Not many people do what they thought they’d do when they were 10 years old, but Trish Newport does. For the last eight years, the Whitehorse resident has worked in various roles with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In a roundabout way, it’s something she started moving toward when she was a kid.

“In 1985, there was a famine in Ethiopia,” says Newport. “I was 10 years old and I saw pictures of malnourished kids and it shattered my reality ... I was so confused why that wasn’t me, and I had nightmares about those photos all through my teenage years. I wanted to understand why that wasn’t me and I wanted to understand why that happened.”

Newport grew up in Oakville, Ont., but moved to the Yukon after attending Lakehead University’s outdoor recreation program. Peers told her that if she liked Thunder Bay, she’d love it here.

For a while, she was a guide with the Youth Achievement Centre in Whitehorse, but she knew her ultimate goal was to work overseas.

Even before she started nursing school at Simon Fraser University in 2004, she was in touch with MSF to find out what was required to work for them.

In 2008, after a couple years of nursing in Whitehorse, she left for Dijbouti, and her first mission with MSF. When she came home after six months, she quit her nursing job and prepared for a second mission.

“It seemed so real to me,” she says of the experience. “I wouldn’t say I do it to make a difference but it’s just really raw, right? There’s a problem and you can at least fix a part of it.”

Yes, you treat kids for malnutrition and send them home to the same reality that caused that malnutrition, but, she says, “it’s like we’re saving lives for the changes that will come tomorrow.”

Today, Newport is back in the Yukon for a couple months before heading out on her 10th mission with MSF, this time to a refugee camp in Iraq. She has also worked in Niger and Chad.

She has more responsibility now than when she started. After six missions, MSF supported her in getting a masters degree in public health, which led to roles as a medical team leader and a project coordinator.

Newport was initially hesitant to accept that added responsibility. As it was, she was completely burned out at the end of every mission. But, she discovered, she goes calm in emergency situations. It’s something her colleagues remark on all the time.

The first mission after her masters was in Cameroon. Medically, the country was dealing with massive outbreaks. Socially, increased violence meant Muslims were fleeing the Central African Republic. Newport says it was a non-stop emergency situation. But she remained calm. And she had a great team working with her. Together, they managed it, and that’s the part she loves.

“(It was like) people are living in chaos but at least we’re doing this. And suddenly you see the mortality rate go down,” she says.

“We just did that. That’s amazing.”

Another time, during a malaria outbreak in South Sudan, the rainy season flooded the roads, so no one could get to the hospitals for treatment. Newport and her team assembled a “motorcycle gang” to carry supplies to 15 villages, where they had trained people to treat the outbreak.

Thousands were treated every week, she says.

“It was so amazing to think that if they didn’t have that, there was no way people would have gotten to the hospital. All of those people would have been at risk of dying ... it gave people in the communities power. The capacity to treat their own.”

It doesn’t always work out that way. On another mission, Newport says she was so busy treating malnutrition, her team missed all the signs of an impending cholera outbreak, and were left scrambling to treat it.

She beat herself up over that for a while, and resolved to be over-prepared for it the next time.

When she was, her team was instead hit with an outbreak of Hepatitis E, something she’d never even heard of before.

“It was a good lesson for me in no matter how much you learn, you’re never going to be prepared for everything,” she says.

Another thing she’s learned is how to figure out a schedule that works for her. The work is demanding. At the end of every mission, she’s burned out.

Most of the time, she does a six-month mission, and takes three months off. That helps her to re-connect and wind down. Something else that helps is coming back to the Yukon, though that can be difficult too. Newport says she has to avoid grocery stores, and places where there’s a lot of food. But there are things that help ease the transition. Yoga. Great friends who understand if she’s aloof when she returns from overseas. It’s hard, but Newport likes things that are hard. She says she feels like she was made for this work. “I think I need extremes to feel,” she says. She’s not an adrenaline junkie, but she needs loudness. She says it’s as though she needs to live in hyperbole. She doesn’t thrive in the mundane. Then there are those questions she had as a kid. She’s still trying to figure out a way to answer those. She likes to think she could at least explain the cause of malnutrition to her former self.
“I feel like my 10-year-old self is not always happy with the answer because I just thought it wasn’t enough food, right, but at least I feel like ‘huh I get it now,’” she says. “I still don’t understand why that wasn’t me, but maybe that’s why I keep going back.”