Humanitarian calling leads nurse to Sudan
The crowded refugee camps around El Geneina, in the western Darfur region of Sudan, hold more than 200,000 people. Starting this week, El Geneina will also be home to a 26-year-old nurse from Massachusetts General Hospital -- Grace Deveney, a Cohasset native who will spend the next nine months helping children and new mothers who have fled their villages while a civil war devastates their country.
"I'm not quite sure what I'm walking into," said Deveney.
Deveney is this year's recipient of the Durant Fellowship for Refugee Medicine, a two-year-old award named for the late Dr. Thomas Durant, an MGH doctor who grew up in Dorchester and spent 35 years providing aid in some of most troubled parts of the globe. Grace is the first nurse to be awarded the fellowship; last year, it went to a doctor who joined a relief mission in Thailand.
When she arrives in Sudan, Deveney will join the team of Concern Worldwide in the Darfur region, where the central government in Khartoum is accused of arming bands of nomadic Arab militiamen and coordinating bombing raids on ethnic African farming villages. The militias are accused of killing up to 50,000 people, systematically looting and raping terrified villagers, and forcing more than 1.5 million to flee their homes. A United Nations official this year called the Sudanese situation the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
For Deveney, the road into that disaster began in Belize on a class trip during her senior year in high school. She was introduced to a couple that ran a small health clinic there. Struck by the number of people they were able to help, she said, she knew that eventually she would find a place where her own skills could make a similar impact.
The contrast with MGH, one of the best-equipped hospitals in the world, could not be more stark.
"You take all of your nursing skills with you," she said. "The hardest part about going over there is that I don't think you have access to a lot of the medications that you would normally have access to here. So you need to be a little bit of a MacGyver."
When she goes, a few keepsakes will go with her: a wooden necklace to remind her of her trip to Peru with her two sisters, and a tiny yellow arrow pinned to her watchband to bring back memories of her hike across Spain with her younger brother.
"My family has been so brave about the whole thing," said Deveney.
She will also wear something else: A simple orange plastic bracelet. Matching orange bracelets will be on the wrists of 60 people back in Boston, Deveney's co-workers on the 11th floor of MGH's Gray/Bigelow building. After they learned Deveney had won the Durant award, the nurses and secretaries on the floor clipped pedometers to their shirts for a month and solicited donations based on how many miles they logged inside the hospital -- eventually hustling their way to an $1,100 contribution to the fellowship. The bracelets will remain on their wrists until she is safely back.
Meanwhile, Deveney faces nine months of uncertainty.
"I'm going to be pulled into wherever they need me most," said Deveney, who spent a week training in Dublin. "I'm looking at it like I'm an extra pair of hands, I have some skills to offer, and I am going to go in and do the best I can."
A lifelong Red Sox fan, Deveney spent her last night before leaving Boston among the Fenway faithful in the raucous right-field roof seats. She was there with her 28-year-old sister, Beth, who said that as soon as Grace first started talking about applying for the fellowship, she knew she was going to need to find a new roommate.
"It's something to be proud of," she said of her sister's upcoming time in Darfur. "But I was proud of Grace before the fellowship. She doesn't need to prove anything."
