Nurse Found Fulfillment in Rwandan Relief Effort : Lea Svedeen volunteered for two months in a bombed-out village in the war-torn African nation. She expresses admiration for the resiliency of the people she met.

In her 11-year nursing career, Lea Svedeen has tended to abused inner-city children, hospice patients waiting to die and accident victims who sometimes arrived at a rural Sierra hospital emergency room before the doctor did.

But these challenges only served as a prelude to the task she took on this summer: Treating victims of the Rwandan civil war.

For two months, the 30-year-old Hacienda Heights native was part of a four-member relief team from International Medical Corps, an organization based in West Los Angeles that brought medical care to a remote village in eastern Rwanda.

The town, Kibungo, had been leveled by mortar fire and ravaged by machete-wielding killers, many of them boys of 10 to 12 years old.

Her time in Rwanda left Svedeen with a deeper understanding of the nation’s decades-old tribal conflict and a profound admiration for the war’s survivors, particularly the women, who must carry on--harvesting crops, raising children and running villages--without their men.

“I think I learned from them,” said Svedeen, who is back in Hacienda Heights, staying with her parents while she recovers from breaking a leg when she slipped in a puddle. “The women, especially, are so strong and so resilient.”

When she arrived in the country in mid-July, thousands of Rwandans were returning to their villages. The highways that wound through the lush countryside were lined with refugees: old men, women carrying foam mattresses or fruit on their heads, and children carrying cans of water.

Conditions were primitive in the hospital where she worked, but Svedeen, who plans to return to Rwanda, says she preferred the rugged experience to U.S. nursing, where up to a quarter of her time was spent filling out paperwork.

“You have more time to spend with (the patients),” the registered nurse said. “You don’t have to do the legal charting because nobody’s going to sue you there.”

In fact, after spending time in Rwanda, Svedeen says, she might never be able to work in a U.S. hospital again.

The intimacy she developed with the patients more than made up for the difficult working conditions, such as the lack of electricity.

At night, the only power goes to the operating room and that’s provided by a generator. Svedeen and other medical team members carried lanterns when making rounds through the wards.

It was by lantern light that Svedeen told a Rwandan mother, using hand signs to bridge the language barrier, that the surgeon had not been able to completely save her 11-year-old son’s hand after a grenade injury.

“I started to cry and she started to cry,” Svedeen said.

As the Americans established the hospital operation, the killing continued in the bush. One afternoon, a family sent two sons to get water from a stream about a mile away. The sons were ambushed by younger boys. One son died. The other recovered.

Svedeen worked closely with the family members, who maintained a 24-hour vigil over the patients--a Rwandan custom. She taught them to bathe patients and dress wounds. She was welcomed to the hospital each day by children shouting “Bonjour! Bonjour!”

“I got to be the kind of nurse that I’d love to be if I had enough hours of the day to be (that way) here,” she said.

There was another big difference between the United States and Rwanda. During her two months in Rwanda, she earned combat pay of about $2,000 a month plus expenses. In U.S. hospitals, she could earn as much as $7,000 a month.

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The experience was also a dramatic shift from her sheltered childhood, growing up in the hills of Hacienda Heights, the daughter of an interior designer and a produce businessman. As a child, she rode horseback over wheat fields that are today covered with tract homes.

One of her early role models was a local physician and family friend who showed her that medicine was a profession that connected with the larger world. He regaled her with tales of relief missions to Africa and other places.

After graduating from Los Altos High School, Svedeen earned her nursing degree at Loma Linda University. She first heard about the International Medical Corps through the university newsletter. She contacted the organization more than a year ago and received her call to Rwanda last spring.

Despite the reservations of her boyfriend and family, Svedeen jumped at the chance.

Despite the suffering she witnessed in Rwanda, Svedeen most remembers the miracles and the warmth of the people.

“There’s a real sense of community there that you don’t have here,” Svedeen said, glancing out over a sweeping view of the urban valley below her parents’ home.

“I felt very appreciated there,” she said. “I felt like I was accomplishing something very important. My presence there really had an effect on these people.”