Women in Rotary Excel

It was a good week for women in Rotary and for women associated with Medical Aid for Oceania – not that MAFO had anything to do with their success!

 

Among the 20 finalists in the Rotary Districts of NSW Inspirational Women’s Awards were Dr Vera Sistenich and Helen Richards CNC STN. Vera is a team member of HandUp Congo, a regular client of MAFO’s shipping and logistics services, and Helen frequently donates medical consumables to MAFO. In the end Vera took out the award but we congratulate both of our associates and all of the finalists. 

 

 

Vera volunteers with Handup Congo, whose medical and health care supplies MAFO ships to the Democratic Republic of Congo every year. She is team leader of the Emergency Medicine Education Project, a RAWCS initiative sponsored by the Rotary E-Club of Greater Sydney. In 2015 Vera launched a far-reaching training program in the DRC, a nation of more than 80 million people with no paramedics and few ambulances. She has now trained more than 400 doctors and nurses in seven provinces and has moved on to help develop an academic program there in emergency medicine. She will be there again in October this year, despite the two outbreaks of Ebola virus that have occurred in recent months. As if all of this wasn’t enough Vera also managed to fit in the birth of her first child – a son, Marcus – in July.

 

Helen is a Clinical Nurse Consultant and Stomal Therapy Nurse at Ramsay Health Care’s Wollongong Private Hospital, but this represents only a fraction of what she does for bowel surgery patients. Active in the Illawarra region she has run education days and acted as volunteer Ambassador for the Illawarra Combined Rotary Clubs bowel scan campaigns. For 15 years she has run a bi-monthly support service for patients and their families. In 2013 she volunteered to go to Kenya as a stomal therapy nurse and has made return visits over four years. For the last two years she was a delegate to the World Council of Enterostomal Therapists, most recently at the 22^nd annual congress in Kuala Lumpur.

 

 

The Inspirational Women’s Awards (RIWA) were established eight years ago to recognise women and young women who best exemplify Rotary’s motto of Service Above Self, in the community service the individual performs above and beyond their normal role. The Awards are an initiative of the Rotary districts and clubs of NSW.

 

The award this year coincides with the despatch by MAFO of 24 boxes of medical equipment and health care supplies to the Democratic Republic of Congo for distribution by HandUp Congo founder Lucy Hobgood-Brown and Dr Vera Sistenich. The air freight consignment will arrive in the DRC capital Kinshasa ahead of the mission team’s arrival in early October.