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In 2006, Nursing Students Return to South America

Auburn Nursing Students Sing a Song of Service in Quito, Ecuador

Amanda Smith, Ashley Walhaug, Amber Thomas, Amy Luzader Amanda Sheehy, Kathy Ellison, Regina Bentley, Jenny Benson

It seems as though life is somewhat like a song. There are songs that bring laughter and songs that bring tears, there are songs that make us feel cold and lonely inside, and then there are songs that make us feel like we could conquer the world in one day. The music is affected by the environment around us and the people that come in and out of our life. During spring semester, some of us at Miller Hall chose to sing a song of service for people the best we knew how. We traveled to Quito, Ecuador to run a week long health clinic for women. We learned that nursing is a career that is much needed in this world, but something that is even more needed is for people to love and to be loved. Each of us chose nursing for a different reason, but we all have some desire to help people who are sick and hurting, to be an encouragement, a support system, and be a constant beacon to our patients and their families.

Our experience in nursing school has taught us about diseases, illnesses, medications, and the importance of treating a patient holistically. We have had many opportunities in different clinical settings to learn about these different aspects of nursing, but we received the best lesson in holistic care through our trip to Ecuador. Six students and two faculty members journeyed to the green luscious mountains of Ecuador to help the poorest people in that country in an area called Atacucho, which is also known as the “Belt of Misery.”

What we did not know at the time was that we would be the ones helped and we would be the ones blessed. We ventured with an organization called SIFAT and were accompanied by seven other team members who we had not met yet but by the end of the week we felt as if we were one family working for the same purpose. As one family, we were able to see over 250 women in a clinic we had set up in an open building with a tin roof above our heads. In this small building we had three areas where the nurse practitioners and doctors could exam and treat the women. About five feet away was the area in which we educated the women on health topics varying from diabetes to STDs with a translator speaking to the women in Spanish. Another area a few feet away was a room that looked like a small narrow closet which became our pharmacy that housed as many medications that we could possibly bring for these people who could not even afford to buy a bottle of Advil. Our jobs as nursing students differed each day. We each had the opportunity to help count medications in the pharmacy, sometimes 120 pills at a time! We assisted the nurse practitioners by taking blood pressures and working with a translator to obtain medical histories, and also helped them with examinations. We also presented lessons that we had worked on in our cultural class to classes of Ecuadorian women. They eagerly thanked us and told us that some of the things we taught them they had never even heard of before! We quickly realized that all of these were important jobs. The basis to everything we did was education.

The information we provided these women could stop them from suffering from some of the diseases that they were there to see the doctor about. After laying the foundation that helped these women help themselves, it was important to provide health care to treat existing problems and provide simple medications like Advil and vitamins to improve the women’s’ health and quality of life.
Each of us returned to America with a different story. One story goes like this: A woman named Carmen was diagnosed with uterine cancer a year ago but could not afford treatment and could not even afford pain medication. We saw several women throughout the week who had limited resources for medical care but were able to find what they needed at our small clinic. This lady unfortunately needed care far beyond what we could do for her at the clinic. She needed surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, medications to relieve her pain and remove her cancer but without money and no insurance she could do nothing. The most we could do was give her Motrin for her pain, and listen as she told us about the hard time she was having. As she left into the cold dreary day, several of us struggled with the question, “What’s the purpose of being here as a nurse if we can’t heal these people?” We learned that as a nurse we do as much as we can for a patient physically, but what means more to our patients than giving medicine and dressing wounds is to give love, support, an ear to listen to, and arms to wrap around them when they cry.