[ti:California Nurse Follows Mother’s Footsteps in Fighting Pandemic] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:00.04]A California nurse helping to fight COVID-19 [00:04.56]says she feels a special link to her mother, [00:09.08]who helped battle the 1918 flu pandemic. [00:15.56]Sigrid Stokes is a 76-year-old nurse from Salinas, California. [00:23.28]She told The Associated Press [00:26.08]she has no plans to immediately retire from her job. [00:32.12]She says she is too busy working to save lives [00:36.88]during a deadly pandemic, [00:39.20]just as her mother did more than a century ago. [00:45.12]Her mother, Kristine Berg Mueller, [00:48.64]helped treat people during the flu pandemic [00:51.92]that spread around the world in 1918. [00:56.60]Today, Stokes is giving vaccinations [01:00.68]to health care workers battling COVID-19. [01:06.04]Mueller was a 14-year-old student in her native Norway [01:10.88]when the flu pandemic hit. [01:14.12]That pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people, [01:19.12]including about 675,000 in the United States, [01:25.20]records from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention show. [01:31.92]Stokes said her mother wanted to do her part [01:35.88]to help those suffering during the pandemic. [01:40.52]“So she and a friend volunteered at the local hospital [01:45.68]to help out in whatever way they could [01:48.72]-- which I would imagine would be things like feeding people, [01:52.72]bathing people, changing beds, whatever they could do,” she said. [01:59.72]Many years after the 1918 pandemic, [02:03.88]Stokes said her mother told her [02:07.12]the experience led her to want to become a nurse. [02:11.84]But the family had no money to send Mueller to nursing school. [02:17.88]Her mother moved to the United States in 1923. [02:23.60]Four years later, she was accepted into an American nursing program. [02:30.04]Mueller married and settled in Los Angeles, [02:33.52]where Stokes’ father ran a bookstore. [02:38.16]One of her mother’s nursing jobs was to work on Hollywood movie sets [02:43.88]to make sure child actors stayed safe and healthy. [02:48.88]One of the many pictures Stokes has of her mother shows Mueller [02:54.72]happily talking to famous child star Shirley Temple. [03:00.76]Stokes said she enjoys her work [03:03.80]and now takes the responsibility [03:06.52]of giving COVID-19 vaccine shots very seriously. [03:11.92]“I give very good shots, I might add, good jabs,” she told the AP. [03:19.84]It wasn’t until Stokes was in her late 20s [03:23.48]that she decided she wanted to follow her mother into nursing. [03:28.80]“I was volunteering in the pediatric ward and so on [03:33.40]and I all of a sudden realized, you know, I really like this,” she said. [03:40.68]Stokes was working part-time when the coronavirus crisis [03:45.80]hit he country early last year. [03:49.64]She says she was too old to safely treat COVID-19 patients, [03:55.44]but knew she could help with vaccinations. [04:00.20]As she arrives to work each day, [04:03.20]she wears a pair of earrings she made from a Norwegian necklace [04:08.56]that her mother wore each day before her death in 1995. [04:15.24]“I wear them every time I come to work [04:18.32]because I feel like it’s a sort of talisman [04:21.60]that she’s with me and our family,” Stokes said. [04:27.00]COVID-19 has killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide, [04:33.60]including more than 460,000 in the U.S. [04:39.20]Stokes says she will not consider retiring [04:43.88]until the virus has been slowed. [04:47.52]“We’ve got to get this done,” she said. [04:50.60]“We’ve got to get people vaccinated [04:53.36]so we can get this country moving again.” [04:57.24]I’m Bryan Lynn. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM