Sharing one’s knowledge and skills through mentoring others can be a win-win, feel-good way of getting important and urgent things done.
Involving children in humanitarian projects signals a hope that, as adults, they too will give time, talent and treasure to meaningful endeavors.
Diane Steinhilber has intentionally done both.
“Volunteering is a luxury,” she said. “The best thing I can do is to serve as an example.”
At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday at the Chautauqua Women’s Club House, Steinhilber will present “Preventing Global Blindness – The Kenya Project.”
According to the nonprofit organization Retina Global, in underserved regions of the world, there’s a surge in “conditions like diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, retinopathy of prematurity, uveitis-related retinal afflictions, and more.”
Although progress in treating these ailments has been remarkable, for many people around the world it is inaccessible. According to Retina Global, its work is in “conducting outreach programs in these identified regions (with) the support of volunteer retina specialists from around the globe who generously offer their time and expertise to make a profound difference.”
Steinhilber, who hails from the Cleveland area, has been volunteering her expertise to close the ophthalmological gap in Kenya. Her path to and with Retina Global has been an invaluable learning curve.
The oldest of five children, Steinhilber said she helped care for her younger siblings at night when her mother was unable to do so. The secretarial course she took at Orange High School in Pepper Pike, Ohio, didn’t endear her to that occupation. When her mother said she should be a nurse, she “knew” that’s what she wanted to do.
The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, accepted Steinhilber into its highly competitive nursing school, “shocking” her family, she said. She successfully completed a year of chemistry and other challenging prerequisites before undertaking OSU’s three-year core nursing curriculum and earning both her RN and Bachelor of Science in Nursing.
“The thing about nursing is that I use it every day,” Steinhilber said.
Moving to Houston in 1979 “for a job because they had a … program where graduate nurses heavy on book learning and light on skills could do (clinical) rotations, (she) completed three rotations — general surgery, emergency, and one other.”
As a critical care nurse at Memorial Hermann Hospital — which Steinhilber said was one of the very first hospitals to have a helicopter pad on its roof — she assisted with trauma patients coming out of surgery.
“I liked all of the gadgets,” she said, “all of the equipment you used to monitor the patients, all of the numbers, and Acuity (scheduling software).”
She also “liked working with (her patients’) families, alleviating their anxieties about tubes (et cetera), and helping them. Often a loved one had a gunshot wound to the head. (I talked with them about) suicide, organ donation and what death meant.”
Steinhilber remained in Houston for four years before returning to Cleveland and joining the Cleveland Clinic as the coordinator of its kidney and pancreas transplant programs.
“I monitored and managed the list of patients waiting for those transplants,” she said. “Lung (and other organs) had their own programs.”
For her, organ donation was the “other, happy side” of being a trauma nurse in Houston. She said that no religion prohibits it.
“This was back in the day when you had to tissue type,” Steinhilber said. “It was called HLA (Human leukocyte antigen) typing. I had to run it to see if it was a match (between patients and donors). We’d call in three patients for one organ, draw their blood, and see who matched the best. Sometimes people died.”
Soon after moving back to Cleveland, she met her husband, who is originally from Minnesota and had earned his Master of Business Administration at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
“I came home and told Jeff that I wanted to be a lawyer or get my MBA,” Steinhilber said. “He said, ‘MBA,’ since he had one. I got into the executive MBA program at Cleveland State (University) and started (night classes). You’re supposed to have five years of experience for the EMBA.”
Learning and understanding business terminology expanded her knowledge beyond medicine.
“I didn’t do much with (my EMBA), but it opened my eyes,” she said. “At that time, medicine and doctors were starting to appreciate the importance of Executive MBAs. It was no longer the time of the Carnegies and Mellons and Rockefellers (making enormous philanthropic donations). So, doctors had to be shrewd businessmen, in addition to being outstanding clinicians.”
In 1993, Steinhilber left the Cleveland Clinic and gave birth to a daughter. Two years later, she had a son.
“Being a stay-at-home mother was infinitely more challenging than being a trauma nurse,” she said. Yet, “it was highly rewarding (and) the best job I ever had.”
Raising her children in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, she said her family adopted the motto of a summer camp her children attended there: “God first, others second, I’m third.”
Traditionally, at the end of two weeks of camp, the “I’m Third Award” is given out. Steinhilber said she’s proud that both of her children have received it.
She and her husband became “very involved in the community and were both active on several boards,” chairing fundraising efforts for many organizations. They mainly focused on children’s causes involving medical issues.
For example, they organized the “first-time-ever fundraiser” for Camp Ho Mita Koda Foundation in nearby Novelty, Ohio, which provides an outdoor camping experience for children living with Type 1 Diabetes. Peter Schumacher, a long-time Chautauquan and endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic, founded this camp.
And for Fairhill Center for the Aging, where Cleveland philanthropist Jane Outcalt initiated a program “to connect the elderly with latchkey kids,” the Steinhilbers put together an event called “Regeneration – A Celebration.”
As her children were growing up, Steinhilber “wanted them to understand that we have poverty in our own country.” She said she took them to a work camp in the heart of Kentucky’s Cumberland Mountains called Red Bird Mission because Clay, Bell and Leslie counties in southeastern Kentucky were the poorest in the United States.
“The coal industry came in, set up business, brought a lot of jobs, but they did not give back to the community,” she said. “They didn’t build schools, cell towers, or hospitals. I took my kids there to experience this. We were putting roofs on trailer parks. … We also worked in the food pantry and garden, on a project to build a playground, and my son picked up trash.”
Red Bird Mission didn’t take advantage of Steinhilber’s basic nursing skill set. And it did not fit her “sustainability” criteria.
“We did the work,” she said. “The homeowners weren’t part of the home building.”
To Steinhilber, sustainability means: “You set up a program, educate, provide resources, and when you’re done, they take over. It’s not a hand-out.”
She planned a family trip to Tanzania in 2011 that would take everyone out of their comfort zone.
“I said, ‘We’re not just looking at animals. We’re going to experience what a developing country is.’ We visited a school, a hospital, and an orphanage,” Steinhilber said. “The kids were traumatized.”
Afterward, Steinhilber said they sent money for a pump to be installed to supply running water for the orphanage, in part so that the women wouldn’t have to do “the water walk.” Because water was now readily available, a small garden was planted. That “was a sustainable experience.”
Steinhilber said she trained their dog, Shep, to be a certified therapy dog.
“We went every Thursday to the VA hospital. It was extremely rewarding. I got to use my hospital (know-how). Shep walked around from person to person with his leash in his mouth. Everyone loved him.”
In 2014, when “empty nest hit” and her husband retired, Steinhilber set about “repurposing” herself, with the caveat that “it had to be sustainable.” She was no longer keen on fundraising because “too many people saw (her) and ran.” Eventually they decided to split their time between Florida and Chautauqua.
Turning to the internet, Steinhilber searched for an opportunity for herself.
“The most intriguing one was in Kenya,” she said. “I contacted We.org out of Canada, and they put up a program just for me at Baraka — which means ‘blessings’ in Swahili — clinic.”
Welcomed by Baraka staff, including a gentleman named Nehemiah Kahato, Steinhilber said she “did dressing changes, education, met newborn babies and their ‘mamas,’ and gave injections.”
The doctor there asked her about what was being done in the United States to treat various health conditions.
“I had to be culturally sensitive about the Maasai,” she said. “… Male circumcision (occurs) at 13. They subsist on milk, meat and blood. The reason the Maasai are so prominent is because they are so fiercely proud.”
Steinhilber said she returned home “knowing that ophthalmology services were in dire need.”
Seeking “another way to work with Kahato (and) get ophthalmology services to the Mara region in the southern Rift Valley of Kenya, (she) called (him) and said, ‘Let’s put our heads together.’ ”
Through the father of one of her daughter’s schoolmates, she found Global Retina.
Its mission is to foster “sustainable solutions for retinal disease management around the world.” Its vision is that “everyone (have) adequate access to retinal expertise.”
Steinhilber’s story about her concerted efforts to prevent blindness in Kenya is hers to share exclusively — Tuesday morning at the CWC House.
