Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9505020008
SECTION: NURSES PAGE: N-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEWART MACINNIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Organizing and leading a medical mission to Jamaica later this month is just the latest volunteer effort for Jean Broyles, coordinator of physician services at Lewis-Gale Hospital. Jean Shelor, a psychiatric nursing supervisor at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, recently returned from a volunteer stint with the Red Cross helping flood victims in California.
In addition to participating in a number of church-sponsored missions, Broyles also volunteers time to the Bradley Free Clinic, is a past president and is now health committee chairman for the Roanoke Valley Breakfast Lions Club, and is on the volunteer committee for the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
"It's what I choose to do," she says. "You get done what you want to. I find my energy revives when I leave work and do these other things."
Her current challenge is the Jamaican medical mission, which departs May 27th. She organized the 15-person team, which includes three physicians, an optometrist, other medical professionals and non-medical people. It has fallen to her to make all the logistical and travel arrangements, make sure passports are in order and ensure the members have the proper vaccinations.
The mission is the first medical mission being sent out by the Roanoke District United Methodist Church Volunteer Mission Teams. Broyles is a member of Northview United Methodist Church.
In 1987 she went to Puerto Rico where she helped build a small Sunday school building. She's gone on missions to Mexico and to areas in the United States where she pitched in to build church structures and homes.
"Flexibility is the watchword for mission trips," she says. Members of the missions have to adjust quickly when prior arrangements don't work out, as is often the case. They also have to adjust to different cultures and different philosophies of life.
Broyles is also proud of her work for the Bradley Free Clinic. She tries to work there at least once a month, and she is often recruiting others to volunteer. The clinic, located on Third Street in Roanoke, is a model for free clinics, she says.
"I started volunteering with the clinic when I got out of nursing and into administration," she says. "It is an opportunity for me to have patient contact, which I love."
Broyles, who graduated from Lewis-Gale's now closed nurse education program, worked in the hospital's emergency room as a registered nurse for 23 years. She managed Lewis-Gale's immediate care facility on Williamson Road for four years before taking her current job recruiting and retaining physicians.
She continues her health-related work with the Lions Club. She notes that the club is known for its work with the blind, but that it also raises money benefiting the deaf, those with diabetes, and operates a drug-awareness program. In addition, it has a major eye glass recycling program in the Valley, where glasses are cleaned, checked for their prescriptions, packaged and sent all over the world for reuse.
In fact, her medical mission will take along 700 pairs of glasses to Jamaica.
She is excited about a new project by Habitat for Humanity that will call for individual volunteers to help build homes for the poor.
"Habitat for Humanity is the greatest program in the world for getting people out of substandard housing," she said.
Jean Shelor's task in California was to help people who had no home at all because of the flooding.
She says she loves her volunteer work with the Red Cross, but nothing she has done with the agency before matches her experience in organizing mental-health services for people displaced by the torrential rains that pounded California earlier this year.
She took two week's vacation from her job at the VA hospital in Salem to help staff the Red Cross shelter in Watsonville, south of San Francisco.
"It was a beautiful spot," she says. "It was so ironic because on one side of the road the fields were flooded - they had opened the levees to keep them from breaking - and on the other side the farmers were irrigating."
Her job was to organize mental-health teams that helped people deal with the disaster. At one point, the shelter housed more than 900 people driven from their homes by flood waters.
"After that, I provided mental-health services to the Red Cross people, helping them deal with it," Shelor says. "I did a lot of fusing, working people through their frustrations."
Shelor says she found her work in California - her first disaster response with the Red Cross - to be rewarding, as is her affiliation with the agency generally.
Until the next disaster, she will remain active in the local Red Cross chapter by giving classes and taking classes, preparing herself and others for emergencies.
She's no stranger to being called on in emergencies. As a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, Shelor was called to active duty during Operation Desert Storm. She was stationed at Portsmouth Naval Hospital for about 10 months, filling in for active duty nurses who were sent to the Persian Gulf.
Shelor has worked in psychiatric nursing at the VA for 19 years. "In this field, you deal with the same patients for years," she says. "The patients are kind of like family. I don't think I could do anything else."
by CNB