Las Vegas Valley students helping treat El Salvador poor

Annie Flanzraich

Friday, July 15, 2005 | 3:44 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 16-17, 2005

Providing medical care to impoverished people isn't just a way to get clinical credit for four Nevada State College nursing students -- it's a chance to give back to the global community.

"You have an opportunity to make a difference (as a nurse)," said Joe Jacquemoud, a 38-year-old Nevada State College at Henderson student, who left Friday morning for El Salvador with three of his classmates. "The question is, 'What are you going to do with it?' "

The group will return to the United States on July 24.

Jacquemoud heard about the opportunity through the Community Lutheran Church, where he is a member. The pastor and founder of the church, Ray Christenson was one of the pioneers who went to the Central American country to build churches and provide medical care in 1994.

While this year will be Christenson's last time to go to El Salvador (he is retiring), it will be the first time nursing students participate in the program.

The students' professor, Wally J. Henkelman, worked with them to have the trip approved for clinical credit after Jacquemoud proposed the idea.

"This is exciting for the faculty," Henkelman said. "We try to teach the students not only to care about their patients but also about the community."

For Hester Kerksiek, a 22-year-old nursing student, it's an opportunity to learn how to practice medicine without modern conveniences.

"I think it's important for us to practice health care without all of our modern equipment, advanced machines and diagnostic tests," Kerksiek said. "When you're out in the field like that, all we have is our stethoscope and our mind."

Kerksiek, Jacquemoud and two other nursing students, Jaemee Wenthe, 26, and Lance Graczyk, 28, will be supervised by a local retired cardiologist, Dr. John Bowers Sr., on their trip.

Bowers said he went to El Salvador with the church two years ago to administer medical care. When he was there he mostly ministered to sick children and helped prescribe eyeware for villagers, he said.

"I think the big experience is to see what medicine is really like in the Third World," Bowers said.

The group is staying in San Salvador, the capital of the country, and will travel about an hour each day to go to different villages.

Besides a medical unit, a construction group will work on building offices for the organizers of the Lutheran Church in El Salvador. It's a project they began five years ago but have not been able to finish because the construction crews have been called to different projects, Christenson said.

The students, along with Bowers and registered nurses, will act as a triage unit, and make preliminary diagnoses for those villagers who come in for help.

"They (the villagers) like to be reassured," Bowers said about his last visit to El Salvador. "We checked over a lot of healthy people. Mostly what we saw were, I would say, people who considered this a good social outing."

Wenthe said she believes going to El Salvador will be an eye-opening experience.

"It's a very humbling experience," she said. "You come back with a totally different perspective of exactly how spoiled we are in America."

The students shouldn't be in much danger while they are in El Salvador because as Americans they are better protected, Christenson said.

However, the students already have a plan if they are "kidnapped and ransacked," Wenthe said.

"We just have to stick together."

All four students brushed off possible danger with humor. For them the experience is about the villagers.

"This is an oppressed people; everyone is dirt poor," Jacquemoud said. "We're going to give help to people."

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