Adama Nylenkeh: Recent Graduate, Rising Star

Adama Nylenkeh began her professional life as a volunteer ambulance nurse in Sierra Leone in late 2014. The 24-year-old Sierra Leonean quickly developed a reputation for grit, humility, and creativity and in February, Partners In Health (PIH) hired her as a program coordinator. Then in May, just four months later, she became a program officer. The promotion made her career trajectory one of the steepest at PIH, and it was hardly a fluke.

“She stands out in every single way you could imagine,” says former short-term clinician Martha Phillips, who worked with Nylenkeh.

Nylenkeh’s career didn’t start out so promising. She graduated from Njala University, in the southern Moyamba District, with a bachelor’s degree in public health in 2014, just as the Ebola epidemic erupted in West Africa and the economy, which had been racing, ground to a halt.

On a lark, she applied to be a volunteer ambulance nurse in Port Loko District, some 60 miles north of Moyamba.

“There was nothing else to do,” she explains.

She wasn’t trained as a nurse, but the job didn’t actually require it. Was she willing to spend days in a hot metal truck, separated from patients by just a thin wall of glass? When she said she was, the National Ebola Response Center promptly enlisted her.

Up to three times a day, she and a driver transported up to a half-dozen patients at a time down rutted and potholed roads to a handful of treatment units, including Port Loko's PIH-supported Maforki Ebola Treatment Unit. Nylenkeh didn’t just slip the receiving clinicians a piece of paper with a couple patient names, as was customary. She described symptoms, gathered info to report back to families, and asked how she could help. If need be, she detoured to collect lab results so diagnosis could be made more quickly. And when triage units were overwhelmed, she donned Tyvek suits to help admit patients.

“I don’t know why I was doing these things,” she says. “They were just things I wanted to do.”

Short-term clinician Amanda Coyle, who worked with Nylenkeh, remembers it differently: “You could tell she genuinely cared for her patients. She went above and beyond.”

Her humble dedication continued. Partly at the urging of so many short-term clinicians, Cora Nally, a PIH community health manager, asked Nylenkeh to join PIH as a psycho-social support program coordinator in February. At the time, Ebola treatment units often offered counseling to Ebola survivors but rarely to families, who could be just as traumatized. Nylenkeh and Nally quickly created programs to support families who had lost loved ones or whose members were being treated for Ebola, offering everything from free counselling to baby food.

Nally promoted her the first week in May. As a program officer, Nylenkeh now directs a team of 150 psycho-social workers in Port Loko District. They go door to door in three chiefdoms, spreading the messages of national or local governments, such as, “It’s now safe for children to return to school.” Nylenkeh keeps things running smoothly.

Nally remembers an incident where a soldier was trying to foist his work onto Nylenkeh’s staff. “She very courteously and directly told him to stop pushing his responsibilities onto others,” Nally says. “She always stands up straight, always holds herself with this quiet confidence.”

The last year hasn’t been easy. Seeing sick children saddens Nylenkeh, especially if they are 2 or 5 years old, like her children. And her husband, an HIV program supervisor for the Moyamba District, was not particularly excited about the ambulance nurse job. “You are joking,” he said after hearing that she had applied. An Ebola ambulance driver friend of his had died not long before. But neither he nor Nylenkeh have any regrets.

“Working as an ambulance nurse is the best thing that ever happened to me, in terms of my career,” she says.