Ben Ng has the look of a stereotypical Lonely Planet-wielding globetrotter. Sporting blonde highlights tied up in a half-ponytail, colourful beads around his neck, and a moustache and goatee, Ben recounts tales from his most recent travels: to South Sudan, as an anaesthetist with Médecins Sans Frontières.
Ben Ng. Photo: MSF.
And like all Hongkongers, he brought back a souvenir snack. “Taste this,” Ng said, offering a thin, rounded leaf he had just torn from an offshoot in a ziploc bag fished from his pocket. The mildly spicy leaf was from a moringa tree, a fast-growing and drought-resistant plant whose leaves are high in protein and vitamins – a suitable crop to support nutrition in places like South Sudan, where disrupted agriculture has led to hunger. Makers of supplements in wealthy countries have been marketing moringa as a superfood.
“In Ethiopia, there was this river where people downstream fetched drinking water, but others upstream were defecating in it. How many doctors would you need for that?” Ng recalled of an incident almost 20 years ago. “Some MSF projects don’t have doctors, but they dig wells, build power infrastructure, and may save more lives than doctors do.”
Ethiopia was Ng’s first assignment with MSF. He was a doctor working in a public hospital who took a year of unpaid leave in 2006 to study tropical diseases like malaria in Liverpool, then backpacked around Spain for three months while waiting for a visa to Ethiopia. In 2009, he took another extended leave from work to travel to the post-conflict Tamil region of Sri Lanka. Before his visa finally arrived several months later, he backpacked through Latin America, from Mexico to Cuba and Peru.
Ben Ng began his humanitarian career with MSF in 2006, serving as a clinic doctor in Ethiopia for six months. Photo: MSF.
This year, in July, Ng travelled to Aweil, a city in the northwest of South Sudan, where MSF runs the paediatric and maternity units in a hospital. As an anaesthetist, his daily workload included helping with the surgical procedures, treating children with burns from open fires, and reconstructing a child’s ear torn by a dog.
Using regional anesthesia, Ben Ng cleaned and stitched a child’s ear bitten by a stray dog. Photo: MSF.
One in every five people in the country – or more than 2 million people – is internally displaced, having been forced to flee their homes due to conflict, the impact of climate change, and other reasons.
South Sudan split from its northern neighbour Sudan after a decades-long armed struggle and became an independent state in 2011 with a referendum and a peace agreement. But violence and instability in Sudan flared up again in April 2023, bringing nearly 900,000 refugees into South Sudan, exacerbating the already fragile situation caused by other local clashes and natural disasters.
As with any catastrophe, women and children suffer disproportionately from the effects of humanitarian crisis. The maternal mortality rate is 1,223 per 100,000 live births, the highest in the world as of 2023, UNICEF estimates. One in ten children in the country do not reach their fifth birthday, according to the agency.
The hospital where Ng was stationed has around 140 beds, and its team of 30 doctors – four of whom were foreign like himself – had to find workarounds for insufficient equipment and medication and frequent electricity suspensions.
“Some MSF projects don’t have doctors, but they dig wells, build power infrastructure, and may save more lives than doctors do.”
Dr. Ben Ng
To treat a child with typhoid fever, which can lead to intestinal perforation, doctors in Hong Kong will typically run MRI scans to find where the punctures are. But in South Sudan, with no imaging equipment, they had to physically find the holes in a child’s guts by first surgically extracting them. Sometimes Ng and his colleagues had to get creative, like positioning a tube designed for drainage in reverse so it could be used for tube-feeding instead.
Unstable supplies of medication meant using up every milligram in a bottle on several patients, Ng said, instead of discarding any excess after a bottle is opened for a single patient as Hong Kong protocol requires. Doctors also often had to rely on only partial anaesthesia during surgery due to power cuts.
Ben Ng (right) went to South Sudan in June as the sole qualified anaesthesiologist at a hospital, performing over 10 surgeries daily for a month. Photo: MSF.
Roughly half of the patients coming into surgery were children suffering from severe burns sustained from accidentally falling into woodfires, Ng said. People living in extreme poverty and displaced from their permanent homes must rely on rudimentary cooking methods.
Last year MSF conducted more than 10,000 surgeries in South Sudan and administered measles vaccinations for almost 66,000 people. It also assisted more than 14,000 births.
“I don’t think MSF doctors are particularly magnanimous… There are many things we can’t do. We just do what we can.”
Dr. Ben Ng
Sometimes MSF will provide food to patients so they would be more likely to stay around for longer-term treatments.
“Sometimes very basic things can save a life,” Ng said.
A Hong Kong public hospital doctor’s typical workday may begin at 8 am and end at 6 pm, with fixed rest breaks. This could easily have been Ng’s daily grind.
Ben Ng with his colleagues in South Sudan. Photo: MSF.
As a student, Ng wanted to become a doctor simply because it seemed like the best career path he could have. It was after spending a year as an exchange student in Japan when he realised he could make life choices differently, and do something he found worthwhile instead. Following a stint as a public hospital emergency room doctor, Ng joined a private practice and specialised in anaesthesiology, an essential part of many surgeries and a skill that gave him more flexibility to join humanitarian assignments each year.
In South Sudan, Ng lived in a compound within 10 minutes drive of the hospital, worked from 8 am to 5 pm, then was on call until 8 am the next day, seven days a week. Every surgery needed an anaesthetist, and he was the only one around. He once had to do three surgeries during the night, before turning immediately to his daytime duty.
What really kept him up at night was not the surgery calls, but the impossible choices facing doctors and parents under such circumstances. Such as when a mother decided she could not neglect several other children for the sake of one with congenital heart disease, who needed her prolonged presence in hospital.
Or when doctors put a feeding tube in a child whose throat was corroded from drinking drain-cleaner, even though it might not buy him much more time. It would be difficult to keep the tube sterile, and a growing child cannot rely only on nutrients from fluids.
“I don’t think MSF doctors are particularly limitless,” Ng said. “There are many things we can’t do. We just do what we can.” The humbling reminder: a small piece of moringa leaf held between his fingertips.
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