I am not one for making New Year’s resolutions. I am a firm believer that one should constantly strive to better oneself – not only for a week or so at the beginning of January.
There are times, however, when I find myself in someone’s company, and I quite honestly feel humbled by their good work. Sheila Donaghy is one such person. From Barnasrahy, Sheila attended Knocknarea National School, later joining us in Mrs Cooke’s class at ‘The Model’, sharing a desk with ‘yours truly’. I recently chatted to Sheila over a cup of coffee at Fiddler’s Creek.
My jaw dropped steadily throughout the conversation as I attempted to absorb Sheila’s mind-blowing auto-biography. So much water under the bridge, since I had presented her proudly with a ‘Smoker’s Own’ keyring, for Valentine’s Day at the age of 8.
After leaving Sligo Grammar, Sheila trained under the old Irish matron system at Sligo General Hospital. Her’s was a very ‘hands-on’ training, alternating her School of Nursing classroom studies with anything from ward-duty to bed-pan cleaning.
Living nextdoor to Verdon’s Pub on The Mall, Sheila was not a party animal, but rather a quiet conscientious student, fulfilling her childhood dream of nursing. As a young R.G.N., Sheila went on to train as a midwife in Scotland, spending two years as a midwife in the Isle of Man.
Theresa McLoughlin, a student friend from Arigna, suggested travelling together on a short nursing contract abroad. Before long, the two girls found themselves in at the deep end, working in Romania with children who were dying of H.I.V. and Aids. Sheila later managed a Romanian Children’s Hospice for three years. A year after the fall of the Ceaucescu regime, it had been suggested by her employers that she take up drinking and smoking to get her through the contract, but it was Sheila’s “devout faith and trust under God’s guiding hand” which was to see her through this and all her following assignments abroad.
A major turning point came when Sheila witnessed the dead body of a young gypsy boy being wrapped in his bed sheet, and then flung, in a most undignified way into an incinerator. Sheila believed that “that boy deserved more in life, and in death.”
In 1994, Sheila’s long association with ‘World Vision’ began when she was employed as a post-genocide health worker to Rwanda. Mrs Gallagher’s French verb and grammar drilling at Sligo Grammar had stood Sheila in good stead for her work in these French-speaking African nations. There, Sheila worked in Unaccompanied Children’s Centres, providing health, nutrition and relative-tracing, for children who were either orphans, or had been separated from their families. Each centre housed up to 300 children, who had been extracted from ‘Internally Displaced People Camps’, which often had anything up to 120,000 people.
A Rwandese lady, having discovered Sheila’s nationality, felt sorry for Sheila coming from a land ravaged by war for almost 30 years. “Ours has only lasted three months”, she said. Mounds of earth signified mass graves, the smell of death pervaded the air, and the young Sligo nurse slept at night in her tent, with her headphones on, in order to block out the clamour of gunfire and grenade attacks.
In 1997, Sheila was sent to Honduras, as a health worker and a trainer for traditional village midwives. She often had to walk anything up to ten hours to the remote villages. One day, on her way to the city to buy essential equipment, the weather turned for the worse. Seconds after her bus crossed a ramshackle bridge, a mudslide washed the bridge away. ‘Hurricane Mitch’ had arrived, and Sheila’s work in Honduras then became divided, to include disaster-relief work.
Sheila moved on to witness racism at its worst amongst the Roma populations of Montenegro, to work in healthcare in Uganda, to attempt to help the ‘women behind the veil’ in sexist, war-torn, drought-ridden Afghanistan, to set up feeding centres in the rebel-ruled East Democratic Republic of Congo, and most recently in Iraq.
Sheila is at present also studying for an MSC in Disaster Relief Healthcare. A programme close to Sheila’s heart is the Child Sponsorship Scheme, of which 90 per cent of the total income goes directly overseas. Somehow, New Year’s resolutions seem somewhat trivial.
