Nurse Finds Contentment In Disease-Ridden Chaos

Democrat Home to do her income taxes, check in with her grown children and revisit the redwoods in Camp Meeker, Patricia Raven is now going back to Burundi. Almost happily.

Why Burundi, people ask her, trying to place it in that blood-stained African center where Hutus massacre Tutsis and Tutsis slaughter back.

Raven recognizes this resistance to identifying another killing place fueled by another complicated ethnic war.

“I never quite understood Bosnia either,” she says. But, she explains, Burundi is where she goes to be the kind of nurse she wants to be.

“In California I was starting to feel like a factory worker,” she says. But in Africa where she works in camps for displaced persons, she gets to do what she does best.

“I know what I am doing there. My skills are necessary. No one tells me I can only talk to a mother for 10 minutes and that I must fill out a 30-page care plan in Medicare language.”

Raven is a health educator with the International Medical Corps, which means she recruits and trains people from the local community to be health workers. They then tell others how to avoid the wasting illnesses, like diarrhea, malaria and AIDS, and respiratory problems that ravage the camps.

Because there is so little access to hospitals, “prevention is essential,” she says.

Yet one of Raven’s big jobs is to convince the people that preventing disease is “more valuable than a pot or pan.”

It’s from an old legacy of expectation, she said, “starting with Livingstone bringing beads.

“So they see me, a white person, and I represent goods, not services.”

“It is a forever relationship. What are you going to give me?”

Yet she gets through. Victory is “convincing a mother that if she cuts her child’s fingernails he won’t get worms.”

This is her fourth international assignment, following stints in Rwanda, Armenia and the Persian Gulf. When she finishes in Burundi late this summer, she hopes to go to Thailand to work with Burmese refugees.

Raven, 47, makes it sound like an adventure.

“I’ve never wanted to travel where the tourists are,” she says. “I want to feel I’m part of the world. You go into a place and do what you can.”

OK, but people get killed there, including altruistic volunteers, relief workers and nurses. Hadn’t she just said in an aside that “people are into machetes there.”

She says she tries to focus on the work.

“I think most nurses are kind of Zen about it.”

In Burundi she’s careful to keep the curfew. She lives in a gated compound with bars on the window. She takes notice of evacuation routes and communicates her whereabouts by radio.

But mostly, to stay safe, she avoids talking politics to Hutu or Tutsi.

“Once you ask a political question, you are taking a side.” To underscore her neutrality, she said, “I’ve learned how to say, “I’m just a nurse,’ in five languages.”

Still, incidents happen. She unwittingly offended a Tutsi chief and received a death threat.

“There was a note on my jeep that said I shouldn’t go out after dark or my throat would be slashed.”

She passes through six armed barricades to get to work. She feels some security in being 20 minutes from the Tanzanian border on a “good paved road” but adds that it is also the same highway where 126 Hutus were ambushed.

Her link with the world outside and knowing what’s going on in her own precarious one is her shortwave radio. The first thing she does in the morning is tune in the BBC for its update on Africa.

Her African friends call her ki-ki, short for kibombobombo, Swahili for raven.

For 15 years she raised two kids in Camp Meeker as a single mother, working as a nurse during the day and tending bar at night.

In Burundi, Raven says her life is less complicated.

If you ask her how she finds peace in the middle of a killing field, she tells of dancers with bells on their ankles and fronds on their heads. Of nights with nothing to do but “read and write and think.”

She shows pictures of giggling children and women wrapped in bright colors with cans of water on their heads gliding along the road. She speaks of “African laughter,” which is “deep and visceral and results in a kind of rumbling from within.”

She says, “There’s a lot of tragedy there, but when I’m walking through the camps I’m happy.”

Half of her California friends tell her “you’re out of your mind.”

The other half listen with a kind of envy.