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 Once again I am traveling down the dirt road that will take me into the Batey to the schoolhouse that will be converted into a clinic for this week. This community has weighed on my heart since my departure one year ago and this, in turn, has lead to my return. My heart is pounding with anticipation as I look into the eyes of the ten nursing students trying to read their thoughts, searching for clues of their hopes for this medical mission. I can see on the bus behind, the dental students and many of the professionals preparing to provide care to this community of people who are virtually unseen in the world.
Having been here before, I am expecting no surprises in the Batey, after all, I have waited and pined for this opportunity to give medical care, a hug, or just a compassionate smile to my patients in this place.
I expect the flat eyes and desperation that fill every available bench in the schoolyard, as well as the helpless acceptance of this life will take the students aback, but I do not expect the emotion that boils up and out of my heart shortly after our arrival. It is not at all a reaction to the sea of people, eyes flat and void of affect, or to the children calling out for pens, pencils, shoes, or clothes. This emotion is purely related to the changes in the lives of these people. In the first few hours I find the thirteen-year-old mother from last year, who had learned to care for her infant son. She now has another infant, a baby girl, just a few months old, struggling for a solid breath, the rhonchi and wheezing audible without a stethoscope. After being examined by the physician and receiving a treatment to ease her respirations, the baby is handed back to her young mother with gentle words of advice and I am off to the next patient, another young girl from last year. This young girl had a burn on her face that has since healed, and her smile seems to have grown even larger than before. Young and old alike they quickly greet me and I realize that like me, they have not forgotten our last mission.
Just when I thought my heart could swell no more a lovely young lady appears in the building. She has a large smile as she hands me a sleeping baby girl. As I am examining the baby I am caught completely unaware as the seventeen year old mother asks me if I remember her from last year's visit. She proceeds to tell me of the journey that has brought her here today to ask me to take her baby out of the Batey when I leave at the end of the week. This young woman has realized the cycle of life in here, and selflessly she wants to give her child a chance outside of the cycle. I am quickly humbled by these words, reminded of my first trip here, as a student, and how humbled I had been when I departed for home. I cannot stop the flow of tears as I take the baby with me to my fellow nurses and to the physicians hoping that one of them will have an answer that will ease my burden and that of the young woman. All the while I would spend the rest of the week humbled, after all, who am I to be chosen to care for a child, to accompany that child on the most important journey ever, the journey of life. In the end, the baby and her mother saw us off at the end of the week with the promise that I would do what I could to help meet their needs.
Each day I would hope that the students were receiving the same education I had in the past. They were seeing wounds, illnesses such as peripheral vascular disease in stages more progressed than one would see in the United States, masses, and other reproductive anomalies, but were they receiving the education they had traveled so far to receive? This was not about procedures and wound care, but about compassion for our fellow man. All of us had left behind managed care, pre-authorizations, and referrals to seek out the true education of just what really is the act of serving others through compassion and community based care. I prayed nightly that this would be what the students took away with them at the end of this trip, just as I had last year. In the end, I was able to see the changes in many of them without spoken word, through their gentle touch or soft glances.
So, although I had arrived with my bags laden with supplies we had done without last year, determined to do more, reach more, and heal more, I am the one who has changed all over again. In my soul I have become aware that no matter how many times I come to the mission, there will be countless emotions and I will always leave feeling changed and changing those around me, working side by side with students and professionals alike to heal those we have come to serve, not even realizing we are the ones who have been healed.
Lori Kelley, R.N.
MDC Nursing Student Alumni
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