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NURSES' ALUMNI ORGANIZATION NEWSLETTER

Orphanage Benefits from Alum’s “Just Do It” Philosophy Susan Gold sits alongisde six young residents of the Nyumbani Children's Home. Nyumbani's children represent all tribes and ethnicities of Kenya. When Susan Gold, BS’91, RN, left Kenya, Africa, in 2003 to return to the United States, she knew that she had to do more for the beloved children at the Nyumbani orphanage outside Nairobi. Armed with a philosophy—“Either do it or stop wanting to do it”— the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing alum put together proposal for the national Fulbright Scholarship Committee, which awards grants for the international exchange of cholars, to introduce an adolescent-HIV education project at the Nyumbani orphanage. In 2004, she was chosen as a Fulbright Scholar alternate; in 2005, she resubmitted and hit pay dirt. She currently is preparing to leave in January 2007 for Nyumbani, where she will stay for ten months to carry out her project. “Research is not just for the advanced degrees,” Gold says. “My well-grounded education at the School of Nursing has taught me not to be afraid of it.” But doggedness has always defined Gold’s character: She completed nursing school at age 40; she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, one of eleven mountains scaled; she made her first trip to Nyumbani (outside Nairobi, Kenya) in 2003 to help its children. A pediatric nurse from the UW Children’s Hospital Adolescent and Young Adult Clinic in Madison, Gold had spent two months in 2003 volunteering through the Catholic Medical Mission Board to help children with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who, abandoned or orphaned, were cared for at the orphanage. In Kenya, Gold says, nurses are revered. There is a deep trust and bond between the patient and the nurse. “AIDS, contracted either through sexual assault or mother-to-child transmission, is the root of most of the problems at the Nyumbani orphanage,” Gold says. “All of the ninety-three children are HIV-positive, while approximately one-half of the children have contracted AIDS. Many children are abandoned at the gate of the orphanage or are found at the gate seeking shelter because they’ve lost their parents to the virus.” One of those children, an eight-year-old named Mary, watched over her mother’s lifeless body for three days before she began her long walk to the outreach clinic in the slum of Kiberra, where she waited for clinic staff to arrive. The orphanage gave her shelter, food, and kindness, notes Gold, until she died a year later from AIDS contracted through mother-to-child transmission. The volunteers live simply, says Gold--with no hot water, unreliable electricity, and by an unwritten Nyumbani rule: “Feed the children first.” The biggest pitfall, Gold explains, is the inadequate supply of drugs and lack of enough antiretroviral medications to offer the sick children. This rendered Gold powerless in 2003. “Sometimes, the most precious thing I could offer the children was human kindness.” Gold’s plan to help orphanage occupants comes in the form of an educational tool modeled after the Healthy Oakland Teens Project (HOT), which was developed with the help of the University of California-San Francisco and is available in Swahili (the native language of the orphanage). HOT meets Gold’s needs—focusing on those already infected by HIV, not on methods for preventing the infection. In short, Gold’s objective is to eliminate the Nyumbani children’s flawed perception of the virus. “They know their parents died of it, and they know that they are HIV-positive, but they don’t have a clear understanding of how they got it— ‘I got it from mom, but did she feed it to me? You get it by having sex, but how did I get it if I had no sex?’” Without an understanding of what HIV is and how it spreads, Gold adds, “the children of Nyumbani will unwittingly contribute to the disease decimating Kenya.” Once in place for the long term, the project will be administered by Kenyan nurses. “The nurse is revered in the Sub-Sahara,” Gold says. “There is a deep trust and bond in Kenya between patient and nurse that I uphold with honor. My goal is to formalize the program so that it can be used by other Kenyan health care providers in different settings to ensure sustainability.” Nyumbani, which means "home" in Swahili, provides food, shelter, and kindness to those ranging in age from newborn to young adult. Gold explains that a nurse can provide health information in ways that separate it from religious dogma. Nyumbani—the house that Jesuit priest and founder Father Angelo D’Agostino built—requires certain protocol. “Nurses can teach from the health aspect,” says Gold. “It’s not healthy to be having sex at fifteen when you’re HIV-positive or you have AIDS.” Cards and letters from the Nyumbani children since 2003 have fueled Gold’s eagerness to return. This continual connection drew the attention of the Wisconsin Chapter of Project Linus, which last year sent blankets to the orphanage with a child’s name sewn on each one. Gold looks at her future journey with the same grit that has carried her this far. “Being awarded a scholarship to pursue my research in Nyumbani demonstrates that nurses can be life-long learners,” Gold notes. “My hope is that my project paves the way for a different outcome in the lives of the children I serve.” For more information about the Nyumbani Children’s Home, visit www.nyumbani.org.