As part of the benefits package for my organization when you are deployed with the emergency response team, as I have been in Dadaab, you are entitled to a rest and relaxation break every 6 weeks. Since you're generally working 12 or more hours a day, 7 days a week under less than ideal conditions (that's home in these pictures)...
...this R&R is pretty essential to mental health and stress management. Fortunately, my R&R coincided with my on-campus orientation for my new distance learning masters program. I'll be getting an MSN in community-based nurse midwifery from Frontier Nursing University, the oldest school of midwifery in the United States.
The plan was to fly from Nairobi to DC via Amsterdam on Friday and spend the weekend in DC with my mom and sister before flying to Lexington, Kentucky via Atlanta for 4 days at Frontier, then back to DC for a day then off to Boulder to see Jess for the long weekend and back to Kenya on Tuesday. Since I was headed straight back to DC, I left all my fairly disgusting field clothes in Kenya and just packed a small carry-on, planning to pick up clean clothes for the week in DC.
Unfortunately, my flight from Amsterdam to DC was canceled due to Hurricane Irene. I was lucky enough to make it standby on a flight to Atlanta almost immediately and canceled the DC-Atlanta portion of my Lexington flight so I could just spend the weekend in Alabama with my parents. They picked me up in Atlanta and after a quick shopping trip to pick up a pair of respectable footwear (aka not brown with dust and ripped) we had a nice dinner in Atlanta and a great Sunday at home including a lucky chance to see a lot of good friends at church.
I headed off to Lexington on Monday morning, not entirely sure what to expect from Frontier. I know that there are many people who remain skeptical about the concept of distance learning, which is one of the reasons Frontier emphasizes its approach as "community-based" rather than distance and holds on-campus sessions several times over the course of the program to ensure the sense of community and knowing your classmates and professors. This session, called Frontier Bound, was the first of those. I'll return to campus for a longer session after my six terms of coursework are complete for a session called Clinical Bound, in which essential clinical skills will be taught and practiced before I begin my 3-4 terms of clinical rotations, which involve 640 clinical hours and 40 births.
Frontier was founded at 1925 as the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) by Mary Breckinridge. She had spent time in France following World War I as volunteer with the American Committee for Devastated France and met several nurse-midwives, a designation that did not at that time exist in the US. Breckinridge realized that nurse-midwives were ideal for providing health care in rural, medically underserved areas where maternal and infant mortality rates were high. She went to the UK and studied midwifery, then spent time in Scotland observing a decentralized health systems serving many rural areas, then finally public health nursing at Columbia and came up with two goals: first, to improve the health of children and second, to pioneer a system of rural healthcare that could serve as a model for healthcare systems serving the most remote regions of the world (hey, sound anything like what I work with in my current job????)
As a monitoring and evaluation person, the next part is maybe my favorite: before she started up anything, she did....A NEEDS ASSESSMENT! I'm telling you, Breckinridge was my kind of woman. She rode more than 700 miles on horseback through rural Kentucky interviewing families and lay midwives to get a good picture of the health needs in the area. She found that women lacked prenatal care, gave birth to an average of nine children (primarily attended by self-taught midwives) and had high rates of maternal mortality (again, sound much like my job now?)
Here's what Breckinridge wrote after this assessment, as she was planning the FNS:
She brought nurses in, trained them as midwives, and sent them out on horses "through fog, flood, or snow" to provide modern healthcare to one of the most remote and poverty-stricken places in the US. The result? Drastically reduced infant and maternal mortality as well as reduced morbidity and mortality for the entire community. No surprises there, really! Obviously both the FNS itself and its midwifery training program have evolved over time, but its mission remains the same at heart: "To educate nurses to become competent, entrepreneurial, ethical and compassionate nurse-midwives and nurse practitioners who are leaders in the primary care of women and families with an emphasis on underserved and rural populations."
Please forgive these fairly terrible pictures, but they were so cool I had to try:
So you can see that this program is pretty much right in line with my interests and thinking. It didn't hurt that it gave me the opportunity to keep working on these things through my current job, including keeping working overseas which I a) love b) um, couldn't really afford to quit and c) didn't want to leave because it can be a hard field to get into!
It turned out to be a great week. I learned a lot about what the program was going to be like and met some really phenomenal people. I was one of the very few people who isn't working as a nurse, especially a labor and delivery nurse, and I think having their experiences in the program will be invaluable, as well as the many other cool things they have done: flight nurse in Arizona, picking up people from the border, Indian reservations, and other rural areas for transport to health care in urban areas; someone who spent her summer providing HIV/AIDS care on an island in Lake Victoria; someone who works closely with the large Somali population in Seattle (we had a lot to talk about!); and many others. I'm looking forward to getting to know them better over the coming year and a half.
The fun included dinner at Wendover, Mary Breckinridge's house:
And the bell-ringing ceremony at the end of Frontier Bound, where we all...rang the bell at the chapel!
After less than 24 hours in DC, which included a trip to H St. with Anthony for Taylor's Sandwiches and a little bluegrass (yay!) and touching base with headquarters (ugh), I hopped a plane for...Boulder, Colorado where my BFF Jess just moved in August to start her Ph.D in psychology at Colorado, because she's super smart like that.
I hadn't been to Colorado since the Great Family Road Trip of 1992. Thus, most of what I remember about Colorado is going down the waterslide at the pool of the hotel we stayed in Estes Park about 314,567 times. Though there no waterslides involved, Jess and I had a great time. We spent a lot of time getting her fabulous and very grown-up apartment settled, but also had time to go to a great crafts fair followed by dinner at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, given by Boulder's sister city of Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
We took a drive to the mountains in Jess' snazzy new car.
Saw a Great Dane in the back of a tiny convertible:
It was a great time, and I was a bit sorry to leave on Monday night. Not only was it amazing to see Jess, I'm pretty in love with Boulder--mountains, prairie, big skies, lots of bike lanes, fresh air, good restaurants and coffee, cool people--what's not to love?
After another less-than-24-hours stay in DC (hi roommates, here's rent checks for the next few months!, a quick trip to Target, and another delicious sandwich courtesy of Anthony) I hopped a plane back to Nairobi, refreshed and ready for Round 2 of my Horn of Africa Emergency Response adventure...
...this R&R is pretty essential to mental health and stress management. Fortunately, my R&R coincided with my on-campus orientation for my new distance learning masters program. I'll be getting an MSN in community-based nurse midwifery from Frontier Nursing University, the oldest school of midwifery in the United States.
The plan was to fly from Nairobi to DC via Amsterdam on Friday and spend the weekend in DC with my mom and sister before flying to Lexington, Kentucky via Atlanta for 4 days at Frontier, then back to DC for a day then off to Boulder to see Jess for the long weekend and back to Kenya on Tuesday. Since I was headed straight back to DC, I left all my fairly disgusting field clothes in Kenya and just packed a small carry-on, planning to pick up clean clothes for the week in DC.
Unfortunately, my flight from Amsterdam to DC was canceled due to Hurricane Irene. I was lucky enough to make it standby on a flight to Atlanta almost immediately and canceled the DC-Atlanta portion of my Lexington flight so I could just spend the weekend in Alabama with my parents. They picked me up in Atlanta and after a quick shopping trip to pick up a pair of respectable footwear (aka not brown with dust and ripped) we had a nice dinner in Atlanta and a great Sunday at home including a lucky chance to see a lot of good friends at church.
I headed off to Lexington on Monday morning, not entirely sure what to expect from Frontier. I know that there are many people who remain skeptical about the concept of distance learning, which is one of the reasons Frontier emphasizes its approach as "community-based" rather than distance and holds on-campus sessions several times over the course of the program to ensure the sense of community and knowing your classmates and professors. This session, called Frontier Bound, was the first of those. I'll return to campus for a longer session after my six terms of coursework are complete for a session called Clinical Bound, in which essential clinical skills will be taught and practiced before I begin my 3-4 terms of clinical rotations, which involve 640 clinical hours and 40 births.
Frontier was founded at 1925 as the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) by Mary Breckinridge. She had spent time in France following World War I as volunteer with the American Committee for Devastated France and met several nurse-midwives, a designation that did not at that time exist in the US. Breckinridge realized that nurse-midwives were ideal for providing health care in rural, medically underserved areas where maternal and infant mortality rates were high. She went to the UK and studied midwifery, then spent time in Scotland observing a decentralized health systems serving many rural areas, then finally public health nursing at Columbia and came up with two goals: first, to improve the health of children and second, to pioneer a system of rural healthcare that could serve as a model for healthcare systems serving the most remote regions of the world (hey, sound anything like what I work with in my current job????)
As a monitoring and evaluation person, the next part is maybe my favorite: before she started up anything, she did....A NEEDS ASSESSMENT! I'm telling you, Breckinridge was my kind of woman. She rode more than 700 miles on horseback through rural Kentucky interviewing families and lay midwives to get a good picture of the health needs in the area. She found that women lacked prenatal care, gave birth to an average of nine children (primarily attended by self-taught midwives) and had high rates of maternal mortality (again, sound much like my job now?)
Here's what Breckinridge wrote after this assessment, as she was planning the FNS:
“In 1925 the territory in the Kentucky mountains, where Frontier Nursing Service began its field of operations, was a vast forested area inhabited by some 10,000 people. There was no motor road within 60 miles in any direction. Horseback and mule team were the only modes of travel. Brought-on supplies came from distant railroad points and took from two to five days to haul in. U.S. mail sacks traveled in little carts or slung across the backs of horses and mules. There was not in this whole area a single licensed physician, not one.
Even after his birth the young child is not an isolated individual. His care not only means the care of his mother before, during and after his birth, but the care of his whole family as well. Bedside nursing of the sick in their homes is as essential in rural areas as in the Visiting Nurse Associations of cities. It means including the whole family, because the young child is part of his family. Health teaching must also be on a family basis—in the homes.”
She brought nurses in, trained them as midwives, and sent them out on horses "through fog, flood, or snow" to provide modern healthcare to one of the most remote and poverty-stricken places in the US. The result? Drastically reduced infant and maternal mortality as well as reduced morbidity and mortality for the entire community. No surprises there, really! Obviously both the FNS itself and its midwifery training program have evolved over time, but its mission remains the same at heart: "To educate nurses to become competent, entrepreneurial, ethical and compassionate nurse-midwives and nurse practitioners who are leaders in the primary care of women and families with an emphasis on underserved and rural populations."
Please forgive these fairly terrible pictures, but they were so cool I had to try:
So you can see that this program is pretty much right in line with my interests and thinking. It didn't hurt that it gave me the opportunity to keep working on these things through my current job, including keeping working overseas which I a) love b) um, couldn't really afford to quit and c) didn't want to leave because it can be a hard field to get into!
It turned out to be a great week. I learned a lot about what the program was going to be like and met some really phenomenal people. I was one of the very few people who isn't working as a nurse, especially a labor and delivery nurse, and I think having their experiences in the program will be invaluable, as well as the many other cool things they have done: flight nurse in Arizona, picking up people from the border, Indian reservations, and other rural areas for transport to health care in urban areas; someone who spent her summer providing HIV/AIDS care on an island in Lake Victoria; someone who works closely with the large Somali population in Seattle (we had a lot to talk about!); and many others. I'm looking forward to getting to know them better over the coming year and a half.
The fun included dinner at Wendover, Mary Breckinridge's house:
And the bell-ringing ceremony at the end of Frontier Bound, where we all...rang the bell at the chapel!
After less than 24 hours in DC, which included a trip to H St. with Anthony for Taylor's Sandwiches and a little bluegrass (yay!) and touching base with headquarters (ugh), I hopped a plane for...Boulder, Colorado where my BFF Jess just moved in August to start her Ph.D in psychology at Colorado, because she's super smart like that.
I hadn't been to Colorado since the Great Family Road Trip of 1992. Thus, most of what I remember about Colorado is going down the waterslide at the pool of the hotel we stayed in Estes Park about 314,567 times. Though there no waterslides involved, Jess and I had a great time. We spent a lot of time getting her fabulous and very grown-up apartment settled, but also had time to go to a great crafts fair followed by dinner at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, given by Boulder's sister city of Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
We took a drive to the mountains in Jess' snazzy new car.
Saw a Great Dane in the back of a tiny convertible:
It was a great time, and I was a bit sorry to leave on Monday night. Not only was it amazing to see Jess, I'm pretty in love with Boulder--mountains, prairie, big skies, lots of bike lanes, fresh air, good restaurants and coffee, cool people--what's not to love?
After another less-than-24-hours stay in DC (hi roommates, here's rent checks for the next few months!, a quick trip to Target, and another delicious sandwich courtesy of Anthony) I hopped a plane back to Nairobi, refreshed and ready for Round 2 of my Horn of Africa Emergency Response adventure...
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