Patricia has been a midwife and a nurse for over twenty years, and she never gets over the first piercing shriek of a newborn baby as she holds it in its fragility. As a senior health care worker at New Masala Health Center in Ndola City in northern Zambia, she manages the maternity health unit serving a community of over 54,000 people. Despite resource shortages and a high patient load, she tirelessly juggles over 400 births a month, delivering an average of twelve babies a night.

For Patricia, it is more than work that she reports to, it isa calling to save lives and support women. As a young girl, she would dance in an oversize nurse uniform borrowed from her aunt, who worked at the big hospital in a nearby town.