Last November Apollo Barasa, a teaching nurse with the ICRC in southern Sudan, was asked to stand in briefly for one of the members of the Field Surgical Team (FST) who was away. He left his post at the Juba Teaching Hospital and flew to Darfur. It was the second time he had worked with the FST, and it turned out to be one of the busiest weeks of the year.

After fighting broke out north of Kutum in mid-November field commanders requested the FST's help to treat the wounded. Once guarantees of safe passage had been obtained from all warring parties the team set out in a four-car convoy for a previously-designated safe area behind the front lines. "The place was in the middle of nowhere," Apollo recalls.

The team set up their base in an abandoned school, turning two classrooms into a store for their equipment and an operating theatre. After cleaning the place thoroughly they hung a mosquito 'dome' above the operating table to catch dust particles falling from the roof. Finally, they laid a huge flag with its protective Red Cross emblem on the ground in front of the building, and stationed the vehicles nearby for better identification in case of attack.

It was not long before the wounded began to arrive in pickups and land cruisers. "Some of them were in a pathetic state," Apollo recalls, "with complicated fractures and gunshot wounds that had bled a lot and had not been dressed."

The team started operating at 7.30 am the next morning and continued without a break for 20 hours. They were so busy that the head of the ICRC's office in Kutum, who was accompanying the team, had to help. He carried patients to and from the operating table and ran other errands. The surgical instruments had to be re-sterilized in an autoclave over an open fire. By the time it was all over at 3.30 am the following day the team had performed a record 27 operations.

For Apollo, it could not have been more of a contrast from his work in the teaching hospital. Speaking after his return to Juba he said, "We were working with very limited resources on very sick patients, and you could see them responding to treatment. It was really in line with the mandate of the ICRC. It was a privilege to be there."

During any FST deployment one of the major challenges is to ensure the patients' post-operative care. Dressings need to be changed, patients must be helped to sit up and become mobile at the right time, and care needs to be taken with regard to hygiene. If there are no local medical personnel present, someone responsible from within the community is assigned to look after the patients until the team can get back to check on their recovery. "They put their hearts into it and are very strict about following instructions," says Apollo.

The work of the FST is different from anything else that the ICRC is doing in terms of health and medicine in Sudan, and those who join the team speak of it as a unique experience.