For 50 years, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has brought medical care to the victims of famines, epidemics, conflicts and other disasters. Founded in December 1971, it grew out of the ideals of a group of newly qualified French doctors who wanted to be on the ground helping those most in need anywhere in the world. Today the organisation has about 100 operations in nearly 75 countries, including Haiti, where for the past three decades it has answered the call, caring for Haitians suffering through everything from earthquakes and cholera outbreaks to rape and serious burns. Doctors Without Borders has been running its emergency clinic in Port-au-Prince's Martissant neighborhood, where armed gangs regularly clash, since 2006. It's the only hospital in the capital to take emergency cases free of charge and is popular with locals. "The situation in Haiti is an emergency that is lasting, and that is getting worse," says says Walter Lorenzi, head of MSF Belgium's mission in Haiti, "people are getting poorer and poorer, access to health care is more and more expensive, and it is harder and harder to make institutions work. So it is a disastrous equation." FILE IMAGES