Marion Tinsley : Nurse from Mattpan holds a newborn she helped to deliver during a medical mission to Zambia last month.Marion Tinsley, a 47-year-old Mattapan nurse who works at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Jamaica Plain, has longed for a chance to connect her African heritage with a desire to help the less fortunate around the world.

Last month, Tinsley cashed in her vacation days and jetted across the equator to Zambia, an African nation she’d never visited. She signed up online to spend two weeks at a missionary clinic that serves as a 24-hour emergency room for the Tonga tribe, a people who live off the land in the South African “bush” in circumstances not unlike those their ancestors knew in centuries past.

“The Tonga are very genuine people, very compassionate,” says Tinsely, a Dorchester native who lives near Lower Mills with her husband and 10-year-old son. “And even when I was able to go away from the village, people didn’t know I was any different until I started speaking. They’d never seen an African-American before and it’s a huge head trip. There was one villager who was convinced he saw me at the market last week and I tried to explain, no, I’m not from here. I’m African-American!”

The connection Tinsely made with the Tonga people at the Sons of Thunder medical farm transcended her own ancestral roots. Since she’s spent her nursing career caring for older adults at the V.A., Tinsley had little experience dealing with kids and newborns. That all changed dramatically during her first hours at the clinic.

“A woman walked in the door in labor. She was about 22-years-old and had just walked something like 20 miles with her family. Everyone started rushing around getting her prepared and I told the director, ‘I really don’t do babies, I do adult medicine.’ And he said, ‘You said you came here to help, now get in there!”

Over the next two weeks, Tinsley supervised some 12 live births— all of them with healthy, positive outcomes.

Much of her time was also spent testing patients for HIV-infection.

“HIV is rampant in the villages,” Tinsley reported. “It is just amazing to see one person after another and their families deal with the constant spread of the virus. It’s so common that of all people we treated- only one woman really seemed devastated by the news [that she was infected.] Everyone else would just say, ‘Okay, how do I get the medicine.’”

The patients at the Sons of Thunder clinic, she said, all received free medical care, including HIV meds.

Tinsley, a graduate of English High and Regis College — where she is now working on her Master’s degree in Nursing— says she is already planning a return trip to Zambia.

“I sent them a care package last week and I stay in touch with the nursing students who staff the clinic via email,” she said. “I will definitely do it again.”