Volunteering inspired me to be a Nurse!
www.learntoliveglobal.org
It all began with a phone call.
When I first talked to Yanti, a woman I’d never met, she asked me over the phone if I wanted to go with her to a place I’d never even seen on a map, to film an organization I’d never heard of. The unrelenting enthusiasm in her voice had me to saying yes before I even knew what I was volunteering for. I was as excited as she was from that first phone call to when I actually met her in person for the first time on the ground in Sapa, North Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2012. I had just flown 30 hours to arrive 2 hours after she had just helped deliver a baby.
Working with LearnToLive is a human experience I share with the world through film and photography that I have captured in the remote village clinics run by the LTL clinicians. On the first trip, I was inspired daily by this crew of medical professionals doing everything they could to improve the health and well being of each patient they saw, taking time not only to bandage their wounds, but to ask about their living conditions, their families, and their lives. To say that my time with LearnToLive was an amazing experience would be putting it lightly.
In my pre-LTL life, never had I been witness to such waves of compassion, been so moved while filming, or found myself in the midst of so many dedicated individuals. As a documentary film maker, it is my job to follow my subjects and find the story. After volunteering with LearnToLive, I came back with so much more. A renewed sense of optimism for the human condition and the knowledge that goals of this nature are achievable being just a few of the things I gained from the trip. I can say with the utmost confidence that LearnToLive has made a real change in peoples’ lives, not only in the patients’ lives, but the volunteers and mine as well.
Since that first trip I have grown from Artist in Residence to Creative Director, a position which is a full time unpaid volunteer job. In 2014, so inspired by the doctors and nurses I've worked so closely with, I returned to university for a second degree – this time in nursing. Through volunteering, I discovered that I wanted to be the one to create change in people's lives, to improve their health, and give them the opportunity to live long, healthy, and happy lives. By this time in 2016, I will be a registered nurse and volunteering annually with LearnToLive not only as a filmmaker, but as a health professional as well.
To say volunteering with LearnToLive changed by life is a massive understatement, especially when you consider that I met the man that just became my husband on the second Indonesian Health Initiative in 2013!
Review from #MyGivingStory