In Malakal, in a settlement of displaced people in South Sudan,
I met Achuei soon after arriving to my mission,
when I was accompanying one of the nurses in their daily round.
Achuei was admitted with acute malnutrition
to our field hospital.
She was 9 years old, but due to her size I thought she was 4 or 5.
From the first time I saw her, she was almost always alone in her bed,
crying but with no tears.
Her father had recently died in the war.
And her mom was admitted with tuberculosis
to the tent-hospital next door.
Her grandmother took care of her when possible.
We treat kids like Achuei, with malnutrition,
with a therapeutic food, a peanut-based paste
which has a lot of calories.
The thing is, even though Achuei had to get this food
we noticed that her grandmother was just giving her rice and bread.
That's why weeks went by,
in which I visited almost every night to wrap her up,
and wait for her to fall asleep,
and Achuei didn't gain weight.
Her grandmother wasn't giving her the key food
to treat her malnutrition.
When I found out that her grandmother
was selling this food on the field I was outraged.
How could it be that this lady was denying her granddaughter
her only chance of recovering?
We organized a meeting with hospital caregivers and patients
along with a translator,
because the grandma just talked Linka, a local dialect.
There she told us she was selling the food in the fields
to buy rice and bread to feed the whole family.
How wrong we were!
She was doing what she believed was the best way to feed everyone,
but rice and bread don't work to mitigate acute malnutrition.
So we told her why her granddaughter needed that sticky paste,
which is a therapeutic food.
After that, we started to see her visiting Achuei
with a plastic bowl filled with rice along with peanut paste.
Apart from South Sudan,
I've been working for several years with Doctors Without Borders
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Niger, and in Central African Republic.
Almost all of them are among the countries with lesser resources
where people are constantly affected by poverty,
malnutrition, malaria, among many other problems.
I'm an economist,
so my main function was to financially coordinate
the missions I was involved with.
I had to make sure that all the processes and procedures were fulfilled,
the approved budget was respected,
that all the bills were paid in a timely maner.
And maybe it would have been more comfortable,
easier and less weary for me to stay behind the desk,
to just fulfill the tasks of my position.
But I had entered this humanitarian organization
because I wanted to be close to people.
So since my first mission I started looking for excuses
to get this proximity.
I still remember like today,
those mornings at the clinics packed with people,
with the patients' little brothers playing around,
mothers chatting, preparing the food,
part of our staff making the round, the tears,
snot and other bodily fluids everywhere.
While I wondered how effective
that piece of soap hung from a rope really was.
And I see myself lifting a little boy too short to be reached,
and later ask myself if that was the only real humanitarian action
I had done in the day.
When I was in Niger, we had changed the approach
to malaria in children under the age of five
after the past year which had been tragic for the population.
A lot of people had died, especially boys and girls
due to malaria combined with malnutrition.
So, we decided to get closer to the communities.
Trying to be closer to people and bring them a prevention tool
instead of waiting for them to reach out to our hospitals and health centers,
almost always collapsing the health system.
We started prevention campaign called
"Seasonal malaria chemoprevention"
consisting of an oral vaccine that had to be administered to kids
for three days a month for several months.
But at first, because the communities knew nothing
and it was a new tool,
they didn't want to be involved with this new treatment.
They preferred to be treated traditionally once they got infected,
which had worked until then.
So we approached the communities, we talked with them,
we told them what this campaign of chemoprevention was about,
we answered their questions, their doubts,
we talked with the mothers and with the leaders of the villages.
That day in the car we were: the driver,
the project logistics manager, Abdulaziz, and me.
I was mostly going to pay salaries
but also to help in any way I can.
We had to deliver the doses
and we feared that very few people would attend the place of vaccination.
After many hours of traveling roads and dirt roads
until the roads end,
and we kept going through the hills with the van
in the middle of the Sahel Desert, we arrived.
To our surprise,
we saw long lines of mothers, we didn't get to see where they ended.
They were holding their children tight
trying to get a shadow under a burning sun.
The kids were scared,
or overwhelmed by the heat or impatient.
But that day of vaccination was just the end of a long road.
It had been possible because we had approached the communities,
we had talked to people,
we had spent long days in the desert.
That day I felt that I was part of something larger.
Our paths had crossed and united.
But there's so much to do in these communities
that I often wondered if it was worth it.
For the more than 184,000 children in Niger
who were able to get the treatment that year, no doubt it was worth it.
I'll never forget the hug with Abdulaziz
when the team deliver the last dose.
The satisfaction in our eyes,
the feeling of joy of a mission accomplished.
A similar joy I felt again in Kikamba,
at the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
When it rains there, the sky falls.
And as the roads, if they exist, are dirt roads,
transportation get complicated.
I had to go with one of our nurses
to the health center on the periphery.
We had to travel for more than four hours just to cover over the 50 km
that separated them from our base
and get to do the weekly consultations.
People from nearby populations were waiting for us.
Some had walked more than three hours
to get to this place in the middle of the jungle.
They knew that every Wednesday
our team came by for consultations of all kinds,
so that day they would come en masse.
When the medical team finished to treat all the people of the day,
we set out on our way back to base.
But in the middle of the road
the van got bogged down in a crater in the road
flooded for days and days of constant rain.
Eastern Congo is one of most conflictive places on the planet.
Several armed groups dispute the territory,
looting and burning villages, chasing after rival groups.
And it also has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world.
That's why it's very dangerous and it's totally discouraged
to travel after the sun goes down,
which was approaching at that moment.
The driver, the nurse and I tried to free the van.
But such a machine is extremely difficult to move for three people.
Before long, we observed several people showing up
from both sides of the road.
We couldn't see who they were for the darkness.
And the first thing I felt was fear.
But right away I realized that many of them knew us.
And even I recognized a lot of men,
women and children we had been at the office earlier that day.
They didn't hesitate to get their hands in the mud
and help us dig up the van.
That day I could really feel what it was to be accepted in a community.
We weren't just allowed to work there.
They also helped and valued us.
And thanks to them I felt safe.
Today I'm in Argentina working again behind a desk.
But I don't forget all the years I spent on the territory.
It's all those experiences, my experiences,
the ones that shaped me and the ones that turned into who I am.
It's Achuei's smile at Malakal's hospital.
It's the hug with Abdulaziz at the end of the vaccination campaign.
It's the goodbye smile of that child in Kikamba
after helping us dig up the van.
It's these memories and hundreds more that keep pushing me forward,
giving me a reason to be and to do.
Today, being thousands of miles away those people are still present in me,
reminding me that it's not about individual work,
or about imposing our help.
It's mostly about working together with the community.
To be able to learn from each other and build together
the paths we want to tread.