Baccalauréat · Série D · Anglais — 2019

Text — The nurse who stayed

When Salimata Ouédraogo finished her training in 2011, everybody expected her to look for a post in Ouagadougou. That is what her class did. Of the twenty-two students who graduated with her, nineteen found positions in the capital within a year.

She chose a health centre in a village of eight hundred people, four hours from the nearest tarred road. There was no electricity, no ambulance and no second nurse. During the rainy season, the track was often impassable for days.

People ask her why. She does not give the answer they expect. « It was not sacrifice », she says. « In the capital I would have been the tenth nurse in a building full of doctors. Here I am the health system. When I improve something, it changes eight hundred lives. Nowhere else could a woman of twenty-four have that. »

In eight years she has trained twelve community volunteers, organised a system in which motorcycles take pregnant women to the district hospital, and reduced infant deaths in her area by more than half. The centre now has solar panels, paid for by the village itself.

Last year she was offered a post in the capital, with a better salary. She refused. « I have not finished », she said.