BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – When an opportunity arose in the summer of 2010 to travel to northern Iraq and train health professionals at a local hospital, Molly King ‘03, an alumna of Illinois Wesleyan School of Nursing, jumped at the chance.
In June of 2010 King traveled to northern Iraq with the non-governmental organization (NGO) Samaritan’s Purse in conjunction with For Hearts & Souls (FHAS).
In Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, she helped to provide training to nurses specializing in post-operative nursing management of congenital heart disease repairs at the Sulaymaniyah Center for Heart Diseases. King spent 10 weeks at the hospital as a representative of FHAS in conjunction with Samaritan’s Purse, a not-for-profit organization funding the trip. During her time there, King focused on developing a curriculum addressing the post-operative care needs of cardiac patients and implementing it through bedside teaching and lectures. At first, this proved to be a difficult task.
“Of course language was a barrier,” said King. “A lot of the medical staff [understood] some English, but many did not, which is quite interesting considering that nursing education is done in English because there is no technical or scientific vocabulary in the Kurdish language.”
In addition to the language barrier, King found that asking questions was viewed as challenging authority and, therefore, culturally inappropriate. “I probably had the hardest time with this because in the context of pediatric heart surgery, I could not respect that tradition when patients, especially children, were being harmed.” Ultimately, King overcame these challenges by gaining the respect of the hospital staff through her persistence in teaching.