Fiona continues a Rosehall family’s long tradition of service
IN A well-stocked NHS hospital, finding a set of scales and a basin to weigh a new-born baby is a simple matter of a trip to the nearest equipment cupboard.
But for overseas aid volunteer Fiona Gilmour, working in a Third World country with scant resources, it wasn’t quite so easy.
Yet, when — after much searching and head scratching – she finally managed to cobble together a makeshift set, her sense of achievement could not have been greater. Fiona, whose family home is in Rosehall, spent five months last year volunteering with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders.
She served as a logistician in the crisis-hit West African country of Ivory Coast.
It was a far-cry from the peace and quiet of rural Rosehall where her parents, Colin and Carol Gilmour live, as well as her grandmother Lady Jean Gilmour, widow of Colonel Sir Allan Gilmour OBE.
The family are very well known locally and have a distinguished record of service to the country in the armed forces. Fiona is no stranger to overseas travel, having lived during childhood in Hong Kong and Germany where her father, an army officer now retired, was posted.
But she says: "Rosehall has always been my permanent home and my family have lived in the area for a century. My parents have always had our house there and we would come back at Christmas and in the summer every year and I still consider it as my main base."
Aged 37 and single, she has had a varied, itinerant and interesting career, working as a chalet girl, charity event organiser, property search consultant and as a freelance marketing consultant amongst other occupations.
The flat she owns in Edinburgh is rented out and she jokingly, but half-seriously, says that she lives out of the "back of her car!"
Being made redundant three years ago from her job as general manager for a small cleaning business in Edinburgh was the catalyst for her overseas aid work.
"I just felt I’d been working for 15 years or so for businesses which were focussed on making a profit," she explains.
"I wanted the opportunity to put something back and to work for an organisation whose focus was on people rather than on £ signs. An organisation where people really were the core concern and the main motivation."
In 2010 she spent four months from January to April working in the Caribbean, formulating a new communications plan for the Belize Red Cross. She returned to the UK but then went back to Belize from October 2010 to February last year.
But it is her latest volunteering stint, with highly respected international aid charity MSF, that proved to be a real challenge.
The charity set up a base in the coastal town of Tabou, 30km from the border of the Ivory Coast with Liberia, early in 2011 in response to the post-election crisis in the country which saw violence erupting in hundreds of communities.
Fiona volunteered there from May to October 2011.
She says: "People in the area had not had access to a health service for over six months. The aim of MSF’s project was to provide health care through mobile clinics out to the small communities surrounding Tabou.
"Staff also set up at the local hospital an in-patient therapeutic feeding centre for malnourished children. Water at the hospital was only available from a hand pump."
Fiona continued: "When we arrived, the situation was still quite tense and a large number of people were carrying arms on the street. There was also a considerable number of road blocks. We generally weren’t stopped at them, although it was difficult for the local population to get around. There was just the feeling that violence could erupt at any point."
As a logistician, it was Fiona’s responsibility to make sure that everything non-medical ran as smoothly as it could in a Third World country. As the project grew, she eventually had around 50 staff to cater for, many of whom were local people.
She says: "I was responsible for all the administration, accounts and supplies as well as radio, satellite and mobile phone communications, human resources and security. It has to be said that it was a very wide spec. I had to keep a lot of balls in the air,"
Her first challenge on arrival was to fix a leaking office roof and get rid of thousands of centipedes which crawled over every surface.
She had to make sure that there was enough food and fuel available, as well as medication, including paracetamol, malaria medication and mosquito nets.
Her shopping list included everything from sweets and cheese to a plastic bin or a thousand-litre water tank. And there was one essential she had to remember to buy on trips to the larger town of San Pedro — Nutella!
Soon after dawn every day, seven 4x4 vehicles carrying three teams of medical personnel would leave the base to set up mobile clinics in the surrounding area. By the time they returned in the evening, they would have seen up to 400 people between them.
The doctors and nurses treated hundreds of malaria cases as well as machete wounds or palm spike injuries, common amongst plantation workers.
Fiona will never forget the tragic death, before it was possible to get them to hospital, of two young children at one of the mobile clinics.
"Helping a mother and father back into a car to take them home without their child was agonising and is not something you can
every prepare for," she says.
The unrelenting pressure did begin to tell at one point as she recalls: "We usually didn’t stop work much before 10pm each evening and it has to be said that the long hours, communal living and lack of a proper social life can make life difficult.
"One day I was seriously planning to quit and even worked out how to get myself to the nearest airport."
But her resolve to see it out returned following a spell in a "quiet room" set up by one of the doctors plus a 24-hour break for ex-pat staff in a nearby hotel, where she had her first non-bucket shower for months
and ate at a pizza restaurant.
When Fiona left Ivory Coast, the situation was significantly improved and two months later MSF closed down the mobile health project as it was deemed that the emergency had finally abated.
Fiona is presently working in Aberfeldy but has just secured her dream job. She is to move to Glasgow in March to work as a programme officer with the charity Mary’s Meals which runs an international development programme, feeding 600,000 youngsters a day across 16 countries.
"It’s an amazing opportunity and I consider myself to be really fortunate to get it. I shall be working out of Scotland but will be travelling abroad," she says.
It appears that the Gilmour family’s tradition of service, exemplified by her late grandfather and father, is continuing, albeit in a different field.
