Alumna's nursing skills put to test in African missionary work
Nurse practitioner Sarah Damick combines her zeal for missionary work with skills forged at the Michigan State University College of Nursing to serve in The Gambia in west Africa, often without modern medical equipment but with a good deal of resourcefulness.
It’s a calling that’s led her to adventurous health care – traversing her village three times a day to inject antibiotics in a very ill child, driving a makeshift ambulance over bumpy roads, or delivering babies on a donkey cart by flashlight in the middle of the night. The Gambia is a sliver of a nation on Africa’s west coast surrounded by Senegal.
“Some people have thought I’m absolutely crazy for choosing to live here, and others think I’m some sort of saint. I am neither,” says Damick, who’s learned the prominent language of The Gambia, Wolof. “I’ve just chosen to follow what God wants for my life, even if that means I live and work without all the amenities and technology that life in the United States has to offer.”
Damick earned her family nurse practitioner degree at MSU in 2017 and returned to The Gambia in January 2018, where she will remain until the end of 2021. Prior to attending MSU, she spent five years, 2010-2014, providing medical care in The Gambia.
She first worked in The Gambia for 10 weeks in 2005 after working as an RN at Allegan General Hospital. Damick grew up in Allegan and first earned an associate’s degree in applied science/nursing at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. She then completed a BSN through Spring Arbor University.
Damick says her MSU training in advance health assessment, lab assessment and pharmacology have been invaluable in treating patients in The Gambia, where her clinic has solar power with no radiology capability and limited lab and medicine supplies.
“I want what every health care provider wants, to help people as much as possible to live healthy lives,” she says, “whether it’s treating their high blood pressure or simply encouraging people to drink more water to stop the dizziness, headaches, palpitations and hypotension caused from dehydration.
“No practitioner is always 100 percent correct, but the education I received at MSU has made me a far better practitioner and that has increased the health and well-being of the whole community as I pass on the knowledge I have.”
