Mary Lou Schulz Fisher
Mary Lou Schulz Fisher grew up in a rural farming community, and even as a child, dreamed of becoming a nurse and traveling the world beyond Iowa. Her nursing career began in the nearby city of St. Louis, where she received her Diploma in Nursing at Lutheran Hospital Medical center in 1965. After marriage to the Rev. Gary Fisher, work at various hospitals in Norfolk, Virginia (including psychiatric units, emergency departments, pediatrics, and intensive care units), the birth of two children, and the adoption of a third, her journey continued in Jacksonville, NC in the late Seventies and Eighties. Mary Lou was a full-time nurse at Onslow Memorial Hospital and mother of three teenagers when she decided to commute (online coursework wasn’t an option in the mid-Eighties) to Greenville on Saturdays to obtain a BSN degree, which she successfully earned in 1985 from the ECU College of Nursing.
When she arrived in Baltimore, MD in 1989 because of her husband’s church transfer, she brought 23 years of experience from Onslow with her. In the Nineties, after seeing her three children off to college and successfully batting breast cancer, she earned her MSN from Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and worked as a Nurse Practitioner at Johns Hopkins Emergency Dept., serving challenging inner-city populations for 13 years. Then in 2006, at age 62, while most of her colleagues began to think about retirement, Mary Lou finally saw an opportunity to realize her childhood dream when she became a traveling nurse with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based medical and missionary non-profit. Over the next eight years she worked in over 24 countries as a health and nutrition advisor, and despite the tragedies she witnessed in areas ravaged by war and natural disasters, Mary Lou not only persevered, but thrived, knowing that her daily work made a difference that she could see on the faces of her patients all over the world.
It is with joyful remembrance that Mary Lou’s family and friends made this scholarship possible and hope that in doing so, its recipients will continue to take Mary Lou’s torch of compassionate and skilled care to those populations where it is often least expected.