Nursing student remembers how time overseas affected her studies

• Nurse from Kenya

Rebecca Ekidor, from Kenya, will study nursing at Capital University Center in Pierre this fall. (AP file photo)

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PIERRE — About a decade ago, Rebecca Ekidor was working in a hospital in Kenya. She’d already developed an interest in medicine, and she’d excelled in school. But while she was treating refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her studies suddenly simmered with greater urgency.

“I interacted with so many of them,” she said of the refugees. “It really gave me more courage and more determination to go to school, to do something to help people. These people were in really bad shape.”

Ekidor now lives in Pierre with her husband, Mark Erupe, and her three children, Nathan, Abby and Jordan. In August she’ll begin studying for an associate’s degree in nursing at Capital University Center. After that, she plans to continue her studies right on through graduate school.

The presence of international students has not been a common occurrence at CUC, said Laura Hayden-Moreland, the academic program coordinator. Hayden-Moreland recalled just a few students from other countries at CUC since she began working there in 2000. She mentioned past students from the Netherlands and from Ethiopia, and a current student from the Ukraine.

Ekidor grew up in Kakuma, a small town in a rural, northwestern part of Kenya.

“It’s a very remote place, and very dry,” she said. “People there are pastoralists, or sometimes we call them nomads. People keep animals . and they keep on moving from place to place.”

Ekidor, who has two older brothers, said she and her family are from the Turkana tribe.

“My dad and my mom never went to school, and in our tribe girls mostly don’t go to school,” she said.

“They only take boys to school. Since my dad was working for the missionaries, he happened to learn the importance of education through them, and he made all of us go to school.”

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