HE has waded and canoed across swamps to reach some of the poorest people on earth dying where they lay.

He has been forced to flee with locals from the militia who rape, pillage and kill as they go and who have emptied whole townships, such is the fear that goes before them.

And he has stood on a makeshift landing strip, pounded out of the desert dirt, watching as the light aircraft that dropped just him and a doctor off in the middle of nowhere, took off again.

Aiden Berry said: “That was probably the worst part of it, that first trip to South Sudan, watching the plane leave us.

“We did have a radio link to the capital and staff there who work with whoever rules or has charge of the territory to assure our safety, but that day I did feel the loneliness.”

Life with international aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières proved to be the polar opposite of his own home life in Hexham – mother Louise is a languages teacher and father Paul owns the Allegretto music shop at the top of Battle Hill – and his peaceable education at Queen Elizabeth High School.

Schooling comes way down the list in civil war-torn South Sudan, where the real fight is simply to survive.

Aiden (26) has just returned to his old job in London, where he is a supply chain manager for a series of big manufacturers, after two years on the front line with MSF.

The hardship takes its toll on the aid workers too, he said. It was a relief to return to normal life, at least for now.

But in the meantime, he wants to raise awareness of the work of the charity that has no political affiliations and, as the name indicates, knows no boundaries when it comes to getting medical help to the most desperate of people.

Aiden’s job on civvy street perfectly equipped him for the role of project logistics co-ordinator with MSF, making sure everything from ambulances, medical equipment and drugs were in the right place at the right time to, as it turned out, hitting the road/dirt track to get a doctor to where she needed to be.

MSF swings into action wherever and whenever there is either a natural disaster or a health crisis. In other words, it is an emergency healthcare service. As such, Aiden’s first posting was in 2015 to a Sierra Leone in the grip of ebola.

He said: “MSF ran ebola management centres. There was no treatment at the time, so it was a matter of managing the hydration of the people who presented themselves with IV fluids.

“My ebola centre was a 100-bed facility. We were working in those sealed, yellow bio-hazard suits in 40 to 50-degree heat.

“I was looking after the repair of the plumbing system and replacing the huge amount of chlorinated water used and keeping the electricity going.

“You could only be in the suit for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, then you’d have to come out. You’d take it off and an inch of sweat would be sloshing in your shoes.”

MSF staff go out to hot spots on six to nine month placements, and last year, for Aiden, it was on Jordan’s north-eastern border with Syria and Iraq.

There, the small mobile medical team he was working with travelled out to the Syrian refugee camp that was growing by the day in no-man’s land. They continued doing so until Daesh/ISIS insurgency forced Jordan to close its border.

When Aiden landed in South Sudan, it was in an area called Leer County, a two-hour flight north of the capital, Juba.

“There has been some form of armed conflict there for the past 50 years – since 2013, it’s been civil war,” he said.

“The sad reality is that today, every man from the age of 12 upwards expects to be armed.

“MSF has been operating there for the past 30 years, the sole form of secondary healthcare for a population of 2.5 million people.

The hospital MSF built there ended up being on the front line of the violence and was looted and burned to the ground seven times over. The whole of the medical team, running into dozens and dozens of people, had to be evacuated to Kenya at one point.

“Médecins Sans Frontières doesn’t give up easily, but finally they had to accept that approach wasn’t working, particularly as the violence was getting worse,” said Aiden.

So MSF looked at how they could still serve the population, but in a different way. The answer was to drop in small mobile clinics, often comprising just two or three people, to quite literally walk through the landscape, treating people as they went.

But therein lay more logistical conundrums for Aiden to solve. “The entire population of Leer has been forced to leave the town itself – it’s just a barracks now.

“It is surrounded by swamps and islands, on which the population has settled into smaller groups of 100 to 200 people, so when we were dropped off by the plane, with just a couple of tents, our food and the doctor’s medical supplies, we had groups of people in around 20 locations to visit.

“We would spend two or three days at one place and then either walk or canoe to the next. It’s too swampy for vehicles.”

While the townsfolk have fled to the islands because of the protection they offer against the militia/insurgents, that security disappears with the swamps during the dry season.

“The people live in horrific conditions, in a very makeshift fashion,” said Aiden.

“They flee from location to location, ahead of the soldiers, and because they have done it so often, they have no property.

“When they flee, they might be carrying with them just a blanket or a saucepan, and that is literally all they have to their names.”

Further information about the work of Médecins Sans Frontières and its fund-raising is available on the website at www.msf.org.uk.