My wife, Maureen Crill, who has died aged 68 from complications of a rare autoimmune disease, was a nurse, midwife and health manager who spent most of her working life on challenging humanitarian postings in Africa, South America, Asia and the tip of North America.
Practical, tough, down-to-earth and brave, she had great resilience, and her cool nerve marked her out for the demanding work she carried out, often in areas of armed conflict. In every setting her courage, simple kindness, professionalism and cultural sensitivity earned her respect and acceptance.
Maureen was born in Rusape in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to May (nee Sime), a housewife, and Robert Lynch, a train driver. Her parents had left Edinburgh in the early 1950s and raised her to consider the UK as her true home. After finishing her secondary education in Bulawayo, she went to Edinburgh to train as a nurse, at the Royal Infirmary.
Maureen Crill at work in the Tahoua region of Niger in 2005
Rather than settling in Edinburgh after qualifying, she returned to what was then war-torn Zimbabwe in 1979. There she worked as a nurse for the Save the Children Fund UK, running mobile clinics in remote, often insecure areas. Having witnessed the lack of care available to women in rural Africa, she returned to the UK in 1982 to train as a midwife at the Singleton hospital in Swansea.
As soon as she qualified in 1984, Maureen moved to Burkina Faso, where she provided training to traditional midwives on behalf of Save the Children while living in an adobe hut, with no electricity or running water. I was the charity’s country director there, and she and I met soon after she arrived: we married in 1986.
After three years in Burkina Faso, Maureen moved with Save the Children to Sindh province in Pakistan, where she was a health and nutrition programme manager. She then became a community nurse (1989-91) in the Northwest Territories of Canada and Peru (1991-94), before switching to a more managerial role as a health programme manager in Cuba (1995-96) for Save the Children and then in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Concern Worldwide.
Returning to the UK in 1998, she managed the logistics of the move of Save the Children’s head office from Camberwell to Vauxhall in London. But within a year she was out in the field again as a community nurse/midwife with Health Canada, serving Inuit settlements in the Northwest Territories and Kwanlin Dün communities in the Yukon, where we lived for the next 20 years.
Throughout her time abroad, Marueen was a devoted reader of Guardian Weekly, which in those days was printed on airmail paper. Copies would follow her, often weeks old by the time she received them, and served as her window on the outside world.
In 2015 we decided to live out our retirement in northern Spain, but not before one last bit of adventure: we flew to Mongolia, hired guides and camels, and rode across the Gobi desert. At the end of the trip, surrounded by curious camels, Maureen buried her straw hat in the sand, signalling the end of her adventurous years.
She is survived by me and her brother, Gerard.
