Lewanna Unger, 2012 UVic BSN/BA (anthropology) graduate is an amazing incredibly generous young woman who upon RN licensure plunged into volunteer work extraordinaire with Mercy Ships, working with some of the world’s poorest poor. Here are excerpts of her notes about this liminal experience comprised of familiarity with sickness and suffering yet strange and different in context/culture. Her story is relayed by Jeannine Moreau, Assistant Teaching Professor, UVic School of Nursing (Lewanna’s final year practicum teacher).
September 13th, 2013: I arrived at Mercy Ships International Operating Centre in Texas for six weeks orientation and training with 20 others until mid- October. We are from seven different countries with various roles: carpentry, IT, reception, supply co-ordination and nursing. We did team building and learned new skills, e.g., a one-week Coast Guard basic safety course, including fire fighting exercises and pool exercises in immersion suits, and flipping a life raft and planning for our initial Congo project.
October 25th, 2013: We arrived in Pointe Noire, Congo on the Africa Mercy Ship. To adjust to the Congo we worked in a rural orphanage (20 children ages 2 to 18) and with the local community; building bunk beds, installing gutter systems to collect water for garden use and washing up, painting murals in rooms, playing/working with the kids.
Mercy Ships: the world’s leading non-governmental ship-based medical organization operating since 1978 serving in 70+ seaport areas around the world providing “primary medical care, relief aid and community support to the most impoverished people on earth, free of charge.”(1) The Africa Mercy, renovated from a rail ferry in 2007, has six operating theatres and a 78-bed ward, the world’s largest charity hospital ship.(2)
November 8th, 2013 to end of August 2014: Ten months on the Africa Mercy ship. There are about 450 crew members including hospital staff but numbers change daily as volunteer commitments begin/end. I work in a large tent on the dock next to the ship and serve primarily as an Outpatient nurse, following up on wound care, doing assessments and blood-work, connecting with individuals/families, ensuring appropriate referrals/supports are in place before and after patients return to their community; I also work in surgical or pediatric surgical wards depending on staffing levels. Major surgeries offered include cleft palate repair, orthopedics (including club foot repair), plastics (mainly maxillary/facial, tumor removal and burn revision), and fistula repairs.
There are 4-5 nurses and four wonderful Congolese interpreters working in the tent (the official language is French and there are three local languages). Mainly my job is wound dressings for patients following discharge after surgery. It’s wonderful to see patients improve with each visit and to see many with previous deformities or handicaps discover new abilities and beauty. Most patients had cleft palate or lip repair, or plastic surgery (e.g., tumour removals and revision of burn contractures); from infants to seniors, I provide healthcare across the lifespan. January, a rainy season, brought challenges with patient/staff transportation and health issues. There was more malaria as the mosquitoes increased. Below is a picture of me working in the clinic.
Since January our visiting plastic surgeon has been doing mostly the contracture release and skin grafts, and we actually have a maxillary facial surgeon on staff who is working with a local surgeon for a lot of the tumours. It’s nice to get to know patients a bit better as I am here longer, and spend more time with them — but strange to realize I left home more than four months ago.
On weekends I explore around with shipmates – e.g., on pirogues (Congolese canoes) on a local lake, off to Dolosi, a north country town, a hike to a smaller village to a waterfall, tried local cuisine, including boa constrictor and Sibissi, a small animal that lives in the jungle.
Lewanna’s musings about working on a Mercy Ship mission: As a first impression I think that there are things my nursing education prepared me for such as basic theory and knowledge with critical thinking skills. But things like power outages, lack of supplies and certain types of supports, tropical conditions, and the effects on wound care have to be learned on the job. I am really enjoying this nursing, being able to provide healthcare for people who don’t usually have the option. Some of the transformations are amazing, physically and otherwise, i.e., to see people who had major defects repaired or tumours removed go back and be
accepted in their communities, often for the first time in their lives.
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1 http://www.mercyships.ca/who-we-are/who-we-are.html
2 http://www.mercyships.ca/the-fleet/africa-mercy.html
From the 2014 Spring Communiqué — Student Issue
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