Sean and I saying goodbye for the next 26 days. He had just had shoulder surgery to fix a torn labrum.
I can't remember the total travel time there, but I think it was something around 48 hours. Lots of lay overs and long flights.
100$ = 56,000 Rwandan Francs
Our awesome hotel. I was just expecting to sleep in a cabin. We were treated really well.
We got a little lost and went for a fun walk around the "residential" neighborhoods
Nice little walk
Hole in the wall place that a local told us to go to. Definitely the first white people to ever go there.
Pretty typical Rwandan food. Plantains boiled in tomato sauce, beans, rice, potatoes, some kind of fibrous root, and salad that does not have one piece of lettuce in it. Honestly, pretty good for a bland diet.
Pretty typical Rwandan food. Plantains boiled in tomato sauce, beans, rice, potatoes, some kind of fibrous root, and salad that does not have one piece of lettuce in it. Honestly, pretty good for a bland diet.
While the first patients were going through surgery and then the ICU, that gave some of the step-down nurses a chance to go on our little day trips. We went on a safari on an wildlife reserve. It was a great experience. We woke up on the edge of this lake where our lodge was at. Not a bad view.
Baboon! and baby
Giraffes!
Zebra!
On our way back to our hotel, we saw this truck full of prisoners. Our tour guide explained to us that the people who were convicted of war crimes during the genocide have to wear pink and then the ones who have actual sentences wear orange. I was a little nervous taking this picture.
Back at King Faisal Hospital, the OR team is working on the patients.
Brooke was showing one of our two pediatric patients what a normal heart should sound like. These two girls stole our hearts.
We would work a couple of days and then have a day off. On one of our days off we went to see a couple genocide memorials. This whole country was rocked in 1994 when close to a million people died in 3 months! This is a picture of the building where the UN Belgian Soldiers were murdered.
Inside this church, they brought people in telling them that they were going to be safe. They locked the doors and then threw in grenades and shot them with machine guns. Approximately 10,000 people were killed in this small church. You can still see the bullet holes in the baptism basin and the blood stained walls. This was a very emotional part of our trip.
This sign says something to the effect of, "If you would've known me, you wouldn't have killed me." The people running the memorials kept telling us that if their fellow countrymen had taken the time to realize that they were killing their neighbors, they wouldn't have committed these crimes. The country has really come a long way since '94. It appeared very safe and clean and everyone was so welcoming. When you think that most of the people that we were operating on were victims or had their parents killed by the genocide, it puts things into perspective. There are not a lot of people who are older than about 40. There were deep scars on the backs of some of the women patients and one woman even had terrible deep white scars across her lower back. She said that they were from the belt that she cinched around her waist to stop the hunger pains when she was hiding. Amazing resilience and belief in God.
On a lighter note, on our way home we kept seeing billboards similar to this. Yes that is condom that the singer is holding. They are trying to say "I wear one, so should you." Pretty brazen by our standards, but the country has about a 3% HIV rate, so it must be working.
Nothing surprised me by the end of the trip. Typical travel.
Those precious girls. Ester and Rebecca.
Dieudonne was the most fluent in English compared to the other patients. He was studying to be an accountant when he had to stop because he was too sick to keep going to school. He was so happy to tell me, "Now I can go back to school to do what I love." Amazing what open heart surgery can do.
A little free time to go to the market.
Some of the ICU and Step-down RN's
Sometimes the power went out. Thank goodness for headlamps on night shift.
They loved having their pictures taken.
The woman on the right, Joyuese ended up with a flair up of Malaria. She was doing fine by the end of the week.
The equipment was rough...
Interesting part of the trip when we were invited to go to the US Ambassador's House.
Not a bad view for the ambassador
Wrapping up our week of surgeries with lots of pictures.
After a night shift, nothing is better than real hot chocolate and french pastries at a fancy hotel on the way to our lesser hotel.
It's a big ordeal getting everyone on the buses and to the airport. Gotta clear customs. Most of the team left a week before us. 5 RN's and a MD stayed to make sure all the patients finished their recovery. We had our little scare when one woman had a 9 second pause and ended up getting a pacemaker. Fun times!
So we moved from the hotel to stay in the guest house of the hospital. Such a juxtaposition seeing a nice house next to poverty.
All in all, wonderful trip, great people and an amazing experience. Hope to do it again someday... especially this time with Sean.
Sorry this post is such a long time coming! The move to Dallas really put other things as a priority above blogging.
