By Amanda Hyman ’17N
How the UR School of Nursing and a volunteer trip to southern Peru helped prepare me for my nursing career.
A
fter I graduated nursing school, I took a three-month break to volunteer in Peru before starting my first nursing job. This decision did not come out of nowhere. In fact, I planned on joining the Peace Corps after nursing school as a public health worker in Tanzania. But during my third semester of the Accelerated Bachelor’s Program for Non-Nurses (APNN) I got sick and was disqualified from being in the Peace Corps. I was very disappointed, and I turned to my nursing instructors for support. I spoke to Elaine Andolina, then the co-director of the APNN program, who reminded me about a clinic that was started by a School of Nursing alumna named Keri Baker ’11N. It was called Ayni Wasi and located in Ollantaytambo, an ancient village set between the Urubamba River and the Andes Mountains in the Sacred Valley of south Peru. I spoke to Elaine and my med-surg instructors – Valerie Fitzgerald, Carolanne Bianchi, and Pam Brady – about the opportunity. Volunteering in Peru meant turning down job offers and taking a gamble that I could interview and get hired for a job that was a full six months away. All of my instructors and Elaine encouraged me to go to Peru. The right fit of a nursing job will come along, they assured me. And they were right. I found a job two weeks before departure at Duke University Health System that would accept me for a new grad residency program. But first, Peru. I boarded the plane and headed down to South America. At Ayni Wasi, they work with women who live in the high-altitude communities of the Andes. The ladies that come to Ayni Wasi speak the indigenous language of Quechua, make their own clothes by hand, and learn mainly by visual
28 NURSING 2019 Volume 1
