A LIFE’S MISSION TO PROMOTE MENTAL HEALTH IN IMMIGRANT FAMILIES AND YOUTH DNP student Blessing Azonwu earns prestigious Jonas Scholar honor
by Susan Maas
Working as a float nurse at Regions Hospital in St. Paul a decade ago, Blessing Azonwu had a revelation. She’d wanted to work in health care since her childhood in Nigeria, when she was frequently ill with typhoid fever. But during Azonwu’s first shift in a mental health unit, a light bulb went off as she remembered a long-suffering aunt who’d died years earlier. “It took me back to my auntie,” Azonwu says. “And I began to reflect back and realize, oh, this is what was going on! She would take off, and sometimes we wouldn’t know where she was, and then she would come back and seem very, very paranoid. All these major symptoms were present,” Azonwu recalls. “And then, when I was working in that mental health unit, everything connected ... I’m like, ‘oh my God, this a treatable illness.’” Her career path crystallized then and there.
Azonwu, who came to the U.S. in her late 20s, had been accepted to medical school in Nigeria. Her family couldn’t afford the tuition, consequently she completed a less-costly communications degree. After arriving in the states, she began working in home care — work that
affirmed her original attraction to health care. Azonwu’s husband urged her to consider returning to school. “He would watch the baby [their second] and drop me off at class,” she says. Azonwu earned a nursing diploma at continued on page 28 www.nursing.umn.edu | 27
