There are no television dramas about pharmacists who make their way through raging battles to deliver medications just in time to save the day.

A show like that could give pharmacists the sort of glory that "CSI" shows give to forensic pathologists.

But if there were such a television show, it could be based on the life of Sharon Connor, 39, of Point Breeze, who traveled to Kenya and Ethiopia to volunteer as a pharmacist for Doctors Without Borders.

Connor was guest speaker yesterday at Penn State McKeesport as part of the campus program, Teaching Africa 2005. She had prepared a slide show on her experiences with Doctors Without Borders.

Connor didn't serve in a crisis situation, such as when Doctors Without Borders responded to the Indonesian tsunami or African civil wars. Instead, she spent her time in missions that the organization had been running for long periods of time.

In an interview, she said of her work, "It's not like you can say you did anything profound, because you're sort of a cog that is part of sustaining what is already there."

But in Africa, she developed a real knowledge of the country's health issues and the public health policy issues they pose, such as medicines needed to treat AIDS being too expensive for nearly the entire population.

Mary Ellen Higgins, an assistant professor of English at Penn State McKeesport who is on the committee overseeing the Teaching Africa 2005 program, said Connor's talk was the fourth in a series that has also addressed West African history, African art and literature and its similarities to African American art and literature, and African dance.

Every year, Penn State McKeesport conducts a yearlong program about a different part of the world, incorporating the studies by various programs and presentations. Higgins said the list of fall programs on Africa had not been finalized.

In 2002, Connor spent six months in Kenya dispensing medications in a hospital in the small town of Homa Bay, where Doctors Without Borders had set up a project to combat HIV and tuberculosis.

The work was to ensure that people in the area had access to basic medications to treat those diseases, such as the antiretroviral drugs that are the first-line drugs against AIDS.

In Ethiopia, her job was to work with drug distributors and that country's version of the Food and Drug Administration, called the Drug Administration and Control Authority, to make it legal to import the same drugs she had been dispensing in Kenya.

Connor is an assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Pittsburgh where, in addition to teaching pharmacy courses, she works with free health care clinics to distribute medications to people who can't afford them. The clinics where she works include the Salvation Army clinic on the North Side and Bethlehem Haven clinic, Uptown.

In some ways her work at the clinics is the same sort of work she did in Africa. She distributes antibiotics, asthma medications and high blood pressure medications in Pittsburgh, just as she did in Africa.

But in Africa, there was a much higher need for antibiotics. Her pharmacy there also needed antimalarial drugs, tuberculosis drugs and the drug to fight the fatal parasitic infection kala azar, which is transmitted through the bite of a sand flea.

She said the most profound work she did was in Ethiopia, because once the antiretroviral drugs were allowed into the country, people with AIDS had some hope of survival. The difference she saw was that people started to be tested once they heard there were drugs, which meant they could be counseled and given condoms to try to stop the spread of the disease.

So while the work she did may never make it to a made-for-television movie, she said, pharmacists are important members, if not the big stars, of the medical teams.

She said she would like to go back again.

"I just enjoy the work."