Emily Parker spoke with author and nurse Sheila Leech, about her new book 'God Knows What I'm Doing Here,' and her adventurous life going around the world nursing people in places like Ecuador, Ghana, and in the aftermath of natural disasters in Haiti, Indonesia and Pakistan and during war in Lebanon.

Emily: In the book you describe yourself as a 'missionary nurse'. How would you define the term and what does that mean to you?

Sheila: Being a missionary is just being a Jesus follower and trying to do the things that Jesus did and incorporating that aspect of my faith into my life and the way I behave. So being a missionary nurse means I try to do things in a way that would please God in my nursing practice, also recognising that people are not just bodies.

As nurses, quite often, we focus on the physical needs that people have. When they're sick we come alongside them and obviously that's what we are trained to do, but there's the whole emotional and spiritual aspects of being a person. As a missionary nurse we're more aware of some of the issues people are dealing with that are affecting their health, and they can be spiritual issues. They can be broken relationship issues. So my approach to nursing comes very much through that lens of relationship with God.

Emily: In recent years you've worked in some of the major natural disaster zones such as Haiti. What was that like?

Sheila: It was devastating. By the time the Haiti earthquake happened, we'd served in a number of different natural disasters in Indonesia and Pakistan and the war situation in Lebanon. I don't think any of us in the team were prepared for what we saw in Haiti.

We were able to get to Haiti fairly quickly, because we partner with Samaritans Purse. We were in Ecuador and Ecuador and Haiti are pretty close to each other, so we were able to get there very quickly. We were working in the Baptist Mission Hospital there in Port au Prince.

As we walked onto that campus, the sheer number of severely injured people was just overwhelming and shocking. There were people everywhere and each one was more injured than the one before.

We started to do rounds and try to get our heads around making an operating list of who needed help first and more and more people came. It was totally overwhelming. Finally, we made one operating theatre out of two, because they were not properly equipped, and we went into theatre and practically lived there for the next week or ten days, just doing what we could for people. It was really overwhelming.

Haiti

Emily: In those major natural disaster zones, where have you seen God?

Sheila: God shows up pretty well always. I think in Haiti He showed up more than we'd noticed in other places; in small things, which were actually big things.

We were running out of water. The hospital was a very small hospital and normally just sustained a small number of patients and staff that lived around. It was overwhelmed by hundreds of people, not just in the hospital, but in the grounds. People were finding refuge in the area and so we were running out of water. Then suddenly someone appeared with these massive water filters, about the size of a room. They didn't know how to fix them and we didn't have a water source to purify. We had taken an engineer with us, a guy from the UK, and he was able to hook up the water filter and drain a duck pond and run it through the filter and give everybody clean water.

We were about to run out of diesel. We were running on generators and there was no electricity in the city at all. We were down to our last gallon of diesel and we said we were going to have to stop the operating list, because we couldn't risk the loss of electricity through the generator because we've run out of diesel, in mid-surgery. We said we were going have to stop and suspend it, but there were all these people waiting. This tanker just showed up from nowhere. Nowhere! We prayed about it, we bring it to God, and it's like, don't you know that we are running out, we are going to have to shut down. We can't start another surgery, we're done for today unless you intervene! Then this tanker just showed up and filled up all the oil tanks with diesel and we could start again and carry on.

Supplies arrived from who knows where. The American army suddenly came up and they said they had a whole bunch of patients, can we bring them? We had a German surgeon with us and he said, "No! You do not bring any more patients until you bring us supplies." The next thing, a big truck comes up and they bring us all the things that we need for the operating theatre and another truck comes up with patients. Time after time God showed up in those ways in provision.

We were working alongside Samaritan's Purse who had pastors, and they were visiting the patients and able to pray with people and comfort people and there were clear evidences of people that had been really steeped in voodoo, turning to the living God.