Rwanda 2011, Day 9

---

Blog Day 9
Ok so I completely forgot to mention a few this about yesterday. Cristina left the clinic in the morning, went to Pastor Simon's house and met up with Dinah. They walked from Simon's house to the village and visited a few of the orphan houses. They were back to Simon's house by 1 pm and had pancakes for lunch (i presume from the mix that we brought for Simon). Then she went to dance rehearsal with Dinah and was recruited to dance with the group on Friday at Simon's church.I worked all day. I had packed a cheese and egg sandwich to the clinic, but only had time to grab a few bites between patients. Today started with a little More of a plan.Christina and Dinah came with us to the clinic and visited some of the orhpans who live near the clinic. Then they walked part way back to Simon's house and the caught a moto taxi. Christina thought that was fun.We saw patients in a collegial consultative fashion today. There were four of us seeing every patient: Dr. Ben, Dr. Pascal, Dr. James and myself. It was a lot of fun to be working side by side and bouncing ideas and diagnoses off of each other. Dr. Ben left late in the morning to get ready to go back to work at his district hospital tomorrow.There was a break in patients around 12:30 today and then we did a little more talking about family planning. I found out that we can buy the IUDs at the local "district pharmacy" but no one knows the price. I asked that we buy some and have a plan so that I can do the teaching. If I cannot do the teaching I feel that I should not leave the instruments here since they will not know how to use them. I am being told that we will have IUDs and patients for Thursday. (later I found out it is not that easy to buy IUDs, but there is a meeting at 7 m (?) tomorrow with one of the nurses and the head of the local district health clinic?!)We saw a few patients after the didactic session.I then was blessed with afternoon tea (or coffee as the case may be) with dr. Ben. He is a very nice older gentleman who wanted to get to know me. We sat and chatted in his front room and then we walked toward the market and were picked up by Caritas and Dr. Pascal. We dropped Dr. Ben off at the pharmacy and went back to pastor simon's and had a snack. Then Simon, Dr. Pascal and I tried to download and install a "open" EMR. The file took almost an hour to download, and then it required another file that was twice the size to install the software on a computer. This is something I will have to explore back in the states where I have access to high speed Internet.We had dinner at Simon's around 8:30 and retuned to the hotel around 9:30 Christina is a little sunburned in the parts of her hair - still wearing the crazy braids. We were both exhausted!

---