Nursing new beginnings in CAR

Central African Republic (CAR) has a long-term spot on the United Nations least-developed countries list. Adequate healthcare there remains an unfulfilled dream after decades of political instability, including the most recent Muslim Seleka take-over in 2013. Healthcare workers cannot escape the violence. Sixteen people, including three Doctors Without Borders workers, were killed during an April armed robbery at Boguila Hospital.

It was to this chaos that God called Leanne and Luke Turk and their young family.

Leanne was eight months pregnant in 1999 with the second of three boys when Luke suggested the possibility of becoming missionaries in CAR. After visiting the country alone, Luke believed God had hand-picked them for work at Gamboula Hospital. As “Mr. Fix-it,” Luke would maintain the physical plant, repair equipment, and oversee construction. Leanne, a nurse, could serve the hospital nursing school.

Barely a year later, sent out by Presbyterian Evangelical Fellowship, the Turks left Athens, Ga., and settled in CAR.

Gamboula Hospital, established in the early 1970s, was already a hub of activity when the Turks arrived. It included a 150-bed referral hospital and dental clinic for western CAR, as well as six satellite primary care clinics within a 90-mile radius. The nursing school supplied staff for the hospital and clinics. But its license only allowed limited training of nurses for employment in the private sector. Graduates could only be hired in the Gamboula system, never by the country’s needy public hospitals. And the graduates were not full RNs.

“There are very few doctors in CAR, so very often nurses serve in a role comparable to a U.S. nurse practitioner, regardless of the amount of training they have,”Leanne said.

Despite the country’s worsening political situation, God impressed on her that if the school were to bear fruit throughout the whole country, students needed additional training and credentials that enabled them to practice anywhere. Christian nursing graduates could shine as stars in a dark place with the necessary skills to meet CAR’s tremendous needs.

Long before Seleka rebels began tearing the country down, the Turks helped embark on a plan to build it up through the nursing program: Gamboula would issue RN-equivalent diplomas from a full-spectrum school. Provisional authorization to start the first class came in August 2010, and in March 2011 it became a reality.

With 16 students then in the middle of their three-year course, the Muslim Seleka movement rocked the country in a March 2013 coup d’état. Though the Seleka got pushed out by January 2014, post-Seleka carnage erupted when non-Muslims directed their mass retaliation against the country’s Muslim minority. Although many Muslims had not supported the Seleka, most fled as refugees to surrounding countries to escape the atrocities.

Reports written about the widespread violence were just as sickening.

“The news media has portrayed the anti-Muslim aggressors as Christians. That is so not true!”Leanne said. “The Anti-Balaka movement is entirely wrapped in witchcraft and political ambitions. However, every Christian has had to decide whether to support the A-B or give shelter to his Muslim neighbor whose life is in peril.”

Leanne and others continued to apply pressure to government authorities to fully certify the nursing school’s broader program. Bureaucratic red tape made Gamboula’s accreditation process a battle in itself, on top of the severe political unrest threatening everyone’s safety.

In July 2014, Anti-Balaka militiamen took Leanne hostage, along with two colleagues and several others as they were returning to Gamboula from a visit to authorities in the capital, Bangui. An Anti-Balaka fighter had been killed shortly before Leanne and her colleagues arrived at a road-block. The militia used them as insurance to prevent another one of its men being shot. For several hours, the fighters declared it would be a life for a life.

“The Lord helped me to see that I wasn’t so much the captive as someone He had sent to a captive audience, and I was able to talk about the Lord with the men and pray with them before we left,”she said. While she talked, all of the militiamen around her stopped to listen. “I look back on it as a divine appointment. I had the opportunity while sitting with the A-Bs as their hostage to tell them that Jesus’loved them, and therefore, as His child, so did I.”

Two months later, the first class of nurses licensed by the CAR government graduated from Gamboula’s nursing program. It was CAR’s first nursing class to graduate at the diploma level from a private university, and the first time Gamboula nurses had a license to practice in both private and public hospitals.

“God has reminded me so many times that He always accomplishes His plans and purposes,” Leanne said. “The graduation was a joyful testimony to that!”

Gamboula’s graduates are unique not just because they come from a private program but because they get biblical training as well. The new graduates—13 men and 3 women—had jobs waiting for them the day after graduation. Most now work with Doctors Without Borders, an NGO responding to CAR’s health and nutrition crisis, brought on by years of upheaval.

Still nursing dreams of working in CAR, Luke and Leanne recently made a temporary move to Cameroon to serve as hostel parents to 12 teenagers attending Rain Forest International School, including two of their own sons. While the Turks minister in a new place this year, Leanne prays the next Gamboula nursing school director will be a Central African.

“We have accomplished our mission,”said Leanne, some 14 years after arriving in CAR.“We pray that the graduates will be not only very good nurses, but also a strong Christian testimony in a country whose people desperately need the hope of the gospel.”