Having always wanted to do humanitarian work, when Red Cross asked her if she wanted to help with the West Africa ebola crisis, she had to say yes.
"One of the reasons I did nursing was because I could see that I could eventually do that sort of work. I've got this training and I want to be able to use it and put it to where it's going to do the most good."
Ms Percival touched down on January 11 with five other Red Cross workers, after training in Switzerland.
They went to a centre in Kenema and then to a centre in Koidu, a town about the size of Palmerston North, for five weeks.
Koidu had a massive outbreak at the end of November and a team from Kenema set up a centre there after finding the hospital totally overwhelmed.
"They said it was just absolutely awful - there were bodies everywhere, some staff were still trying to treat people but a lot of them had contracted it, and they died."
Ms Percival, who had never been to a third world country before, said it was an eye-opening experience.
"It was not only the disease the locals were dealing with, it was their whole social structure, it was just decimated.
"They were really hard working people just hanging out for it to finish so they could go back to normal life."
Much of her work involved disinfection measures, safely handling the bodies of those who died and carefully dressing and undressing workers' protective suits. Culturally, people normally mourned by having contact with the bodies - which were highly contagious.
"One of the most common places where you would get outbreaks were funerals."
She said that initially people were scared of the Red Cross, because people went into the centres and never came out - because they died.
"One of the main myths the local people believed was that the white or western people were getting people into these hospitals to harvest organs."
She said while ebola was certainly declining now, people were still fearful of contracting it.
It was rampant, wiping out whole families and it killed those infected quickly, she said.
"There were times when I went home and bawled my eyes out because it just seemed so hopeless. Coupled with the poverty and people dying and just their whole way of life, it was just so overwhelming."
She said to cope, she just had to be realistic about what she could do.
Her friends and family were "semi-prepared" when she told them she was going because they knew she had been wanting to help in a conflict zone.
"I think some were a little concerned because ebola had such a high profile."
At first, her two adult children were not overly concerned, but when her daughter learned she was going to help with the crisis, she "kind of freaked out."
"When I said I was going to Africa they said 'Oh, okay mum'."
Her daughter then asked her, "You're not going near that disease place are you?"
After arriving back home, reporting to Regional Public Health and getting the all-clear, she hoped to go overseas again with Red Cross.
She said workers did not just swoop in and out but left behind infrastructure and trained people to cope for future crises.
