Haiti native Ketly Angoma is a clinical support nurse at SSM St. Mary’s Health Center in St. Louis, where she has already been pegged as one of the organization’s Emerging Leaders in the five years she was worked there.
She makes shift assignments, mentors new staff, collaborate with doctors and other nurses and assigns beds for new inpatients. More importantly, Ketly said, “The way I see it, I treat the job as a mission – not just like I go to work. I get a chance to make a difference in people’s lives every day, so even though I may not be in a foreign country, I still treat the job every day as my mission.”
Angoma works on the Orthopedics/Short Stay Surgery Division, where Team Leader Jessica Heet says, “Ketly is always mindful of the patient’s rights regardless of their disposition in the world. I would regard this quality concurrently with Ketly’s deep relationship with God.
Truly and honestly, despite the trials and tribulations of health care, Ketly has always reflected internally on the good that can be done externally.”
Angoma said she always wanted to be a nurse in order to do something to help people.
“I need to be at the bedside and not in the office right now,” she said.
One of the main reasons Angoma wanted to be a nurse was to go on medical mission trips. She has already been on two of them. The first was a medical mission to Haiti through Hand of Hope, which is part of the Joyce Meyer Ministries.
“We worked the clinic there and then we went to the mountains and did medical clinics, Angoma said.
That was in 2009, shortly before January 2010 when the big earthquake claimed the lives of thousands of Haitians and others. Her brother was one of them.
Most recently, Angoma sojourned to Santo Domingo in February for an eye clinic with her church, Twin Rivers Church, for the Haitians who came over to the Dominican after the earthquake.
She has not returned to Haiti since the earthquake.
“It’s kind of hard and I’ve been stalling it, but I know I will be going soon,” Angoma said. “I’m better – it’s getting better.”
Angoma also helps support extended family in Haiti that she is helping to put through school in Haiti.
Last year, Angoma earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing last year through an online program from Oklahoma Wesleyan University after earning a nursing diploma at Lutheran School of Nursing in St. Louis. She and her family immigrated to St. Louis from Haiti in 1994 and she graduated from Parkway South High School.
She is married with two children, a daughter and a son.
St. Mary’s mission, “Through our exceptional health care services, we reveal the healing presence of God,” resonates throughout Angoma’s patient care.
“With me being a Christian, I feel like for somebody who was unable to do the things they used to do or is losing all of the control that they used to have at home – for that person, that day, I can be God with skin and arms, for that day for that person,” she said.
“With that, it keeps me loving my job and not getting tired of doing what I do every day. It could be that day that I might be the only person that they see or the only person who shows them the healing presence of God that they really need.”
