Pitt-Bradford Nursing Professor, Student Take Part in Medical Mission to Cameroon

By Kimberly Marcott Weinberg
Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing

A University of Pittsburgh at Bradford nursing professor and student left today for a medical mission in Cameroon, West Africa.

Tammy Haley, coordinator of the Bachelor of Science in nursing program at Pitt-Bradford, and Amy Silvis, a nontraditional nursing student from Bradford, will be making the trip with Christina Siewe, a nurse and native of Cameroon.

Siewe and her sister, who is also a nurse, founded the Good Samaritan Clinic in their childhood home in Ekona, a town of about 23,000 in the interior of Cameroon. Siewe has lived in the United States for many years, and she and her husband, Dr. Youmasu Siewe, came to Bradford when Dr. Siewe became the director of the Center for Rural Health Practice at Pitt-Bradford.

The couple joined First Presbyterian Church, which has taken on sponsorship of the clinic.

Haley learned about the medical mission through church member and Pitt-Bradford employee Dr. Holly Spittler.

Soon, the whole nursing program at Pitt-Bradford was energized and raising money and gathering supplies to send on the mission. The Student Nurse Organization raised $500 and helped load a trailer of supplies headed on the mission with Haley, Silvis, Siewe, a second nurse from Siewe’s previous home in Arkansas and Silvis’s younger sister, Rachel Avey.

Through Pitt-Bradford’s Office of Community Engagement, the men’s soccer team and women’s basketball team also donated their muscle power to loading the 40-foot trailer with wheelchairs, medical beds and other donations.

The group will arrive in the port city of Douala, then travel two or three hours overland to Ekona.

Haley said that during the month-long mission, she and the other nurses will spend four days a week at the clinic, mostly providing basic care.

“People there die from acute illnesses that we can treat,” she said. With a year of nursing school behind her, Silvis will be able to help with the care and education as well, Haley said. “She’ll be able to help with basic assessments and help gather information. I think we’re all going to learn a lot.

“I think it’s such an outstanding opportunity to do something meaningful within my field of expertise,” Haley said, adding that in the past, she has enjoyed working in challenging circumstances in a hurricane-ravaged hospital in St. Thomas and in Alaska.

Silvis’s trip is part of a larger journey from corporate computer forensic consultant to what she hopes will be a career as an oncology nurse, having been inspired by her own medical team that helped her beat third-stage melanoma.

Needless to say, she’ll be packing lots of sunscreen and long sleeves for the trip to the equator.

Silvis said she will spend much of her time helping to educate the villagers in simple things that can improve their health, such as oral hygiene and hand-washing.

She said her nursing classmates are envious about her trip. SNO advisor Mary Boser, assistant professor of nursing, said she plans to have Haley and Silvis share experiences, photos and memories of the trip with students and faculty and to have SNO continue its involvement with the clinic.

For Silvis, it’s her first trip out of the country.

“I admit I’m nervous,” she said, “but I’m very excited, and Christina tells us how excited her sister and the villagers are.”

The trip will take place from June 14 to July 14. For more information on Good Samaritan, visit www.goodsamaritancameroon.org.

Pictured, Pitt-Bradford nursing students, including Amy Silvis of Bradford, center, help Christina Siewe, second from left, pack a trailer full of donated items for a medical mission to Siewe’s native Cameroon. The other students helping are, from left, Donna Kavinski of Warren, Doreen Neel of Bradford and Mark Schaut of St. Marys.
Photo courtesy of Pitt-Bradford