I’m following in my uncle’s footsteps as a humanitarian

My life choices were greatly influenced by my uncle, who was a Society of African Missions priest. He worked in Africa for 40 years. As a child my ears and my head and my heart were filled with stories of Africa. He instilled that love in me and inspired me to become involved in humanitarian work.

I did a nursing diploma at University College Cork, a degree at Waterford Institute of Technology and a diploma in tropical nursing at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. I then started working with Operation Smile, which does facial reconstructive surgery in developing countries in Africa and the Philippines.

I was in the Philippines when it was struck by Typhoon Hagupit in December 2014. I was asked to join an emergency team, and worked with the Philippine army doing medical evacuation from the worst-affected area.

We had some collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières; that was my first time encountering them on the ground. Experiencing that kind of emergency response made me decide that was what I wanted to do.

I came to Papua New Guinea with MSF last July. I work at a hospital in the Tari highlands, a very remote, inaccessible part of the country. The focus here is on family and sexual violence and on emergency surgery. I'm the nursing activity manager, providing support for staff in all aspects of patient care. We have a team of six expatriate staff. I'm the only nurse. We have a surgeon, an anaesthetist, a project co-ordinator and a logistician. We also have 111 MSF-trained national staff.

The work here is very difficult. A lot of women are trapped in a cycle of violence, and we see them come back again and again. Papua New Guinea is one of the worst places in the world for gender-based violence, with the highest incidence outside an active conflict zone. In other countries the violence is caused by opposite sides in a conflict, but here it’s very close to home. It’s family and intimate-partner violence.

Apart from MSF, the services in Tari, the town where I live, are very limited. There is no social support for victims, but at the hospital we have resources and a strong system in place.

I see several victims of violence every day in the emergency department. I love working with the national staff here, and I’m very happy in my work, but the level of violence is really shocking. I still haven’t become accustomed to it.

Daily life in the highlands can be extremely violent, but the atmosphere within the hospital compound is lively and friendly, and the local people are very welcoming. They would protect us at all costs. I feel safe here. But my life is confined to the hospital compound; our movement outside is very restricted.

No other Irish work at the hospital, but I did by chance dial a wrong number one day that, unbelievably, was answered by an Irish engineer on the Papua New Guinean island of New Britain.

He turned out to be a native Irish speaker, too, so we had a great conversation in Irish for an hour about the GAA, what was happening at home, and life in Papua New Guinea. It came at a time when I really needed to talk to someone about Ireland and in my language.

Denis O'Brien's company Digicel has the licence to provide internet here. The connection can come and go, but when it's good it's good enough to Skype home.

I miss so much from Ireland; number one is my family. I grew up in a family of 10 children, and we look after each other – we’re very close.

[ Pádraig Collins ]