My wife Maureen Krill, who died aged 68 from complications of a rare autoimmune disease, worked as a nurse, midwife and health care manager and spent much of her working life in challenging humanitarian roles in AfricaSouth America, Asia and the tip of North America.
Practical, tough, practical and brave, she had great resilience, and her cool demeanor set her apart from the hard work she did, often in zones of armed conflict. In every situation, her courage, simple kindness, professionalism and cultural sensitivity have earned her respect and recognition.
Maureen was born in Rusape in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to May (nee Syme), a housewife, and Robert Lynch, a train driver. Her parents left Edinburgh in the early 1950s and raised her to consider Britain 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 the country, which was then war-torn. Zimbabwe in 1979. There she worked as a nurse for Save the Children UK, running mobile clinics in remote, often unsafe areas. After witnessing the lack of health 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 she qualified in 1984, Maureen moved to Burkina Fasowhere she trained traditional midwives on behalf of Save the Children, living in a mud hut without electricity or running water. I was the regional director of a charity there, and she and I met shortly after her arrival: we married in 1986.
After three years in Burkina Faso, Maureen moved with Save the Children to Sindh province in Pakistanwhere she was the health and nutrition program manager. She then became a community nurse (1989–91) in Canada's Northwest Territories and Peru (1991–94) before moving into a more managerial role as health program manager in Cuba (1995–96) for Save the Children and then in the Democratic Republic of Congo for World Care.
Returning to the UK in 1998, she managed the logistics of Save the Children's head office move from Camberwell to Vauxhall in London. But a year later she re-entered the field as a community nurse/midwife for the Department of Health. Canadaserving Inuit settlements in the Northwest Territories and the communities of Kwanlin Dune in the Yukon, where we lived for the next 20 years.
Throughout her time abroad, Marouin was a devoted reader of the Guardian Weekly, which in those days was printed on airmail paper. The copies followed her around, often weeks ago when she received them, and served as her window into the outside world.
In 2015, we decided to live out our retirement in the north of Spain, but before that we had one last adventure: we flew to Mongolia, hired guides and camels, and rode through the Gobi Desert. At the end of the journey, surrounded by curious camels, Maureen buried her straw hat in the sand, signaling the end of her adventurous years.
She is survived by me and her brother Gerard.
