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SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — Sister Theresa Keller clicks the heels of her gray suede shoes together.
"There's no place like home. There's no place like home," she says chuckling as she sits in her office tucked away at Siouxland Community Health Center. Plastered above a diploma on a wall are two posters featuring Glinda the Good Witch and Dorothy from the American film classic "The Wizard of Oz."
The Sioux City Journal (http://bit.ly/1SSeXkt ) reports that after nearly 40 years away from home, Keller, an advanced registered nurse practitioner, returned last fall to Sioux City to live and work.
"What you really want you will always find in your own backyard. You don't need to go looking for it someplace else," the 59 year-old says before grabbing her backpack and traversing a maze of halls to get from her office to urgent care. There she dons a crisp white lab coat and stethoscope decorated with a small stuffed puppy.
"I do 100 percent of what a nurse does and I do 90 percent of what a physician does," she says.
After graduating from Bishop Heelan High School, Keller left Sioux City in the late 1970s to attend nursing school at Viterbo University, a private Roman Catholic liberal arts university in La Crosse, Wisconsin. It was there that she decided to enter religious life. St. Rose of Viterbo Convent, the motherhouse of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, is right across the street from the university.
"It becomes just part of who you are," she says of religious life. "I spent my adult life growing up in the convent."
Keller says she had a three-point plan when she entered the convent at age 19: to serve the poor, work as a missionary in Africa and finish her nursing degree. She got that degree as well as a doctor of nursing practice degree from Rush University in Chicago and a master of public affairs degree from the University of Minnesota.
She practiced medicine at Hennepin County Family Practice Center in Minneapolis, Davenport Community Health Center and Peoples Community Health Center in Waterloo. Keller also taught nursing for the University of Iowa and Clarke University in Dubuque.
While working at the Hennepin County Family Practice Center, where most of her patients were Spanish-speaking Latinos, Keller decided it was time to immerse herself in another language. She traveled to a school in Bolivia to learn Spanish.
"I'm kind of intermediate. I understand a lot, but if you don't use it, you lose it," Keller says of Spanish. "The Spanish speakers are a marvelous group of folks in regards that they don't mind how much you murder their language."
Keller uses her Spanish at Siouxland Community Health Center. She also encourages her graduate nursing students at Briar Cliff University to learn enough words and phrases to be able to introduce themselves in Spanish and ask simple questions of their patients.
Keller is a clinical preceptor for the FRANCIS (Forging Relationships for Advanced Nursing Cultural Competence in Siouxland) Project, which seeks to provide better primary care for Siouxland patients who need it most. The project is a collaboration between Briar Cliff University and local health care providers. Beginning this fall, Briar Cliff University will offer a Spanish class designed for health care professionals.
"My goal is that every nurse practitioner has the opportunity to have their work as a mission -- they see it as a calling to do this nurse practitioner work," Keller explains.
When she turned 50, Keller finally made it to the continent of Africa. She did missionary work and taught nursing, midwifery and laboratory technology in a school out in the bush in the Central African country of Cameroon. The isolation came as a bit of a shock to Keller, who says she wishes she would've made the journey earlier on in her life.
"You can't see your hand in front of your face. There's no lights. There's no street lights," recalls Keller, who supervised a 40-bed pediatric ward where she encountered children suffering from a host of preventable diseases including measles and meningitis. "It's nothing like here. It's bare-bones."
Keller says there are multiple ways to do mission work. She encourages her students to look at the big picture.
"Gandhi and Martin Luther King got to the point of saying, it's not about color or race or creed. It's about economics and it's about the poor and the have-nots and the haves and how do you bridge that gap."
A big part of nursing, Keller says, is teaching patients. She looks down at her shoes.
"Maybe you need a better pair of shoes. Maybe your back wouldn't hurt as much," she says. "And then, 'Where do you get the shoes?'"
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Information from: Sioux City Journal, http://www.siouxcityjournal.com
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