MY EXPERIENCE WITH NURSES INTERNATIONAL

I started my journey with Nurses International (NI) a year ago when I was working with a colleague in Chogoria, Kenya. She gave me a First Aid class to teach at the local nursing school. It wasn’t a difficult class, but I didn’t want to start from scratch with new slides and material if I could find some lectures or slides already created. So after some searching online, I found Nurses International’s BSN curriculum material and downloaded it. I figured, why not? It couldn’t hurt to look at free material. What I downloaded was a vast repository of information, but seeing as I was teaching a single subject, I just searched “first aid” and found a lecture on first aid in the med/surg portion of the materials.

After finding a great presentation, I simply adapted it to the curriculum objectives in our program and now I had an excellent set of lectures in very little time. I finished the course on first aid and went on to use the materials in the other two subjects that I teach, trauma, and critical care. After I had downloaded the materials, I also received an email from Miriam Chickering, the CEO herself! I was surprised, to say the least, and I thanked her for the use of such a vast selection of materials. In the spring of 2020, I reconnected with Miriam to see if I could use some of the NI materials to start a professional and spiritual development curriculum for hospitals in low and middle-income countries. Seeing as this was also the vision of NI, she asked that I join NI as a director for that purpose, and I accepted the position of Director of Professional and Spiritual Development.

Since then, I have been working towards creating a new curriculum to enrich nurses in their Christian walk and to prepare future nurses by helping complete our BSN curriculum. And so, here I am, living in Kenya, working alongside other global nurses and professionals focusing on improving the health of the world one nurse, one person, one community at a time through Nurses International.