Five strangers from across South-western Ontario met together here at St. Matthias Church on a warm winter day in January.
What brings them together? They have a passion and urge to make a difference.
Marion Willms, of Rockwood, is leading a team of nurses to war torn El Salvador to help people in remote areas.
The nursing group from Canada will go after a long civil war that disrupted the country and left people with poor healthcare options.
The group will be working with SalvAide, a non-profit organization, and will be going on an intensive delegation to El Salvador in February.
SalvAide is a registered Canadian charitable organization composed of a network of communities and supporters in Canada dedicated to fostering social and economic development in El Salvador since 1985.
SalvAide works to raise awareness among Canadian people about El Salvador, as well as its history, culture, and people, and the challenges they currently face.
The group builds social and economic justice and development in El Salvador through education. It sends delegations to El Salvador, has internships, speaking tours, Newsletters, urgent actions, fundraising, support for Salvadoran partner organizations, and by various development projects.
El Salvador is the smallest Spanish-speaking nation in the Western Hemisphere. It is on the Pacific coast of Central America, and has Guatemala to the west and Honduras to the north and east. The Gulf of Fonseca separates El Salvador from Nicaragua on the southeast.
Willms said the SalvAide mission is to build social and economic justice, democracy and dignity with the people of El Salvador.
The nursing group will be running medical clinics in two remote rural areas in El Salvador. The people there have been without access to medical care for over two years.
“We plan on sharing health promotion ideas with the community and exploring the many factors threatening the health of Salvadorians,” said Willms.
She is leading the team and will focus on the children. The villagers do not have access to safe drinking water and often fall victim to intestinal parasites. She will help de-parasite the children in the community. She will also screen children for malnutrition and provide vitamins for them.
Carol Keith is a dialysis Registered Nurse at Soldiers Memorial Hospital, in Orillia. She will share her knowledge about diabetic education and screen the villagers for vision problems and leg ulcers that diabetics are prone to.
She will also work with the people and help them develop a healthy diabetic diet based on foods accessible to them.
Ellen Pemberton is a midwife working in a practice in Georgetown and Mississauga. She will work with health promoters in the village to educate them about healthy pregnancies, well babies, and safe deliveries.
El Salvador has one of the highest infant mortality rate in Central America.
Kristel Guthrie is a post political science degree, and a first year nursing student at the University of Toronto, as we;; as an avid traveller.
She has a keen interest in Third World nursing and much to offer. She plans on to assess the villagers and practice her clinical skills.
Jennifer Hicke is an emergency room Registered Nurse working at the London Health Sciences in London.
She is going to focus on sexual health and the barriers that the people of El Salvador encounter.
For Willms, it is not the first time she has helped others in this manner. She graduated as a nurse in 1998 and spent two years in Nunavut. She also worked as a volunteer in Mississippi at Long Beach after Hurricane Katrina hit. She said she was just “down the coast from New Orleans.
Willms said the group is hoping to collect donations of the many things they need in order to run clinics in the remote areas.
“We are looking for over the counter medications (vitamins infant, child and adult, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, gauze, tensor, band-aids, condoms etc…).”
Anyone interested in helping the group make a difference in El Salvador can make a donation or learn about the delegation by contacting Willms at mwillms@cogeco.ca before Feb. 9.
