Queen of the Tundra: Cindy Swanson

Cindy Swanson writes…
Merrill asked me to write about myself for the Team Sinai Haiti blog. I guess I always have trouble talking about myself but here goes... My international travel started in 2000 when I joined the Peace Corps. I was in Belize as a part of a group that was training elementary school teachers how to use computers. It was a neat experience being there and lived there for six months.
My next adventure was teaching in a public school in Alaska. It was a village accessible only by bush flight on the Yukon National Wildlife refuge. The interesting thing was, it was more remote, otherworldly with less amenities than being in Peace Corps. I taught elementary and high school art in a village that was all Native Alaskan. I learned to live on the tundra with no running water. In the two years I was there, I learned an important thing that sociologists talk about, that there are two levels to another culture. There are the material things and the non-material things. It is relatively easy to get used to not having water, living in a house on stilts, the food, traveling by boat or plane, etc. The things that are more difficult to grasp are the intangible things like values, communication, and cultural norms. These things are usually learned more slowly. What I value might not be the same, what is normal for them may not be the same for me. As a teacher, I had to be very careful not to assume my way was better.

Tundra Cindy and the Shock Trauma Crew in Haiti

After coming back to the lower 48, I went to nursing school at Johns Hopkins and from there began working in the OR at Shock Trauma and have been there ever since. Last year after the Haitian earthquake, our hospital organized a team and set up camp in a half collapsed hospital in the city. Each week new teams would be rotated in to do basic triage and surgery. I went last April, and staffed three OR's doing mostly orthopedic, and general surgery. That week we were lucky to have an OB/GYN doctor with us, so we did OB as well. We had to learn to do surgery with limited supplies, intermittent electricity,and only a mini c-arm. I have wanted to go back since then, so I was really excited to learn that Team Sinai needed an OR nurse. See you all in June! ----Cindy Swanson, RN