Review: "Beyond Borders" edited by Sue Averill

Beyond Borders, edited by Sue Averill
Published 2016
★★★

A short collection of essays about nursing in humanitarian contexts. I picked this up because I'd read a longer collection by the woman who edited Beyond Borders and found it engaging; also because humanitarian work (while not without ethical problems, sometimes significant ones) is interesting to read about, so I probably would have picked this up anyway.

In many ways, I knew it would be like this, but I don't think it is possible to viscerally feel the depth of this challenge without actually being inside it. (Heather Starshine McLeod, "Burst Wide Open," loc. 207)

Beyond Borders is short, coming in at well under 100 pages by Kindle estimation. There are ten essays, and several writers contributed more than one; I suspect One Nurse at a Time (the organization through which this book was published) was quite a small outfit, and judging by its website, which was last updated in 2023, it may since have closed its doors. The writing quality here is variable (some proofreading would not have gone amiss) but overall decent; for the most part I really just would have liked longer essays, and more of them. (Interestingly, a number of the essays in this book seem also to be in Nurses Beyond Borders, which was edited by one of the contributors to this book and published a few years earlier; I may have to see if my library has that one.)

One interesting thing: Sue Averill writes in "T Girl" that Children in my world don't play with other kids one day and die the next. [...] Children in my world don't die in my arms, with me impotent to offer more than mumbled assurances that she was among friends. (loc. 732) It's a poignant moment, but it is not lost on me that her cowriter for the previous essay in the book, "Susy" (and also her cowriter for On a Mission), writes in yet another essay in this book ("Mae Mae"), about the premature death of her own son. It's not in and of itself contradictory; Averill is writing about her own experience, not about Elizabeth Coulter's. But that disconnect could be the starting point for a book all its own.