Tom Disher Left to right: SPU senior nursing students Kiran Gill, Laura Ellefson, Jessica Ferro, Kelly Lenart, Lisa Hodgson, Jessica Anderson, Elya Will, Lysen Storaasli, Mary Amico, and Kristen Roosa discus their trip to Vietnam, Thursday in Otto Miller Hall 127.

Dr. Bac Si Ha cares for patients in remote villages in Vietnam.

He knows how to treat for cuts and bruises. He knows how to cure respiratory illnesses and dysentery.

But Dr. Ha also knows what it's like to care for a leukemia patient when chemotherapy isn't an option.

When 10 SPU seniors traveled to Vietnam last quarter to study pediatrics, they said they got more than professional experience. They said Vietnam left them with an emotional tie that won't easily be forgotten.

The nursing students left for Hanoi, Vietnam, in early February. They spent six weeks traveling from local hospitals to village clinics treating children in extremely poor areas of Vietnam.

All of the student nurses expressed great compassion for the children they met and treated over the trip's six week course. "My heart comes alive when I am with these children; I love every moment," Jessica Anderson, a senior, said.

Working with the international exchange program Medrix, the 10 nursing majors spent fall and winter quarters preparing for their trip to Vietnam. While the main goal was to focus on pediatrics for the local children, they also covered teaching plans and materials, child nutrition, and immunization. During winter quarter, they focused on treating dehydration and intestinal parasites, both of which they had to face numerous times during their trip, they said.

Because many of their patients were unable to understand English and were being taught in large groups of mostly children, the group created various flipcharts to visually communicate practices of personal hygiene, oral care, and hand washing. These were also used repeatedly to help bridge the gap for a group of American students to teach groups of Vietnamese who sometimes spoke three different languages.

"Thankfully, we had studied Leininger's Sunrise model for addressing religious and social issues when treating our patients," Laura Ellefson, a senior, said. "There were times when a simple sickness had escalated to a major disease because the child wasn't receiving the correct care. It goes without saying that it was difficult to recover from such a lack of education."

Their studies also covered the historical, religious, and political aspects of Vietnam, which has many rural villages with little to no access to clean water and medical supplies.

The students also performed four specific case studies on certain sick children. These patients ranged from an infant whose mother was worried about malnutrition from breastfeeding to a 10-year-old girl named Doa, who died after suffering an infectious fever that refused to break.

"There are few things that are more difficult than trying to treat a sick child when you know that there are not the right resources available to help them," Ellefson said. "The emotional connection you make with your patients is a tough thing to deal with when you're literally unable to help them."

In Hue, another impoverished city, many children were not being treated for simple ailments because their parents believed malevolent spirits, not bacteria, caused sickness.

The SPU students visited local Vietnamese nursing students and resident Vietnamese doctors to administer care to the patients in the Hue Central Hospital. During their three weeks at Hue Central Hospital, the group faced a variety of symptoms and sicknesses. It was also where the students met Dr. Ha.

"Dr. Ha was such an inspiration to our group, and even when he knew things were dire for his patients he was so generous and loving it was simply incredible," senior Mary Amico said.

After their studies in Hue, the group headed to Nam Dong, a remote province in the northwest. Nam Dong's clinics and hospital were in bad condition, the group said.

Because of the family-oriented treatment in Nam Dong, the group decided to go out into the villages for home visits, going into the peoples' homes for treatment and education.

Looking back on their experiences in Vietnam, all 10 students expressed interest in returning to Vietnam for nursing. When asked how the trip changed their perspective on nursing, the group replied that it truly affirmed the difficulties and the worth of working in rural clinics.

As the group spoke about their infrequent recreational time spent biking through the rice paddies, all of them emphasized the privilege of people in the United States to have easy access to multiple physicians.