Oregon nurse shares experience of volunteering in Gaza
KEIZER, Ore. (KPTV) - An Oregon nurse is back home after volunteering in Gaza for more than a month and treating hundreds of patients from a field hospital, and this isn’t her first time dropping everything to help people in disaster zones facing devastation and war.
With more than five months of ruin, rubble and war, few hospitals in Gaza still stand. Now, thousands of people hurt and sick, are crowding field hospitals made of tents, where volunteers doctors and nurses with scarce resources are doing the best they can to help.
One of those nurses is Yvonne Groenhout from Keizer.
“It’s desperate there. We were seeing like 400 patients a day, people were lining up before we even arrived,” Groenhout said. “It was just continual bombing day and night. It’s sad because the children seem used to it, they’re not phased much by the bombings.”
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With more than two and a half decades of experience as an intensive care unit nurse, Groenhout is now dedicating her life to volunteering on the frontlines of disaster zones all around the world.
“Everywhere I’ve gone - Haiti, Ukraine, recently I went to Gaza - the people there are overwhelmingly grateful for our presence,” said Groenhout.
Using her medical skills to help during devastation is a personal mission rooted from Groenhout’s own tragedy.
“Losing a child you... time does not heal all wounds. But I see her in so many people,” she said.
Her sense of purpose was thrown into question after the death of her oldest daughter Kaylee, who was 23 years old.
It’s an unimaginable loss she doesn’t like to discuss.
“Afterward we were like, ‘what now?’” she said.
But that clarity finally arrived in the form of a call for help at the height of the pandemic.
“You saw all the devastation back east. We were here, feeling completely helpless,” Groenhout said. “But how do I go help?”
That’s when Groenhout signed up for the International Medical Corps. The group quickly sent her to a hospital in Chicago that was desperate for nurses.
She had no idea that mission would change her life.
“Once I did that, it just clicked. Like now I know a purpose. I can help those that are in the greatest need, the underserved,” she said. “I feel like my daughter just always worried about other people instead of herself, so it all just made sense.”
Groenhout then retired from her full-time job as a nurse to devote herself to volunteer missions in Los Angeles, Corpus Christie, Haiti, and Ukraine.
“I originally was going to go for three weeks and stayed for 12,” she said about Ukraine. “We taught docs, nurses, paramedics trauma training, how to treat a trauma patient. We taught stop the bleed classes.”
Most recently, she’s returning home from a five week trip to Gaza.
“We were in Rafah. We flew into Cairo, joined a UN convoy to go across to Gaza. The mission was to set up an outpatient clinic and field hospital,” she said. “We actually go to set up tents. We planned where everything was going to go.”
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Since the field hospital opened in January, it has provided critical medical assistance to more than 27,000 people. In February, the team marked a milestone of 500 surgeries.
“We saw a lot of patients who had effects from the war like shrapnel, infected wounds,” she said. “From where the hospital was you could see the plums, you could hear it and feel it. It was just nonstop day and night.”
For now, this hero is home with her family. But at any point, she’s ready to answer the call for help. Grateful for the important work that honors her daughter.
“Most people when they lose a loved one, you realize that when you say, ‘someday I’m gonna do that,’ that someday may not be there,” Groenhout said. “I just want people to remember, people are people. It’s desperate there, and anything would help.”
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