Tales from a Conflict Zone

NZ nurse Lisa French Blaker has written a book about working for the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) in Sudan. In Heart of Darfur (Hodder & Stoughton), French Blaker, 36, recounts the nine months she spent in war-ravaged Darfur, in western Sudan. “[In Darfur] you’ve got tens of thousands of people who’ve been displaced from their homes,” she said in an interview with The Age. “They don’t feel safe enough to go to the camps, so they just grab their kids and move … We got lots of people in our hospital who’d been shot as they were running away from an attack – back of the humerus, back, buttocks, back of the femur.” French Blaker is now heading to Iraq, where she will continue to work for Medecins Sans Frontieres.