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Susan Anlian Ketigian’s career has her working as an operating room nurse at an ambulatory surgery facility on Long Island. The alumna’s passion has her traveling around the world at her own expense – to work in that role for free – helping perform no-cost surgeries on needy children living in needy areas.
Most recently, over the course of two weeks in January, the 1979 graduate of William Paterson’s nursing program treated 150 children across three locations in India. Ketigian and her teammates – surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists and specialized therapists from across the United States – worked from 7 a.m. well into the evening each day.
“That was a brutal one. We worked at three different sites: arrive, set up, move; arrive, set up, move. I’m still recovering from that trip,” she says, explaining that the team travels with its own surgical supplies and operating room equipment.
Nevertheless, Ketigian is eagerly gearing up for another such trip this month: traveling to Ica, Peru to take part in what will be her 15th medical mission – events she refers to as “an addiction.”
“Someone once asked me, ‘You’re taking vacation from work – to work?’ Yes. It’s my favorite thing that I do,” Ketigian says. “The work is phenomenal,” she adds, rattling off some of the places she’s served, including Vietnam, El Salvador, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and Colombia.
She has primarily worked on missions to benefit children and young adults with cleft palates, facial deformities or crossed eyes. In many countries, Ketigian says, when a child is born with such problems, people attribute it to a curse on the family. Without surgical intervention, the child will be ostracized, never work and never wed.
Ketigian primarily travels on medical missions through the northeast chapter of “Healing the Children,” a charitable organization established in 1979 to provide critical medical care to children across the globe. To date, HTC has helped more than 250,000 children in almost 100 countries.
Although the missions are self-funded, Ketigian has been fortunate enough to have people donate to HTC’s northeast chapter on her behalf, to help defray her costs.
Ketigian says she has wanted to volunteer on a medical mission for as long as she can remember, but once she got married and had four children to raise, she set that desire aside. A few years ago, when a colleague got involved with a mission trip, Ketigian – whose children are now grown – decided to get involved as well. She hasn’t looked back since.
“If you were in the U.S. and you had a baby that needed surgery, you would check out the doctor – do your homework,” Ketigian says. “But these people show up, just with the hope that we can help them. They hand their baby over to a stranger that doesn’t even speak their language. Imagine how stressful that could be.”
Many of the parents, she says, travel long distances by foot, animal, scooter or bus to have their children screened by the mission team and considered for surgery. Their personal stories are often harrowing. Ketigian recalls an 18-year-old mother who was prostituted by her parents and raped by four men, causing her to get pregnant. The parents ended up in jail, and the teen ended up giving birth to a boy with a cleft palate. She was making and selling beaded jewelry to support herself and the baby.
Worse than hearing such stories, Ketigian says, is when parents show up on the mission team’s doorstep with children that can’t be helped – those with so many birth defects that they would not survive the surgery.
“There’s a heck of a world out there,” Ketigian adds. “Seeing that, seeing what I’ve seen and where I’ve been, when I hear people complain about frivolous things in life … they need an eye opener.”
Some of the hospitals Ketigian has volunteered out of are fairly updated; a few are nightmarishly old and filthy, “with dried blood on everything.” Oftentimes, local hospital employees go through the mission team’s trash at the end of the day to pick out surgical supplies that they can sanitize and reuse, such as gloves and tubing.
Knowing that a child’s life has been saved or forever changed for the better, Ketigian says, makes the hard work – both physically and emotionally – more than worth it. Her biggest reward is seeing a child with a new smile or the newfound ability to eat and speak properly. The next biggest reward is the reaction of parents, who go from unfathomably stoic to “beaming.”
“I love it; I really do,” Ketigian says of her volunteerism. She urges William Paterson nursing students to “absolutely go” if they have the opportunity to offer their services abroad. “You will work with the finest people in the world: talented and great and giving … It’s a really worthwhile experience.”
