prov1810

So today started out with breakfast alone. Christina spent the night at Simon's house with Dinah, his daughter. Breakfast was more of the usual: bread, eggs, fruit, Tea, etc. When I was having breakfast, you all in America were tucking in for the night on Wednesday. It was already Thursday, November 24th for me, but I really could not calinto "thanksgiving" I got to the clinic and things were off to a slow start, but after the confusion cleared we got into a good flow of seeing patients and discussing diagnoses and plans. It was great working in a collaborative fashion, learning from the Rwandese and Congolese doctors I was working with at the same time I was teaching them. We did more cervical cancer screening and found another candidate for cryotherapy. I am a little ... read more

Blog day 10 Breakfast was busy today and buffet style. There were several French people at the restaurant and a few ?English people.I found out that there is a two week bicycle ride in Rwanda - this week and next or so Dr. Pascal thinks. They ride in each province of Rwanda, yesterday was Kigali, today is Gisenyi. I think this would be fun to do some day. This could combine 2 of my favorite pastimes: bike riding and traveling to Rwanda! This morning at clinic we saw 7 women for cervical cancer screening, bringing the total for the trip to 11. We screened 5 HIV positive women. Today we had our first positive screen (one of the HIV positive women) and she will be coming back for cryotherapy. Dr. Pascal thought it best to have ... read more

Blog Day 7-8 Okay, let's see if I can put "pen to paper" quickly since I am exhausted. Sunday we had the usual breakfast, and then Simon picked us up at 9:30 to go to church.  The service was very nice with lots of singing before and after the preaching.  The service started at 10 am, and ended around 12:30 or so.  This type of service would not go over in America!  Christina Audi were asked to speak at the beginning of the service.  I was not prepared for this, but I should have been and I was not really surprised by this in retrospect. We went back to the hotel for lunch and then had time to do some studying.  Christina had emails from her teachers with assignments and she has an online math text ... read more

Today was a day for several surprisess! The day started same as the previous days  with waking at 6 am, showering and getting ready for breakfast.  Today's breakfast was the same, except for some reason we had two bananas on our plates.   Breakfast also served us another surprise: we had been having breakfast with some business me from Burundi the past 2 days but this morning there was a different gentleman eating with us.  He was more outgoing than the other two gentlemen had been.  He introduced himself as Leonard, and said that he was a medical doctor.  This started a conversation about what type of work he did, and what we were doing in Gisenyi.   He has a dream of developing a private hospital and health center, similar to what I think the ... read more

Day #1 (Monday, Nov 14th) started at 4 am with waking and double checking that I had everything. I am pretty sure I left something at home (like the parts of a first aid kit I was putting together). We got to the airport just after 5 am and got checked in. Somehow I managed to check in Christina using my reservation. This caused some issues, so the ticket agent had to help us. After that was resolved, I had to ask to check my two bags. Christina had already checked her bag when I checked her in at the kiosk. The agent let me check 2 bags without charging for the second bag. She did ask another worker if the second bag was oversized (which it was - $100 fee) and he just shrugged and ... read more