Three weeks into his first MSF mission to Somalia in 1993, Brock and 11 other foreign-aid workers were held hostage for 6 hours by the team's own security guards. Working mostly on the rebel side, Brock helped set up a 200-bed hospital and assisted with surgery. About 7000 displaced people lived around the hospital. Today, he is adept at reconciling the conflicting realities of Western and war-zone medicine. You have to be able to move from one to the other.
Some people can do it fairly comfortably and some people have a lot of difficulty with it.
The key to working with MSF is adaptability. A lot of times you find yourself moving sacks of grain when you thought you were going to be doing clinical medicine. Brock, who is now completing his family practice residency in Vancouver, hopes to practise emergency medicine while continuing his overseas work.