Obituary of Maureen Creel | nursing
My wife, Maureen Creel, who has died aged 68 from complications of a rare autoimmune disease, was a nurse, midwife and health administrator who spent most of her working life in challenging humanitarian positions in Africa, South America, Asia and the tip of North America.
Practical, strong, humble, courageous, she had great resilience, and it was her cool nerve that distinguished her for the hard work she did, often in areas of armed conflict. Everywhere, her courage, simple kindness, professionalism, and cultural sensitivity earned her respect and acceptance.
Maureen was born in Rusap in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to May (née Sime), a housewife, and Robert Lynch, a train driver. Her parents had left Edinburgh in the early 1950s and raised her as the United Kingdom as her true home. After completing her secondary education in Bulawayo, she went to Edinburgh to train as a nurse at the Royal Infirmary.
Instead of settling in Edinburgh after qualifying, she returned to war-torn Zimbabwe in 1979. There she worked as a nurse for Save the Children UK, running mobile clinics in remote and often unsafe areas. After witnessing the lack of care available to women in rural Africa, she returned to the UK in 1982 to train as a midwife at Singleton Hospital in Swansea.
Once qualified in 1984, Maureen moved to Burkina Faso, where she provided training to traditional birth attendants on behalf of Save the Children while living in a mud-brick hut, without electricity or running water. I was country director for the charity there, and we met shortly after she arrived: we married in 1986.
After three years in Burkina Faso, Maureen moved with Save the Children to Sindh Province, Pakistan, where she was the Health and Nutrition Program Manager. She then became a community nurse (1989-1991) in the Northwest Territories of Canada and Peru (1991-1994), before moving into a more administrative role as health program manager in Cuba (1995-1996) for Save the Children and then in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Concern International.
After returning to the UK in 1998, she managed the logistics of relocating Save the Children’s head office from Camberwell to Vauxhall in London. But within a year she was back in the field again as a community nurse/midwife with Health Canada, serving Inuit settlements in the Northwest Territories and Kwanlin Dun communities in the Yukon, where we lived for the next 20 years.
Throughout her time abroad, Marwin was a loyal reader of The Guardian Weekly, which in those days was printed on airmail paper. Copies followed her around, often weeks old when she received them, and served as her window to the outside world.
In 2015, we decided to live out our retirement in northern Spain, but not before one last adventure: we flew to Mongolia, hired guides and camels, and rode across the Gobi Desert. At the end of the journey, surrounded by curious camels, Maureen buried her straw hat in the sand, marking the end of her adventurous years.
She is survived by her brother Gerard and Anna.