“Nobody had ever given me a range before.”

I had been trying to leave Kenya for two years before I found Northline, and by the time I did I had stopped believing anybody. The first agency wanted 180,000 shillings to “process” my file. The second one did not ask for money at the beginning, which is how they get you; the money comes later, in a contract you sign at the airport. A friend of mine paid that one for eleven months and never went anywhere.

So when I sent the first email I was not hopeful. I sent it at twenty to midnight after a night shift, because that is when I did everything that year. The reply came the next afternoon and it did not say congratulations. It said that with six years in ICU I was a strong candidate for Ireland and Australia, that Canada would take at least fourteen months because of the assessment, and that Germany was closed to me because I did not speak German. It gave a range: six to nine months for Ireland. Nobody had ever given me a range before. They had given me dates, always, and the dates were always wrong.

“They had given me dates, always, and the dates were always wrong.”

The clinical interview was with a nurse, not a recruiter, and it was harder than the hospital interview that came later. She asked me how I would manage a patient on noradrenaline whose mean arterial pressure had dropped in the last ten minutes, and then she asked me what I would do if the registrar disagreed with me. That second question is the real one. I have thought since that if an agency does not ask it, they are not really assessing you at all.

St James’s interviewed me on the eighth of December by video. Forty minutes with the clinical nurse manager for ICU 2 and an educator. Northline had sent me the panel’s names, the format, and the three questions that unit always asks, which felt almost like cheating until I realised that they wanted me to be good, because a candidate who falls apart in an interview is a wasted eight months for everybody.

The hard part was not the interview. The hard part was February to June, when nothing happens and you have to keep living your life as though it might. My mother asked me every Sunday whether there was news. For four months the answer was no. What Northline did — and I did not appreciate it at the time — was write to me every second Friday even when the answer was no. The email would say: nothing has changed, your file is at stage three of four, the current queue at NMBI is running at fourteen weeks, here is the date we expect to hear. It sounds like a small thing. It is the entire difference between waiting and being abandoned.

In April the board came back and asked for more evidence about my clinical hours. Kenyatta had given me a letter that said “six years” and the Irish board wanted the hours, by year, signed. Fatima wrote the exact wording I should give my nursing officer, and I had it back in nine days. If I had been doing that alone I would have sent the wrong thing and lost another two months. I know that because it is what happened to a colleague of mine who went through a different agency, and she is still in Nairobi.

The decision letter came on the sixth of June. I read it four times in the changing room and then I went and did a twelve-hour shift.

“I read it four times in the changing room and then I went and did a twelve-hour shift.”

Ireland was not what I expected, and I want to be honest about the parts that were hard. I arrived on the eleventh of July at twenty past six in the morning and it was fifteen degrees and raining, in July. I lived in hospital accommodation in Rialto for the first ten weeks, which was fine and which I needed, because no landlord in Dublin will rent to somebody with no Irish payslip and no PPS number. Finding my own place took six weeks of viewings where thirty people turned up to see one room. That is not Northline’s fault and they had told me it would be like that, but being told and living it are different things.

The money was better than home and less than I imagined. Rent takes a third of it. Nobody warned me about the first six weeks before payroll catches up — actually that is not true, they did warn me, in writing, twice, and I did not really hear it. Bring the month of money they tell you to bring.

Work has been the easy part, which surprised everybody except me. Intensive care is intensive care. The equipment is newer, the ratios are better, the drug names are the same. What I had to learn was the way people talk to each other here — the indirectness, the way a consultant says “I wonder if we might” when he means “do this now”. Six months in, a registrar disagreed with me about a sedation hold and I held my ground, and afterwards I thought about that question in the interview.

Ngozi called me in week one, week four and at three months. At three months I cried on the phone, which I had not planned to do. She did not try to fix it. She said that month three is when everybody does that, and that it passes, and it did.

My sister is a theatre nurse in Nakuru and she is starting the same process now. I told her two things. Do not pay anybody. And when they give you a date instead of a range, walk away.

As told to Northline, Dublin, August 2025. Edited for length. Grace read and approved this text before publication and was not paid for it.