Deborah Milligan looks the part of the Southern California surfer girl.
With her blond hair tied back into a ponytail, her tan skin draped in linen and beachcombing flip-flops on her feet, she could blend right in with the denizens of her native Newport Beach.
But for more than a year, Milligan saw more funerals than barbecues, and her feet traversed muddy, potholed roads rather than the fine grain of Pacific beaches. Going shopping, she would pass stacks of homemade caskets rather than cases of beer, and fears of catching the common cold were replaced by anxiety over contracting malaria.
Milligan, 41, a physician specializing in pulmonary and critical care, recently returned from Homa Bay, Kenya, as one of thousands of volunteers who each year travel the globe as part of Doctors Without Borders.
Milligan, who lives in Long Beach, spent 15 months in the region, serving in the general medical wards, the tuberculosis ward and the chest clinic of the Homa Bay District Hospital. She also worked in an HIV clinic, which, when it was opened by Doctors Without Borders in November 2001, was the only clinic in Kenya providing free anti-retroviral therapy for people with AIDS. Milligan was one of the organization's four non-Kenyan doctors tending the hospital's overflowing roster of patients.
"In one sense, it was really depressing to be there, there was so much death," she said. "But on the flip side, we were able to do so much more for patients than they would have gotten in other hospitals."
Doctors Without Borders, known more commonly throughout the world as Medecins Sans Frontieres, was founded in 1971 by a group of French physicians seeking to provide medical care to victims of armed conflict, epidemics and natural disasters.
The nonprofit organization, which now sends more than 2,500 doctors, nurses, lab technicians, clinical psychiatrists and administrators each year to 80 countries, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.
Milligan got her passion for medicine from her father, an Anaheim neurologist. She got her first taste of living outside the U.S. while attending Occidental College and taking part in a summer program in Africa. She knew she wanted to study medicine, but after she earned her bachelor's degree, she decided to take a few years off. Dedicated to helping others, she worked for three years as a technician in a tissue bank in San Pedro, helping burn victims with tissue transplants.
