Leon County Commissioner Robert B. Rackleff

Esther Moring's career as a nurse started earlier than most. "I had two brothers, and I was the 'army nurse' for them," she remembers. "How do you get to play with your brothers when they're playing army, except as a nurse? I've given numerous little boys between the age of four and eight their army shots."

Little did Moring know that years later she'd be working in actual war zones, giving immunizations and other care to entire populations of displaced refugees. Moring's work with the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders has taken her everywhere from Tanzania to Angola to El Salvador to Takijistan, and, earlier this year, it earned her the UAB School of Nursing's JoAnn Barnett Award for Compassionate Care.

"I appreciated that they opened the award up to a broader perspective than just individual care," Moring says. When people treat populations, defend them, and advocate for them, that is compassionate nursing at its highest level."

Moring was nominated for the award by UABSON professor Ellen Buckner, DSN, RN, whom Moring says was a mentor of hers from the very beginning. "I flunked every chemistry course I ever took at least once," she remembers with a laugh, "And I hated the writing part, too. So Ellen sat me down and said, 'Esther, you are going to be a great nurse, but whatever you do, you must the through chemistry, and you must get through this writing.'"

Get through it she did, and after earning her masters degree in nursing at the University of Washington, Moring joined the International Rescue Committee. "My first mission was in Tanzania, and while I was there, 'Hotel Rwanda' happened," she says. It was a sea of people coming up the road with their belongings on their heads, and there I was, a new international nurse who had no idea what I was doing... It was trial by fire, and I learned on that first mission how to love international nursing and how to work with refugees in outbreaks and vaccination campaigns."

To take an even more direct role in the treatment and management of such efforts, Moring joined Doctors Without Borders and went on her first mission to Burundi in 1995. Over the next 12 years, she would be come an expert on ebola in central Africa, battle dengue fever in El Salvador, dodge bullets in Bosnia, and contract a case of typhus in Burundi - 34 missions in all, and she began a 35th, to Chad, in July 2007. "I opened Chad three years ago for the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders, so it'll be interesting to see how the care has evolved and how the people are faring," she says.

In the midst of this, Morning got married in June of 2006 to Bob Rackleff, a county commissioner in Leon County, Florida. "I promised my husband six months out of the year," Moring laughs. "He keeps the home fires and the county fires burning while I'm gone."

How has she managed to survive such a grueling workload over more than a decade of international missions? She chalks it up to a lesson learned while slogging through charts during her UABSON days: "Chop up your work. If you have something overwhelming, chop it up into pieces, and that works," she says. "If you're in a rescue camp with 200,000 people, then focus on 10,000 at a time -- you'll get through it.".