Local nurse describes harrowing experiences in Nepal
Posted July 25, 2015 3:58 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Three months ago today the first of two powerful earthquakes rocked Nepal, killing almost 9,000 people.
While the disaster is out of the headlines, the countries’ painful recovery continues.
Genelle Leifso just returned from Nepal where she was deployed as a nurse at a Red Cross field hospital.
“There are landslides, there are monsoons, and problems with water contamination, and ongoing disruption of roads and transportation,” she says.
Despite the challenges, she felt her group made a difference by training local health workers.
“The ability to provide sterile instruments for sutchering patients who have lacerations, sterile instruments for doing dressing changes, or for looking after women who are giving birth,” she says. “That’s incredibly motivating. It helps you keep going. That said the snakes in the tent [was] something I wasn’t quite prepared for. We had heard about that possibility and then when it actually happened in a patients tent, it was pretty scary.”
An 18-year-old buffalo herder turned operating room cleaner stood out. “She really took her role seriously and I feel like in this sort of situation we had actually given here a life skill that she wouldn’t have had before.”
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