NURSE LIFE

It’s minutes after 7 p.m., the end of a long work day for Surrey Memorial emergency nurse Julia Iwama.In the 12 hours she’s been on shift, there’s been no end to the human suffering and need streaming in through the automated hospital doors — the drug-addicted, the chronically ill, the frightened and the lonely.“I don’t doubt I could be useful here,” Iwama says, leaning forward to rest an elbow on the small cafeteria table, fist curled up under her chin as she considers her situation.“But, I guess, that’s not what it is really about for me.”At 23, Iwama has decided what “it” (life) is about: living and working in Nepal. Come September, the recent University of B.C. nursing school graduate will pack up her comfortable life in Canada and say goodbye to her family and friends in order to devote herself and her skills full time to the 1.5 million, mainly impoverished people living in Dadeldhura, a remote community high up in the Himalayas.Moving to Nepal has been a long time coming for Iwama, who first fell in love with the country and its people when she was eight years old.The moment came as she was seated around the family dining room table at home in Surrey, taking turns with her younger sister and brother reading aloud from a book entitled How You Can Change the World.Illustrating Iwama’s assigned chapter was an image of two little girls about her own age, their warm brown skin looking so out of place against the stark white Himalayan snow.She felt an immediate connection to the girls. Thinking about it now, she says it probably had to do with her own mixed ethnicity (her father is Asian, her mother, Caucasian), and feeling like she never quite fit in in her own world.Whatever it was, she says, “something in my mind just clicked, and I was mesmerized.” As a teenager, Iwama made her first real effort to put her childhood dream of travelling to Nepal into action when an older friend and mentor encouraged her to join a Christian-based non-profit organization for youth with ministries in various developing countries, including Nepal.Thrilled, Iwama quickly enlisted as a volunteer, but, instead of Nepal, she soon found herself in Venezuela where, at the age of 14, she spent her summer working with street kids. It was an amazing experience, she says. But she couldn’t help wondering why the country that so captured her heart had somehow managed to elude her grasp.Someone told her to pray for direction. And, though skeptical, she did. Each time she visualized the same thing: a woman with bright green eyes and a face well-written with age.At 15, she applied again to work in Nepal, but was assigned instead to a team in Kenya working with battered women. The summer after that, she found herself in Uganda caring for children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.“I kept looking for the woman in my mind’s eye,” she says. “But I never found her.”In 2005, following her first year at nursing school, Iwama finally made her first trip to Nepal. Flying in to Kathmandu, she travelled two days by bus, then six hours by jeep up a treacherous mountain road before reaching Dadeldhura, where she had volunteered to work for four months with Dr. Davey Gin, a Surrey physician whose family had moved to the region.Years of civil war between government forces and Maoists had, by then, torn up the country, leaving thousands dead, injured and homeless.Adding to the country’s woes are widespread disease, poverty and malnutrition.Iwama recognized the old woman’s face as soon as she saw her — her first patient, brought in to the tiny, ill-equipped hospital with two broken arms after the vehicle she was riding in went off the road.And she remembers, still, the feeling of peace that washed over her when she looked into her patient’s bright green eyes.“It was a confirmation within my spirit that I was where I was meant to be,” Iwama says now.The trip was the first of three volunteer postings she would spend at the hospital while completing her nursing degree back home, each visit taking its own emotional and physical toll.There are few medical supplies in the tiny, understaffed local hospital. There is no access to clean water. Leprosy and tuberculosis are endemic. Buildings and homes are unheated, despite sub-zero temperatures. “You nurse with gloves on, and a jacket and scarf,” Iwama says. “But it’s always a reality check when you see a villager walking with flip-flops on because he can’t afford shoes.”On one past trip, Iwama was forced to choose between giving the hospital’s only oxygen compressor to a badly injured eight-year-old boy, or a woman who’d been impaled by a tree. Neither could survive without the equipment. In the end, Iwama chose the boy.“I felt he had a better chance,” she says.Another time, she nursed both a four-year-old child whose leg had been blown off by a bomb, and, in the next cot, the rebel soldier who’d set the bomb in the first place.“It was a lesson in true compassion,” she says.Iwama graduated university in the spring of 2007, and, like all her nursing colleagues, has found no trouble in getting work in British Columbia. If she wanted, she could earn as much as $80,000 a year — enough to pay off student loans, get her own apartment and buy a nice car like many of her friends.But Iwama has been squirrelling away as much as possible. Working with an non-governmental organization operating in Nepal, she will be relying on her own money, as well as monthly donations from family, friends and church groups, to fund her new life in Nepal. People often ask her what she’s running from when she tells them of her future plans.“I’m not running away from anything, that’s the hard part,” she says. She loves her family. She loves her friends. She loves her job at Surrey Memorial.“But, in the end, at the end of the day, it’s not enough to keep me here,” she says. “So when people ask why I’m leaving, I say, ‘Yeah, it’s great here. But it’s not my heart’s biggest yes.’ ”