Published 2017
★★★
Averill's work as a nurse has taken her around the world, and On a Mission focuses on various trips she took to places in dire need of more medical care. This is organized as a set of essays, most (not all) covering experiences during those trips: to Darfur, to Sierra Leone, to Uganda; to Pakistan, to Ethiopia, to the Philippines (though the Philippines chapter has a somewhat different focus...).
It's a fast and interesting read, if at times a difficult one; there's so much loss and devastation and senseless violence. Averill's experience is both wide and deep, and this kind of work calls for an innate ability to think on one's feet and come up with creative solutions.
Most of the book is told from Averill's perspective, but a couple of chapters/essays pull more from her coauthor's side of things (Coulter being a nurse and writer). I didn't love those chapters—there wasn't enough context for me to understand immediately who was talking and why, and the extended "joke" about pretending that a (fictional, mercifully) new nurse was a sexual predator was...not actually funny. Shockingly. On the whole I probably would have preferred a longer-form memoir to these largely disconnected essays, but then, I always prefer a longer-form memoir to largely disconnected essays, so there's that.
There are a couple more books published by the volunteer organization that Averill seems to have worked with (though the actual trips were, as I understand it, through Doctors Without Borders), and I'd be interested to pick those up too.
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