100 Degrees of Separation

Noël Koto and Christina Lovett learned similar lessons about nursing and ministry, even though separated by 100 degrees. Noël perspired in India, while Christina shivered in Alaska.

Noël's Story

Noël Koto describes her first impression of India as “sensory overload.”

She remembers the smog, mosquitoes, crowds of people, cars, bikes, motorcycles, cows, bright colors, loud noises, and strange smells, and, she recalls, “I just sat in the car and said ‘I love this.’”

Noël says that she received a clear call to missions in India while on a mission trip to Mexico as a high school student. Seven years later, she visited India for the first time as a nursing student at Northwest University.

The opportunity to work in India as part of her training was a key reason why Noël chose Northwest University. Students in the Mark and Huldah Buntain School of Nursing complete a month-long intensive clinical during their senior year, which most do overseas.

In addition to India, sites may include Mexico, Zimbabwe, Taiwan, and a remote part of Alaska.

Noël discovered Northwest’s School of Nursing while reading her grandmother’s copy of a past issue of this publication, Northwest Passages. She realized that Northwest University would be a perfect fit when she learned that the School of Nursing is named after Mark and Huldah Buntain, missionaries to India and the founders of Mission of Mercy.

Even after applying for admission to Northwest University, Noël had reservations. “I just wanted to go,” Noel says of her sense of urgency about her call to missions. But her father insisted that she attend college so that she would have a career to fall back on. She chose nursing, but, she says, “I was praying that I wouldn’t get into nursing school.”

It seems that God had other plans for Noël. She was accepted into the School of Nursing, and she now she sees the value of her training. “I feel nursing is a tool, so I am glad that I have it.”

While in India, the value of her training in nursing became even more apparent. Visiting the village of Puri, Noël and her fellow Northwest University students toured an Assembly of God ministry that included a school, housing for orphans and boarding students, a Bible school, and a clinic.

Noël jokingly asked the pastor conducting the tour if they needed a nurse at the clinic. The pastor responded that yes, they did need a nurse. Noël realized that this was a position that she could fill.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” she says. “I felt an incredible peace and I knew that I belonged there.”

In another town, about 45 minutes from Puri, Noël and the other students attended a church service under the stars on a beach by the Bay of Bengal. This is one of Noël’s favorite memories from her time in India. She loved worshiping and praying with the church members.

“I am still in contact with that congregation, and I know that they pray for me almost every meeting that they have, and that just blows my mind.” She says.

This congregation also has a clinic, and Noël hopes that when she returns she will be able to work in both this clinic and the one in Puri, as well as help with the children at the school and orphanage.

“Even before we landed, I knew that I loved India. My love for the people and their way of life just grew,” Noël says. “I love the culture. Their culture is so community minded. They are so supportive of one another.”

Every culture has its faults, though, and she says, “One area in which I might defy the culture is acknowledging the people at the bottom of the caste system,” including the poor, servants, lepers, and the mentally ill.

“The thing I struggled with the most was all the suffering and sorrow around me,” she says. She was not always sure how to respond. She desired to follow biblical commands to care for the widows and orphans, but the reality of professional beggars and crowds of children asking for handouts made it difficult to determine who really needed help.

“One of the biggest things I could do as a Christian and as a visitor was to treat them as human beings, to respect them,” she says.

Noël knows that she has some preparing to do before she can return to India. She is working as a medical assistant at a pediatric doctor’s office and plans to begin work in the oncology ward at a local hospital. She hopes to return to India for a month or two in the fall of 2006 to work in the clinics after the monsoon season, when disease is at its worst.

Once she has paid off her student loans and raised her support, she plans to move to India.

She says that through her trip to India, God taught her to trust him for her finances and safety, and now she is learning about “having faith that I will go back —because that is what I want more than anything else.”

Christina's Story

Christina Lovett chose nursing as a career because she sees it

as an opportunity for ministry.

“I wanted to have a career that would give meaning to my life, something that I could look back on with pride and fulfillment,” she says.

For Christina, nursing is about helping suffering people, and meeting people’s needs involves understanding them.

For this reason, Christina says, multi-cultural training and experience is “absolutely essential” for nurses.

When Christina began looking into potential colleges, she was impressed with the academics and the friendly atmosphere at Northwest University, but most importantly, she says, “I liked that the nursing program had a multicultural emphasis and a very strong integration of faith and studies.”

During her senior year, Christina chose to go to Bethel, a town in a remote part of Alaska, for her cross-cultural nursing practicum.

While in Bethel, Christina worked in the emergency room at the local hospital. She often treated patients suffering from diseases that are not frequently seen in the continental United States, such as RSV (a respiratory disease in infants), tuberculosis, and botulism.

She also gained considerable pediatric experience, as most of the emergency room patients were infants. She has put this pediatric knowledge to work in her present career as an emergency room nurse. For example, recently Christina was able to demonstrate for the other, more experienced nurses how to test an infant for RSV, because she and the other medical staff conducted the test daily in Bethel.

In addition to the practical knowledge that Christina gained while in Alaska, she learned about love and compassion.

Romans 13:10, which states, “…love is the fulfillment of the law,” became especially meaningful to her during the trip.

“How I love others and how I do my job can be a fulfillment of the Christian way of life,” Christina says.

One patient stands out to Christina as a reminder of each person’s need for compassion. The woman was intoxicated and had been severely beaten by her boyfriend. The patient was barely conscious, but while Christina held the woman’s hand and prayed under her breath, she heard the woman pray quietly, “Dear God, I’m sorry. Please don’t let me die.”

Christina says that it is easy for medical staff to become hardened to people who return to emergency rooms again and again because of the same poor choices, but, she says, “hearing the desperation in that woman’s voice reminded me that they still are souls who need God. They are caught up in life and they are caught up in that desperation.”

Christina learned the importance of listening in order to meet a person’s needs, especially when different cultures are involved.

The native Alaskans she helped to serve in the hospital wanted time to consider before answering questions or making decisions. Addressing urgent health needs efficiently had to be balanced with respectful listening.

“I guess I learned patience in Alaska and to slow everything down, because it makes people feel more comfortable,” Christina says.

She found that the people she and the other Northwest University students met appreciated that they came ready to learn about their way of life.

Experiencing a different culture is always an adventure, and Christina’s time in Bethel was no exception.

She and the other students traveled by Cessna airplanes to remote villages to help with medevacs, went on dog sled rides late at night, and rode snowmobiles. They sampled local food, including seal meat, whale blubber, and Eskimo ice cream (which often includes ingredients such as Crisco, sugar, berries and seal oil).

Christina says that an ability to interact with and appreciate a variety of different cultures will be invaluable as an emergency room nurse.

For example, she will need to be prepared to handle language barriers and different cultural health practices.

“We live in a melting pot —America isn’t made up of just one culture,” she says.

Christina now works in the emergency room at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland. She hopes to eventually specialize in trauma and become a medevac nurse.

Throughout her career, Christina knows that she will often be serving people with very different cultural backgrounds from her own, and she says that her time in Alaska expanded her ability to care and to show compassion.