Mission of love

At 8:30 p.m., after every one of the 123 children had been screened by a surgeon, the crew left the hospital for dinner. “From the start we got along amazingly well,” reports nurse Jennifer Capuzelo Kiel, a sentiment echoed by OR nurse Josephine Sullivan. “I have new friends from all over the country.” One of those friends is Janice Johnson, a nurse who has, “never actually worked as a nurse.” She was particularly touched by how supportive they all were. “Josephine is a superb scrub nurse who took me under her wing and opened my eyes to the complexities of OR nursing. Allison [Godchaux, a nurse practitioner] invited me along for every procedure she did and allowed me to assist when possible.” All the nurses became, in her words, “dear friends who treated me as a compatriot.” Johnson’s now preparing to renew her nursing license so she can work the OR or recovery room on future missions.

“Every member of the team had a great spirit of purpose to take care of the patients and each other,” adds Zoraida Delgado, a nurse who considered it “a joy and privilege” to work with them.

The journey was grueling, the days were long, the hotel lacking in amenities (like hot water and air conditioning). But there were no complaints—not about working from sunup to sundown, not about having to wait 90 minutes for dinner to be served at restaurants unaccustomed to handling groups, not even about the daily electrical shock they got when they touched the faucet at the end of a cold shower. They were on a mission.

The HTCSW team traveled to Ecuador on their own time and dime to deliver first-class medical care to patients in need. And deliver they did. In four and a half days, the two surgical teams completed 70 operations on children as young as four months. Mission accomplished, the team returned home sleep-deprived and emotionally spent, but full of gratitude for an experience that reminded them why they went into nursing.

“In the U.S. we have lawyers on one shoulder and insurance companies on the other, dictating how we have to practice medicine,” says family nurse practitioner Allison Godchaux. But on a medical mission, “we are doing it from our hearts to the best of our ability and taking care of people, pure and simple—it is what it should be.”

Universal Health Care

Each year thousands of nurses donate their time and talent to travel to all corners of the earth on medical missions. Countless organizations sponsor trips that can easily fit into a two-week vacation. Not that you should confuse volunteering with vacationing. “You work long hours and sometimes the conditions aren’t that great,“ says Linda Harper. “But it’s an unbelievable experience.” Sue Averill, a nurse who’s a veteran of many missions, agrees: “You come back so energized and with a whole different perspective on nursing.” Her website, onenurseatatime.org, has a searchable database of volunteer organizations and opportunities. The group also offers scholarships to defray the travel costs associated with most trips (One Nurse at a Time helped underwrite Allison Godchaux’s trip to Ecuador). Another great resource that offers an in-depth look at a world of opportunities is Volunteering at Home and Abroad: The Essential Guide for Nursesby Jeanne Leffers and Julia Plotnick. Whether you’re motivated by a desire to give back, a sense of adventure or a nursing challenge, the benefits of mission work “defy description,” according to nurse Janice Johnson. “I think you have to experience it to understand it.”