I don’t want to find my identity in being a nurse. This past week I realized why I’ve been burying myself in extracurricular activities all throughout college… I can’t stand being around nursing for long periods of time. At school, I can escape and visit my friends who aren’t nursing majors, hang out with Alpha people, and study other subjects besides nursing. Here, I’m a nurse 24/7. I live with mostly all nursing majors, all of the other students are at their service sites during the day, leaving the nursing majors alone doing homework, and all of school work is for nursing. There’s just no break from being a nursing student. It’s not that the nursing profession isn’t noble and incredible, because it is. I have just realized that my goal is find my identity in Christ and Christ alone, in being his follower and here I am identified first as an American and second as a nurse. Right now in my life that means working hard to incorporate Christ into every aspect of my life. However, there are many times when my life is so crammed with nursing that I get to the end of the day and realize that I didn’t make room for God. How is it possible that the most important aspect of my life gets pushed aside for school work?
We spent last weekend on safari at the uMkhuze game reserve riding in open vehicles and enjoying the gorgeous scenery of the bush. We saw countless amounts of animals on these rides like leopard, lion, cheetah, zebra, giraffe, antelope, wildebeest, buffalo, and warthog. They were such an incredible reminder of how creative our God is. I think my favorite part, aside from driving around a bend and seeing giraffe in the street, was being in the bush and admiring the beauty that defines this country. Not only are the people beautiful and diverse and interesting, but the land is gorgeous and thrilling and stunning all at once.
It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that we’re leaving Pietermaritzburg in less than two weeks. We’ll be traveling down to Cape Town on the 27th where we’ll spend our last three weeks studying more history and culture of South Africa and exploring the city. It’s not that I’m not excited to go to Cape Town that’s making me feel down these days – it’s the thought of leaving the people I’ve built relationships with and the thought that I can’t ever relive this experience. Even when I come back someday, it won’t be the same. The people will be different and the purpose will be different and it’s just so sad to me. But at the same time there is so much joy in the thought of coming back and seeing how people have grown and how programs have grown and seeking after what God might have planned for me here.
Hopefully I’ll be able to update you soon… the internet is being ridiculous and the president of APU and the head of internationalism are coming this week to visit which is amazingly exciting. For now, love, grace and peace.
It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. I think I just got to a point where there was s
o much going on in my brain that I didn’t know how to get it down in writing. We ended clinical a couple of weeks ago and it was an extremely abrupt ending. I had a beautiful last clinical day in pediatrics. At Eastboom clinic (which I had not had the best experiences at) I had a wonderful nurse who taught me so much about diagnosing patients and what to assess for when looking at children who come into the clinic. She showed incredible advocacy for her patients which I have not seen yet in one of my nurses. We had a 6year old boy come in with a cold. His mother informed us that he was HIV positive and had started ARVs, but he had stopped taking them 6 months ago because the mother couldn’t get to the clinic they had started the ARVs at – when you start taking ARVs at one clinic you have to continue to go there because they have all of your paperwork and records of your literacy classes. My sister told me that in order for this boy to get started on ARVs again, he and his mother would have to go through counseling and would have to get more blood work done meaning it could be another 6 months before this little boy could start taking ARVs again. My heart just broke for this family. The situation was one of the hardest there is because the little boy needs his medication, the mother probably was not educated enough about non-compliance, and there is no adequate transport for them to get to where they need to go. It’s just amazing to me that with all of the advances that have been made here, there are countless problems just like this one that are preventing people from getting proper medical aid.
These last few weeks have been filled with homework. We’re cramming the last month of our classes into these next two weeks in order to relieve our class work for when we go to Cape Town, but that means that we have had no lives for the past three weeks. Every time I talk to my mom she asks what I’m doing that day and all I can say is that I’m doing homework. But it’s not all dreary work. Two weekends ago we went hiking in the Drakensberg mountains to go and see the san cave paintings from the bushmen who were the original inhabitants of South Africa. The landscape on the way to and in the Drakensberg mountains is absolutely breathtaking. The sky was the brightest of blues and the grassy hills were an electric shade of green to the extent that it looked completely fake.
o much going on in my brain that I didn’t know how to get it down in writing. We ended clinical a couple of weeks ago and it was an extremely abrupt ending. I had a beautiful last clinical day in pediatrics. At Eastboom clinic (which I had not had the best experiences at) I had a wonderful nurse who taught me so much about diagnosing patients and what to assess for when looking at children who come into the clinic. She showed incredible advocacy for her patients which I have not seen yet in one of my nurses. We had a 6year old boy come in with a cold. His mother informed us that he was HIV positive and had started ARVs, but he had stopped taking them 6 months ago because the mother couldn’t get to the clinic they had started the ARVs at – when you start taking ARVs at one clinic you have to continue to go there because they have all of your paperwork and records of your literacy classes. My sister told me that in order for this boy to get started on ARVs again, he and his mother would have to go through counseling and would have to get more blood work done meaning it could be another 6 months before this little boy could start taking ARVs again. My heart just broke for this family. The situation was one of the hardest there is because the little boy needs his medication, the mother probably was not educated enough about non-compliance, and there is no adequate transport for them to get to where they need to go. It’s just amazing to me that with all of the advances that have been made here, there are countless problems just like this one that are preventing people from getting proper medical aid. 
These last few weeks have been filled with homework. We’re cramming the last month of our classes into these next two weeks in order to relieve our class work for when we go to Cape Town, but that means that we have had no lives for the past three weeks. Every time I talk to my mom she asks what I’m doing that day and all I can say is that I’m doing homework. But it’s not all dreary work. Two weekends ago we went hiking in the Drakensberg mountains to go and see the san cave paintings from the bushmen who were the original inhabitants of South Africa. The landscape on the way to and in the Drakensberg mountains is absolutely breathtaking. The sky was the brightest of blues and the grassy hills were an electric shade of green to the extent that it looked completely fake.
We spent last weekend on safari at the uMkhuze game reserve riding in open vehicles and enjoying the gorgeous scenery of the bush. We saw countless amounts of animals on these rides like leopard, lion, cheetah, zebra, giraffe, antelope, wildebeest, buffalo, and warthog. They were such an incredible reminder of how creative our God is. I think my favorite part, aside from driving around a bend and seeing giraffe in the street, was being in the bush and admiring the beauty that defines this country. Not only are the people beautiful and diverse and interesting, but the land is gorgeous and thrilling and stunning all at once.
Another amazing landscape moment was going zip-lining through the canopy this weekend. We spent a few hours on Saturday doing an incredible zip-lining adventure through the canopy of a South African forest. The weather wasn’t the clearest, but it was amazing to zip-line through the mist while dodging trees and looking into deep ravines filled with trees and waterfalls while spending time with some girls I have come to love and adore. We had a blast screaming our way through the 8 zip lines and entertaining the workers as we laughed and sang in Zulu.
It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that we’re leaving Pietermaritzburg in less than two weeks. We’ll be traveling down to Cape Town on the 27th where we’ll spend our last three weeks studying more history and culture of South Africa and exploring the city. It’s not that I’m not excited to go to Cape Town that’s making me feel down these days – it’s the thought of leaving the people I’ve built relationships with and the thought that I can’t ever relive this experience. Even when I come back someday, it won’t be the same. The people will be different and the purpose will be different and it’s just so sad to me. But at the same time there is so much joy in the thought of coming back and seeing how people have grown and how programs have grown and seeking after what God might have planned for me here.
Hopefully I’ll be able to update you soon… the internet is being ridiculous and the president of APU and the head of internationalism are coming this week to visit which is amazingly exciting. For now, love, grace and peace.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
