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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Witnessing birth of new nation inspires nurse

By: Melissa Martin

Posted: 02/13/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Wendy Rhymer was in South Sudan as a medical team leader with Doctors Beyond Borders.

Seven months after its birth, the fragile new nation of South Sudan is primed to blossom, one Winnipeg aid worker says.

"It's a great time to be there," said Wendy Rhymer, a registered nurse who returned last month after a 10-month Doctors Without Borders mission to the central African nation. "Hopefully, governments are able to follow up."

Enlarge Image

Wendy Rhymer with one baby of a set of twins (one girl, one boy). Her name is NyaWendy (the girls all have Nya as the beginning of their names).

Rhymer, 33, was stationed at a hospital along the Nile River when South Sudan gained its independence in July 2011. As the country took to its legs, the mission watched many of the best of its 180 local staff leave to seek out training and opportunities to help build the new nation.

"It's exciting in South Sudan right now, because people want this country to work," she said. "People are seeing it as an opportunity."

But amid the optimism, Rhymer's time leading a medical team in South Sudan was marked by daily reminders of the struggles the landlocked country faces.

Years of violent conflict have left the civilian population struggling for education. In a nation in which most women lack access to effective contraception and prenatal care, the infant and maternal death rate is high: on one night, Rhymer, a nurse-midwife, watched three infants die.

Another time, her hospital had to perform emergency surgery on a woman suffering from horrifying injuries as a result of a traditional healer's attempt to stem bleeding they believed to be a miscarriage.

And then there were the gunshot wounds, countless numbers of them, suffered by people rushed up the Nile for hours to reach the hospital.

Rhymer cautioned the international community can't lose South Sudan from its sights. Although the famine that swept through east Africa last year has abated, as many as 90 per cent of people living in South Sudan live on less than $1 a day, and food security hangs by a thread.

"People say oh, the malnutrition crisis is over," Rhymer said. "But it doesn't mean there's not malnutrition, or aren't people in crisis."

Most of all, Rhymer said, the international community can support South Sudan -- and other developing nations -- by reaching out to support education.

While infrastructure is important, she noted that Doctors Without Borders can perform safe and effective surgery in tents; it's the education, she said, that is most in need.

"I've seen where people donate to build a big hospital, and it's empty," she said. "You'll see schools that are empty because there are no teachers. You need (fewer) structures -- you need the people and tools to do it."

During the mission -- one of many Rhymer has made with Doctors Without Borders -- the nurse saw first-hand what education can do. She witnessed how, after teams worked to educate the local population about modern medicine, traditional birth attendants began bringing women with troublesome pregnancies to the hospital for their births. Those interventions saved lives, Rhymer said.

"You start to see how everyone is changing," she said. "You start seeing that everyone knows the roads (Doctors Without Borders) drives, so they'll leave their people on the side of the road so we can pick them up."

Most of all, Rhymer noted that every infant she was able to deliver in South Sudan, every local staff member they were able to train, came because millions of people, including Canadians, donated to the cause. As Canada's own demographic grows, Rhymer hopes more folks will look at their communities and see cause to contribute. "So many people here come from other countries -- and this is their story."

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 13, 2012 A4

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