anna grace haas silva: Rwanda-- Week 1

Muraho! Greeting from Rwamagana, Rwanda.

Claire’s and my first week here has been an adventure. Each week I hope to share a small update, a highlight, a challenge, and something comical that has happened from our experience here.

We arrived Thursday night and spent the weekend in Kigali with my sister Emily, her finacé Shami, Noel, and Mama Nyanja and Babu (our friends with whom we stay while in the city). We were able to adjust to the time change quickly (really no jet lag at all- we are becoming experts at this!) and we enjoyed adventures around the city to exchange our money into Rwandan francs and go to the outdoor market to buy vegetables and fruit. I was also so excited to go back to Emily’s church which I very much enjoyed while visiting in December.

On Monday we were ready to go the Rwamagana Hospital (about an hour from Kigali) for our first day to become orientated and see where we would be doing our rotations. This is a government hospital and it has an ER, a pharmacy, a mental health ward, an outpatient ward, a physical therapy ward, a surgical ward, an internal medicine ward, a maternity ward, and a pediatric ward.

Although they mostly speak Kinyarwanda and French, the doctors and medical students know enough English to communicate and they are very welcoming. We learned that this is one of the four teaching hospitals in Rwanda, and we are thankful to be in this learning environment where the nurses and doctors want to help us learn and achieve our goals.

Update: This first week we have been working alongside three Rwandan nursing/ medical students who are on rotations in the pediatric ward with us, and they speak English very well. They taught us how they fill out the nursing care plan for each patient on a daily basis, how to take vital signs, and we learned what it sounds like through a stethoscope when a patient has pneumonia or asthma. We also learned how to read an x-ray to check if a patient has tuberculosis.

The most common illnesses that the pediatric patients present here is malaria, malnutrition, and pneumonia. Cases of cleft lip and palate are also present.

Highlights of the week: Rwamagana is beautiful! It is also very safe so we can walk around the town without needing a Rwandan to accompany us, even after dark. We both agreed that we could live in a place like this.

The people here are very friendly and we are enjoying learning how hospitals are operated in countries of limited resources. The staff are very welcoming and we are learning a lot about the common diseases found in in children here and the proper treatments.

Challenge of the week: Both Claire and I have new Dansko shoes for nursing, and we are currently breaking them in (we will be ready to start clinicals at school in the fall!) but because we leave to walk to the hospital at 7:45am and get back for lunch at 12:45pm, then go back from 1:45pm to 5:00pm. This many hours of standing and walking for multiple days in a row is making for very hurting feet! Claire also has problems with her left foot and right knee, and I have problems with my lower back, so we are in much pain while getting accustomed to standing for so many hours at a time.

Humor of the week: on our first day of work, I poured salt instead of sugar into my coffee! I missed out on a great cup of coffee (and caffeine). The next day I skipped attempting to put sugar in altogether.

Also the toilet clogged this day, and by the time we acquired a toilet plunger, it was after dark and the electricity had also gone out! How Claire and I have both gone our whole lives without having to plunge a toilet, I don’t know, but it would be a first for both of us, and somehow I was elected to do it. Thankfully Claire brought her headlamp (so glad I gave that to her for her birthday a couple years ago—it certainly comes in handy so often for us!) so headlamp on head and plunger in hand I went into the dark bathroom without a clue as to what I was doing. But whatever I did worked! On my first try, I successfully plunged a toilet (and good thing, because clogged toilets are becoming a daily theme). As I washed my hands afterwards, the sink started to leak. Nothing the bathroom floor rag can’t clean up for now.

Another funny was that Claire and I have started a small running club… here in Rwamagana the neighborhood dirt roads are great for running, but every day after coming home from the hospital when we go out for a jog, the neighborhood kids think it’s a great idea to join us so as we go, we collect a small pack of kids jogging behind us, and they think it’s hilarious!