In Iowa: Cross-cultural exchange benefits all

I recently had the chance to talk with students at Coe College. Their nursing program has an exchange with the country of Swaziland.

Swaziland, for those not up on African geography, is a small, landlocked country surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique on the continent's southern tip. It has 1.4 million people and is ruled by King Mswati III, Africa's last absolute monarch.

Students from Cedar Rapids go there for a few weeks each year to shadow nurses. The professor in charge of the program, Anita Nicholson, also raises money to bring Swazi nurses and practitioners to Iowa.

This summer, Zakhele Soko, the infection prevention and control coordinator at Good Shepherd Hospital in Siteki, Swaziland, spent almost two weeks doing intensive training in burn and wound care and infection-control techniques with staff at Mercy Medical Center and UnityPoint-Health St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids, as well as at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City.

Nurses here worked with him to develop alternative therapies for techniques common in Iowa that wouldn't be possible at Good Shepherd due to lack of resources. He will take the skills he learned back to Swaziland and train others at his hospital.

The program is a boon for both sides. The benefits for the Swazi nurses receiving advanced training are obvious. But it is a benefit for the Cedar Rapids students as well.

I spent two years living in Swaziland as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2009 to 2011. It was the best thing I could have done with that post-college time of my life.

The opportunity to experience a culture completely different from your own is priceless. It is a chance to open yourself up to new experiences, new ideas and ways of living totally different from your own. That can make you more adaptable, more empathetic and less quick to judge.

Those are lessons that apply back home, without a doubt. In their future careers, the Coe nursing students will likely tend patients from cultures and socio-economic backgrounds different from their own. If they can learn to look beyond superficial differences and see their patients and their patient's health concerns as part of a bigger picture, they will be better nurses.

Soko summed up these thoughts himself when I asked him what he hopes the Cedar Rapids students learn in Swaziland.

'I hope they will socialize, learn how people live, how they conduct themselves. Each country is unique and different. Each country has its own way of doing things,” Soko said.

'I also want them to know they are privileged to have what they have in this town, in this state.”

I'm glad the Coe students are having their own cross-cultural exchange. When they visit Swaziland, I hope they are able to see beyond the problems so often associated with Africa in the media, and see the beauty of life 9,000 miles away, in all its complexities.