Georgia Southern nursing professor contributes to award-winning textbook
American Journal of Nursing (AJN) recently honored the textbook Global Health Nursing: Narratives from the Field with a Book of the Year award for 2015. Carole Bennett, Ph.D., assistant professor of nursing at Georgia Southern, contributed a chapter to this award-winning book — the first of its kind in which readers hear the voices and stories of nurses working all over the world.
Bennett’s chapter, “Resilience and Recovery: Mental Health Care in Post-Conflict Rwanda” is a harrowing account of her work in a country torn apart by genocide.
“I had been assigned to work at Ndera Hospital, the only psychiatric hospital in Rwanda, high on a hill on the outskirts of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda,” she wrote. “As we came through the gates, I saw a series of brightly painted one story stucco buildings connected by long covered walkways. The buildings were surrounded by well kept African gardens with flowering trees and swarms of brightly colored sunbirds. It looked welcoming, even comforting. But it wasn’t long before cries and shrieks were heard from patients too ill to be calmed even in this serene place.”
The reviewers at AJN said the textbook read more like a travelog which made the reader feel a “part of each contributor’s diverse journey.” Bennett says this is the true strength of this landmark book, in which nurses from all over the world were able to write from their heart and share their intimate experiences from the field.
“Undergraduate nursing students are very interested in global health and working in a third world country,” she said. “This book is a nice transition, allowing students to read directly about other nurses’ experiences.”
While in Rwanda, Bennett worked in refugee camps and developed screening tools that could be used on the refugees living there to determine their mental health status and needs. She taught courses in psychiatric nursing at the University in Kigali, wrote electronic textbooks and developed standards for mental health care for the country.
What affected her most, however, were the stories of the people and their experiences.
“The patients would look at Manuel as he would interpret my questions to them, in their language Kinyarwanda with Swahili and French thrown in here and there,” she wrote. “But once they began to answer the questions about what had happened to them during the genocide, they looked directly at me with searing intensity. While I couldn’t understand their words, until he interpreted for me, I could see they told their story with great feeling and were eager to have the opportunity to talk about their life. They never stammered or hesitated. The story spilled out in a steady stream as though they had just held it in too long and once started no longer could hold it back.”
In her current research at Georgia Southern, Bennett focuses on racism in nursing, particularly with a historic perspective.
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