Student and teacher — these simple words define Nancy MacFadyen and her 35-year career.

Arlene Wilgosh’s hometown of Minnedosa is two-and-a-half hours from Winnipeg. About 2,500 people live in this small, close-knit community, including Wilgosh’s 82-year-old mother. In this Canadian prairie town (“Manitoba’s Valley Paradise”), Wilgosh had her first work experience in a health-care organization.

Working in northern British Columbia or in disaster zones in faraway lands, Phyllis Randle has dedicated her tremendous organizational skills and considerable nursing expertise to help those who need it most.

For a woman as devoted to her community, her family and her roots as Julie Lys is, nursing is the perfect career. Not only can she offer a more personal, and continuous, level of care to generations of families she has known since childhood, but she can – and does – volunteer her time and expertise in a variety of community initiatives that combine her two passions: aboriginal health and education.

Angela Cooper Brathwaite’s mother, a midwife and community health nurse in Trinidad, loved telling her young daughter about her work. Some of the more vivid tales lingered in Brathwaite’s mind for decades. One story delved into the horrors of smallpox. At the time, there was no vaccine to prevent the deadly disease. “They’d put the sickest people on trucks to go to isolated places to die,” says Brathwaite. “Healthy people would go along to care for them, knowing they’d die as well.”