Imagine you're in a country in eastern Africa, trying to fight off an emergent Ebola strain among the locals while the rest of the country fights a civil war. You do nothing but work at the hospital all day because it's both safer and better equipped than the Tukul hut in which you otherwise live. 

Your t-shirt, bearing the name of your organization—Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), MSF for short—is supposed to keep you protected because the soldiers know the importance of doctors and will allow you to work.

Nothing screams "safety and security in a warzone where I don't speak the language" like a t-shirt and a happy-go-lucky smile, right? Make sure to keep your stethoscope around your neck; you'll want to look as doctor-y as you possibly can.

 

It's in that third one from the bottom. Don't worry, it'll be there when you get back. (Source)

Really though, if you want to work with MSF, you should leave any hopes of safety and security back home, packed up securely in a box, sealed up tightly with duct tape, stored behind some other boxes, way in the back of the spare room next to the water heater closet in your parents' basement. It's not coming with you.

All that stuff about safety and security aside, you won't find a more noble use for your talents than MSF. That is, if you don't mind carrying the weight of fourteen years of school loans on a relatively meager salary. They require a six- to nine-month minimum commitment and offer a starting salary of $1,731 per month, which then goes up based on expertise and experience (source). 

The upside is you get all that money in tax-deductible form, but it's still a lot less than you'll earn as a doctor just about anywhere else. This is the reigning heavyweight champ of not-in-it-for-the-money jobs.

Doctors Without Borders was created in the early 1970s by a group of French doctors and journalists (hence the official MSF name and acronym). These French docs were fed up with all the pesky rules the Red Cross imposed on them—rules about who they were allowed to help and when. 

MSF was founded on the principle that people should be able to receive medical care, no matter what unfortunate situations have been wrought by the messed-up decisions of leaders in their country.

There are currently MSF missions in over seventy countries around the world. In addition to the places they're already working, they're on the lookout for any new disasters or tragedies that might crop up, ready to ship the supply equivalent of two entire hospitals to another continent in less than twenty-four hours (source). 

Basically, they're like a bunch of Mother Teresas with medical degrees. And also a really strong knowledge of international shipping logistics.

To do this job well, you'll need to get used to dealing with difficult situations. Many of the patients you see won't make it. When it isn't from an epidemic or a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, it'll be from the ravages of war. And any of those things could do you in just as easily.

You'll also have to be cool with going to the bathroom in a hole in the ground and not seeing your friends or family for almost a year. You'll be on call 24/7. Sleep will be in short supply. You'll see horrible things that'll make you want to hurl, but luckily, you won't have much in your belly to give up anyway.

Is that an upside? Are there any upsides to this job?

Well, maybe—but it depends on how you look at things. For some people, there's an overriding need, a driving force, to do the most good they can in the world. And right up at the top of the list of "doing the most good" is aiming to learn some of the most difficult stuff we deal with as a species, then risking life and limb to use that knowledge to treat the less fortunate halfway across the world. 

Members of MSF probably aren't in it for the glory, but the upside comes from knowing you've directly helped to save the lives of countless people. For some, that's worth all the trouble.

 

Um, I think I can handle it. (Source)

Even if you decide this is the job for you, it won't be easy to get in. Thousands of eager, hopeful docs apply to MSF every year, but only a select few are chosen, mainly because this is an incredibly demanding job and very few have the skills, temperament, and overall ability to handle it.

This also probably isn't a long-term career. Practicing medicine is a career; working for MSF is a job, and probably one that should be taken in limited doses (no pun intended). It's possible to start a career with MSF and just move from mission to mission; in other words, be homeless—or, permanently displaced?—with a medical degree. 

Many MSF doctors opt for a more comfortable route: they spend most of their working lives in their thriving medical practice in the U.S., and go on MSF missions every couple of years.

There are two things we can't stress enough about this job: how noble the work is, and how difficult it is. One quality we haven't mentioned thus far is confidence—but you'll need it. It's difficult enough to hack it as a doctor, much less one in a war zone, so you need to be totally confident you can work in the kind of unstable environment you'll be dropped into.

Still with us? Does that still sound like something you want to do? Alrighty, then: read on to find out how to make your life-saving dreams a reality.

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