Linda Robinson vaccinates a child in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo during a yearlong mission to the war-torn west central African nation.—PHOTO COURTESY MDI HOSPITAL

BAR HARBOR — Last year, Linda Robinson traveled half way around the world to a war-torn corner of central Africa. What she saw there turned her own world upside down.

“Nothing prepares you for what you see,” said Ms. Robinson, a certified nurse midwife at Mount Desert Island Hospital, recently after returning from a year’s leave of absence on a medical mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). “Those people had suffered unspeakable torture,” she said.

An estimated 45,000 Congolese citizens per month die as result of a continuing 10-year-old civil war. Human rights groups report that civilians are mutilated, raped, and killed by government soldiers and rebels alike.

The job, with the international group, Doctors Without Borders, lasted from September 2007 to September 2008. Ms. Robinson traveled between her base in the village of Shamwana, located in the southeastern Katanga Region, to outlying villages where she worked with a team to deliver medicine, care, and education.

The DRC is one quarter the size of the United States with a population of just over 68 million. Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering multiple displacements, direct violence by a variety of armed groups, malnutrition and epidemics of preventable diseases.

“When I first got there, I thought, ‘I can’t do this,’” she said. The horror of war and its effect on people seemed, at first, impossibly hard to grasp. “You can feel the sadness,” said Ms. Robinson. “I was just overwhelmed by what war does to a population. It takes away their will to live. They are numb. I felt like I had sent myself to hell.”

But the initial shock soon gave way to a sense of purpose, and Ms. Robinson began dealing with the challenges of health care delivery in a poverty-stricken post-war zone. One of those challenges was travel. “We would travel by Land Cruiser to outposts every week and would often get stuck in the mud. The roads were more like trails,” she said.

Despite a lack of training and resources, local midwives were “wonderful women,” said Ms. Robinson. The main problem was a lack of adequate supplies. “They were working with nothing. I was trying to run a maternity ward in a local clinic and mice had chewed holes in the suction tubes.”

Ms. Robinson’s work included delivering babies, educating local health care workers, and vaccinating the local population against preventable diseases such as measles.

During her stay, an upsurge in fighting that took place between rebels and government soldiers in late 2005 and early 2006 had all but ceased, allowing the organization’s volunteers to work in relative safety in the Katanga region. “I felt safe,” she said. “We lived in an enclosed compound and always carried radios.”

But living conditions were far from luxurious. “I had my own room, but it was very basic with a thatched roof. We cooked over a charcoal fire,” she said. The food also left a lot to be desired, consisting largely of canned goods and powdered milk.

At the end of her year, despite the personal hardship, and having witnessed firsthand one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, Ms. Robinson had no regrets. “It was so hard to leave. As difficult as it was there, never once did I feel I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”

Ms. Robinson has since returned to work at the Women’s Health Center at MDI Hospital and can be reached at 288-8100.