Motivation to join the ADF
I was living in Newcastle. My father was in the air force, so we moved around a lot when I was growing up, but we more or less settled in Newcastle. I was working as a registered nurse at a local hospital there. And basically, the desire to join up a service had been something that I'd wanted to do for a long time. And the conditions were right at a certain time for me to apply to join up at one of the services.
I did actually want to join the air force, but they weren't taking nursing officers at the time, nor were the Navy. So I went into the army. I was living and working in Newcastle before I joined up ..So I had joined the army reserve in 1988 as a musician, even though I couldn't really play my instrument very well. I was playing alto sax. But basically, there was an ad in the paper with the local army reserve band wanting musicians and I went along with my sister who can actually play. I was teaching myself the alto sax. So I was able to join up at that stage and be a musician in the army reserve for a couple of years.
So I had an understanding probably more of the army than I did of the air force when I was making the decision to join up… and I think I'd made a decision that I wanted to serve at some stage, because Dad was in the air force and I can certainly remember the moment where I felt I wanted to join up. Because there were some aspects of growing up in the services that I enjoyed, some that I didn't…I actually thought, yes, I do want to join up and I did look into say jobs in the air force where what they could train me to be.
I hadn't sort of really put the nursing and the service together. Even when I was in the band, I hadn't really put that together. And then I think it's just at some stage I realised, "Hey, I'm a nurse. I can join up as an officer," which is something that I did want to do. And so it kind of came together that way, more indirectly than it seems that it should have been, I guess.
6 Camp Hospital
First unit I was in, it underwent three name changes whilst I was there in two years' time, but I was posted into a unit called 6 Camp Hospital, which was a small medical centre in Albury–Wodonga at Latchford Barracks. It was at a place called Bonegilla.
And at that stage they had army TAFE there, so they were training all our apprentices. And we also looked after the wide training area there. But it was an inpatient facility. Our main patients were the trainees, the apprentices. It was a very small unit. We probably had about seven nurses and at least two of them were male.
Somewhere in Africa
At that time I was working, I was a nursing officer at 1 Field Hospital in Sydney. It no longer exists. And I think at the time nurses at that unit were either in the ward side of the house or in the field side of the house. And I had just moved over, I think, to the field side of the unit. And basically I was able to tick, I guess, all the boxes at that stage that I had the profession they were wanting, I was fit. I was ready to deploy basically.
I don't know what the criteria outside of those parameters was... Prior to the genocide happening, I would've known the capital at some stage because I knew all the capitals of the world when I was in year seven. I had a vague... Well, I knew it was in Africa. That was probably the extent of my knowledge on Rwanda though.
Arrival in Kigali
We were put into chalks, and I was in a chalk with a couple of other nursing officer colleagues. And we left from Townsville. We're in a C-5 Galaxy, so it was a massive plane. And so we took off from Townsville, and I remember being excited, but sort of anxious about, nervous about what I was going to be encountering when I got to Rwanda. But the flight was fine.
We went via a place called Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian ocean. So that was just a stopover, a fuel stop and a dinner stop. But that was quite remarkable to go via that place. And I've since been back there on another trip home from another overseas trip with the military. And then arriving in Kigali. My recollection is we arrived quite late at night. We had to stay at the airport because there was a curfew on.
The airport, every window had been broken. There was a glass container that had Digit, Diane Fossey's famous gorilla in it. That was all blown up. So yes, we had to stay the night at the airport. I remember there was really loud music playing. I think the American troops were securing the airport. Loud music was playing all night while we were trying to sleep, just awaiting the next day basically.
Accommodation
I was pretty happy with our quarters actually. Because we moved, we were accommodated in an ex-military barracks basically. And out of about 300 in our contingent, about 30 were women. So women and senior NCOs and were given their own room basically. And the rooms have damage to certain degrees. But to have your own room was pretty well a luxury, as far as I'm concerned.
Any sort of hard standing's a luxury. So had our own rooms. They did actually have bathrooms in them, but the shower maybe worked once or twice whilst I was there. But we had our room and we had our basic sleeping bag and whatever else we were able to carry with us. But as in the first couple of weeks, we started to get creature comforts. So we got a stretcher, we got a pillow.
So all these things evolved over time. And we put up mosquito nets, of course. But it had a little desk in the room and there was a cupboard to put things into. So as far as our accommodation was concerned, that was fine. We're on a balcony. We saw the sunrise, I think, which was quite spectacular. So I was actually quite happy with the accommodation.
"The food was okay"
We had our own cooks and they had a kitchen. But for the first couple of weeks, at least I recall eating ration packs. So it was our stock standard ration packs. And there was some exchange of ration packs. So sometimes we got French ration packs or American ration packs. It was dependent on who you met or that sort of thing.
There was that exchange going on. So it was always exciting to get a ration pack from a different nation. But I do recall having ration packs for a lot of the time, at least initially. And then when our cooks got up to speed, it was hot boxes for me because where our barracks were, our barracks were where our sleeping quarters were, where our messes were, where the kitchens, where the operations areas were. And then the hospital was around the corner.
So I worked six days a week, so most of my meals were delivered in hot boxes. We did have a dining room, but because I worked at the hospital, we had our meals over there. So it was a lot of hot boxes, so hot boxes everything sort of mixes around with everything else in the hot box. So it's not my favourite way of eating, but that's how it was.
The food was okay. I'm not a foodie, so it's not a big war winner for me, so to speak. And then when I did have my day off, on your day off you could eat in the dining room. But my day off was on a Sunday, usually, and the cooks had their day off on a Sunday. So I had ration packs on a Sunday.
A typical day
So I think I would've woken up at about 6:00, met up at the top gates for a security picket to walk myself and my colleagues to the hospital, which was just around the corner. We'd had our Steyrs on us. Arrive at the hospital, unload the Steyrs, put that away somewhere safe. And then basically more or less like any other day on a hospital ward, you get handed over from the night staff. So your team's there with you.
Depending on how much staff was there, my role might be as in charge nurse or it might be just helping out with everybody else. So it was basically supervising medics, doing ward rounds with doctors, medication rounds, a lot of supervision, writing reports, making sure we had the equipment we needed to do the job. So it was a very practical hands-on job that I had. Every so often., I can't remember exactly how often it was, but we'd be on a resus call team. And that was probably about once a week or so.
So if there was a resus, someone coming in needing resuscitation, then you would divert to the resus bay and help out. I was a ward nursing officer. Where I worked, the hospital had a small ICU area. Then it had a medical surgical ward. So it was a mixed ward and it was adult and paediatric as well. So I was basically a general ward nursing officer. That's how I'd describe what I did there.
UN and humanitarian work
We were setup to mainly look after UN troops. There was 5,500, I think, supporting the UN too at that stage. So that was our primary role. But my recollection is that we did look after the troops, but most of the time, they were only very short stays.
So a lot of our work was humanitarian, looking after Rwandan citizens who'd, my recollection, a lot of them had had trauma from standing on landmines or something like that. So that's my enduring memory of a lot of what I did over there.
Butare and Kibeho
I did a couple of day trips to some towns, whose name escapes me. But the main place that I went to was I was stationed at a place called Butare in the southwest for possibly up to a month, where we would go to the displaced person's camp Kibeho and do some humanitarian work there. We basically would set up a clinic and we would have thousands of people lined up to see us, to see what we could do to help out them or their families.
We were limited with what we could do though. I guess for me, a lot of my concerns would centre on the clinical aspects of what I did, because that was my focus. But I felt when I was going down to Butare to work in the displaced person's camps, I felt quite anxious and quite unsure of myself. And I recall growing up and seeing images of aid workers on the TV helping out in Africa, and I used to think that they were amazing people, what they were doing. But I just felt incredibly inadequate working in these displaced persons camps. And I tried to find out any information that I could to help me to do something worthwhile and valuable in these camps.
And we did have these World Health protocols. They were very basic, very short about what we could do in certain situations, but it was very limited as to what we could actually do for these people. And a lot of it was giving out soap or giving out worming treatments. We couldn't do a lot more than that, but we used to get a lot of people to the tents just trying to do whatever we could for them. In a way, giving them, say, soap would, would be something, maybe not so much a placebo, but something better than nothing.
And at the end of the day, if they wanted to, they could on-sell the soap or what have you. But it seemed to me at the time when I was looking up say worms and a cough could be worms or this or that could be worms, anything could be worms, so you might at least give them worming treatment.
Recreation and contact with home
I read a lot of books and I wrote a lot of letters. But we had the mess situation there, so you could always go up to the mess after work and socialise. Sometimes didn't do that every day of the week, we did have mess functions. We also had R and R, so there were two periods of R and R where we could go to, most of us went to Nairobi or Mombasa or somewhere like that for a couple of days. And we did get two weeks off during our time there, where you could go home or you could go anywhere in the world that you wanted to basically. And the Sunday was my day off generally.
That was a day where you can do washing and things like that. We could go to a local cafe, so that was always good to get out there. We occasionally did some fun runs. We occasionally did socialising with other contingents, the Indian contingent, British contingent, Canadian contingent. So there's always something to do. And I guess, because I didn't have a lot of downtime, even if you didn't do a lot on your day off, that was okay …
Mail came in a couple of days a week. I did a lot of letter writing. When I was on night duty, which I did a lot of night duty, I wrote a couple of letters probably every night. So I was sent off a lot of letters in the hope that I would get a lot of letters back and parcels and things like that. So mail arrived about every couple of days… we had a phone set up i in the barracks, but it was quite expensive to phone home. We'd would buy the old phone cards and they didn't last very long. So it was quite expensive to phone home, but I did it on a regular basis.
Realising the obvious
You go through of the streets, everything bombed out. And people being injured by landmines that might have been buried during that time, and the ongoing violence and certainly seeing people injured with machetes and things like that, as I said, but that's the ongoing. Couple of things that stand out for me is that one day I was at a clinic outside of Kigali and somebody stumbled across a body.
Don't know how long that body had been there for or the circumstances, but I think we all assumed that, that body had been there from the genocide. And I don't know what we actually did, but we saw the body. I don't know if somebody reported it to somebody senior, but that was probably one of the few physical reminders of what had gone on like that.
I didn't see other mass graves or any other human remains like that. But I guess the thing that did confront me, was I was at an orphanage one day immunising. And I was looking at the children's records and they would say... And I appreciated I was in an orphanage, so obviously these children didn't have parents.
But it wasn't until I was looking at several of their records where it said, "Mom died April '94, dad died April '94." So I'd see that and I'd see something, I'd see something else. And then it hit me, it was the obvious thing that hit me. But it just hit me that these children had all been orphaned because of the genocide. And incredibly sad to, as I said, to realise the obvious.
Suffering children
A lot of the way I got through Rwanda, I think was not having my own children. Because I can't imagine being there and seeing children who'd been were either sick from... Not so much, we didn't see a lot of sickness. It was more trauma. But to see children and being a mum, I honestly don't know if I could've done the job in that circumstance.
I know plenty of other mums and dads. There were lots of dads over there, lots and lots of dads. And I don't really think I perhaps understood it from their point of view. But to see kids suffering, to see anybody suffering is terrible. But seeing children suffering is a lot harder from my point of view.
Debriefs and getting on with the job
We had a debrief over there, but I recall it just being in a circle of people. And a lot of the time some people will offer things, other people won't. I guess at the time when we were having the debrief, even though I'd had a couple of traumatic experiences, sometimes it's not the right place to talk. And maybe the debriefing should have happened two months ago, not when we just about to go home.
So there was that opportunity for debriefing, but I didn't really have much to offer to that or nothing I really wanted to share in a group situation. And we did have some psychological debriefing when we got home. So it's obviously so much better now what's offered. Certainly , whilst we were there, there was mainly my nursing colleagues, there were a couple that I was very, very close to.
One of them actually got married whilst we were there in Kenya. So that was wonderful to be involved in that. Certainly, my colleagues on the ward and the Senior Nursing Officer, Major Beverly Wright as she was then. So there were people to go to. The Padre as well. But a lot of the time, I think you just got on with the job.
I think if there was somebody I needed to talk to, I could find somebody. Sometimes it's not necessarily a medical colleague…I think I wrote a lot in letters home. I did keep a diary, but my diary was more what we did. Unfortunately it didn't go into my feelings about certain things. So I think perhaps letters I wrote home would've been more illustrative of that. But I don't recall needing a lot of support. Yeah. Because I think when things happen, unless you get it there and then, for me at that time, then you just have to deal with it and move on.
Making a difference and a feeling of inadequacy
The inadequacy played on my mind and changed my life actually. So I feel that when I was there, we did a lot of humanitarian work. And there were people saying, "Oh, look, we are just putting a band aid on it and we're not really making a big difference."
But I guess I just felt the fact that we were there, we were part of the UN, our presence should enable something positive to come out of this. And I didn't know what that was. But I just felt that we were here, we made a difference to a lot of people's lives, some in a lot more ways than others, like saving lives. But I think we gave a lot of hope as in not just my contingent, but the UN's presence there.
I know that they'd been let down by the UN before, but I saw the fact that we were there as a good thing. As I said, I think we changed some people's lives for the positive in a big way. We can only do so much, but I look on it as a worthwhile what we did there.
A life defining moment
I was working one day down in the displaced person's camps, and I was with the doctor. And just this ongoing feeling of inadequacy. And I was looking at the doctor and I just felt that he knew what he could do and he knew the limits of what he could do. I felt that I wanted to be able to do more and I felt that he was able to do more.
He knew more than I did. And it was in that moment that I thought, "I've got to become a doctor." And so that seed was planted on a specific day when I was down in the displaced person's camps….And it was because of that particular moment. And so that has changed my life and brought about so many different opportunities and a lot of satisfaction.
But I was also looking after a lot of babies and nursing mothers there as well and I had no idea about babies or mums or things like that. I was involved in a rather horrific obstetric event whilst I was there. And maybe if I was a midwife, I couldn't have changed the outcome, but I could have perhaps made a little bit better for the mum. So I became a midwife after getting out of the regular army and training up to be a midwife before I became a doctor.
Some significant people
Major Beverly Wright, who was our senior nursing officer. She's a great lady. And I think she was the perfect person for that job. Very, very grounded, very approachable. The ward boss was Captain Judith Spence, who I have a lot of regard for.
So it was having some good people like that there. Trevor Gardner was the doctor who inspired me to become a doctor. I don't think he was probably aware of how significant my interactions with him were. And the Commander Pat McIntosh. I enjoyed hid command. I didn't have a lot to do with him, but I felt very safe over there being with him.
Rwanda's recovery
I'm certainly aware that the country has become a success story and here's been a lot of healing within the nation where people have been able... I don't know how they can do it, but they're moving together towards the future. And they've got a good economy.
It's not a utopia or anything like that, but it's amazing what they've achieved post such a horrific event. I've read a lot of books on Rwanda. Sometimes the more I know the less I understand it. Sometimes when I go to speak about Rwanda at various events, I just can't understand why this happened. And it gets distressing to think about it. If I think about it, I get distressed and I can cry. Trying to keep it together now, but it's just hard to make any sense of, I guess.
