Born an ocean apart, Birgit Umaigba and Danny Wang arrived at RNAO with vastly different experiences to inform their practice. Umaigba escaped violence in Africa for a life in Canada, while Wang experienced a culture shift of a different sort when switching from the study of medical sciences to nursing. Both recent nursing graduates were drawn to RNAO because they saw it as an organization that would help accelerate their professional growth and immerse them in a community that would support them.

The path to RNAO began for Umaigba on a red clay road near her childhood home in Benin City, Nigeria. She walked that road several times a month, avoiding the deep ruts and holes that filled with water during the rainy season, to a large house where a nurse tended to those who were too poor to go to a private hospital, including her best friend Obehi. At age 16 or 17, Obehi was three years older than Umaigba but had lived much less, her failing body ravaged by sickle cell anemia, an illness all too common in West Africa. Her eyes yellowed and her belly protruded, the pain of the disease robbed her of childhood and left her sad and lonely.

Umaigba tried to fill that void by bringing Obehi food and sharing her notes from school. As she had done so often, Umaigba ascended a flight of stairs to a room so small there was no space for a chair between the single mattress and its walls. The sounds of prayer and sobs of family surrounded the bed and a single IV pole.
“She was gasping for air. I remember holding her hand. She was crying in pain,” Umaigba recounts. “Her breathing started to slow. She said nothing. Her eyes were so white. I couldn’t see the pupils.”

The nurse, a Muslim woman, started the IV, but it was not enough. In an hour’s time, perhaps less, Obehi was dead. “I don’t think any of us knew she was going to pass away that day,” Umaigba says.

She still dreams about Obehi, the two of them playing, and it scares her. But she gained something special in those final moments of her friend’s life. The nurse held Obehi, she recalls. “She was everything…the doctor…the nurse. (She) touched me in a profound way.” It was that day Umaigba decided she too would become a nurse. She didn’t know how or when. But she knew.