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Nansen Refugee Award Photo story

Dr. Evan Atar Adaha

In remote north-eastern Maban County, South Sudan, one man runs the only surgical hospital in Upper Nile State. The hospital-provides a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of refugees and South Sudanese people.

Dr. Atar arrived in Bunj in 2011 after the war forced him to flee from his previous hospital in Sudan’s Blue Nile State. At that time there was only an abandoned health centre in Bunj. Dr Atar transformed it into a hospital.

When he arrived, he operated on his first patient by stacking tables to create a raised operating theatre. He has worked tirelessly over the years, securing funding from organisations and training other young people to become nurses and midwives.

Today, the hospital serves over 200,000 people. This includes 144,000 refugees from Sudan’s Blue Nile State, of these 142,000 are living in four refugee camps. In addition there are 17,000 South Sudanese people internally displaced by conflict in Maban County and its surrounding areas. The local Maban population in this region is around 53,000. It is for his outstanding commitment and self-sacrifice in providing medical services to people forced to flee, and the communities that welcomed them, that UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is honoring Dr. Atar as the 2018 winner of its Nansen Refugee Award.

On average, Dr. Atar and his team operates on 58 cases per week. In this environment Dr. Atar sometimes works 48 hours non-stop, and is on call at all hours. The personal sacrifice Dr. Atar makes is huge. He lives close to the hospital in a canvas tent whilst his family lives in Nairobi, Kenya. He is able to visit them three times a year during short breaks to recover from his grueling medical work.

Dr. Atar treats all people in medical need regardless of their background - a commitment that has earned him the respect of all refugee, internally displaced and local communities.

The situation in Maban County is volatile with regular periods of violence over the past years. Following the recent attacks on the offices and compounds of international organisations (including UNHCR) in July this year, Dr. Atar once again remained to work in his hospital even when members of his medical team were forced to leave.

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Dr. Atar’s hospital in Bunj, South Sudan, has no general anaesthesia meaning doctors work with ketamine injections and a spinal epidural. The x-ray machine is broken and out of use. There is only one operating theatre light (standard is three), no blood bank and basic surgical materials often have to be bought when on leave out of the country or improvised on site.

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Dr. Atar’s ward rounds take up to three hours a day and the time he spends with each patient is appreciated by them all and forms a real bond between himself and his patients.

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“Healing is not the medicine alone. You have to assure the patient. The moment you relate to a patient, they will open their heart to you”, says Dr. Atar.

Dr. Atar prepares a woman for a caesarean birth. He averages about seven such procedures a week but one particularly busy night he performed six.

Although a committed Christian, Dr Atar (a native Arabic speaker) knows the Koran and prays with Muslims and Christians alike before surgery if they request it.

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Dr. Atar estimates that he must have delivered more than 900 babies since he arrived in Maban.

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Gisma Al Amin, 28, a Sudanese refugee, holds her 5th child, a baby boy. She didn’t hesitate with the name. She called him Atar, after the doctor that delivered him.

“Here I feel I am in safe hands. I feel like I am in the hands of my father, but it is Dr. Atar. Everyone knows him, he is our doctor.”

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Kalisa Yesero Wabibiye, 47, has worked for several relief organizations in Africa as a doctor.

“When I started here, I thought I couldn’t even last a week,” said Dr. Kalisa. “People call this hospital ‘Atar’s hospital’. He is indispensable.”

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The Maban hospital is a true lifeline for Upper Nile State. With no other hospital it often becomes overcrowded and is also the final place patients can go placing great strain on all the medical staff. It overflows with patients, with wards extending out of buildings into the open air.

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“We treat everyone here regardless of who they are, I am most happy when I realize that the work that I have done has saved somebody from suffering or has saved his life”, he says. Dr. Atar’s commitment to treating all people regardless of their background has earned him the respect of all refugee, internally displaced and local communities.

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Dr. Atar acknowledges that his choice of work has been hard on his wife and four children. He sees them only three times a year. His family lives in Nairobi and keeps in contact via WhatsApp and email. “WhatsApp is such a help,” he says. “Now I can do physics and chemistry homework with my oldest.”

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