Lindsay Schultz explains how Haiti has validated her career
While in Haiti as part of Team Broken Earth, Lindsay Schultz participated in treatment plans that saved the lives of children and babies that would have had little chance of survival without the efforts of Canada’s volunteers. She remembers watching one tiny patient who had been born premature at 30 weeks gestation, leave the hospital. “I showed the mom how to feed the baby with a tube once she was home, and off they went,” she says. It is moments like that when Schultz is sure she made the right decision to become a nurse. “I’m very grateful I had an opportunity to do this. What they have built down there with so few resources is amazing. I’m proud I was able to go down and help with it.”

Even with gunshots ringing out during the night and armed guards surrounding the compound, Schultz says she was grateful for every minute she spent in Haiti. “I didn’t take much notice of those things because my attention was focused on the patients,” she says.

Schultz has been an RN since 2011, working first at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and now as a pediatric nurse in the emergency room at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax. Like others in her profession, she is driven by a desire to help. In April of this year that drive led her to Haiti—where hospitals struggle along without much basic equipment and supplies, and armed guards are necessary to escort volunteers to dinner each evening. The conditions didn’t discourage her in the slightest, in fact, they underscored the need for such missions and she plans to go again next year.

“International travel was one of the reasons I went into nursing,” says Shultz, who made her first trip to a developing country when she was still a nursing student. “The more I do things like this, the more I love it and want to continue doing it.”