A Nurse's Notes

My Mother

A little boy made friends with Sheila at the baby-naming ceremony yesterday.  Then afterward he came up to me and started chatting.  I took his picture, then gave him my sunglasses to try on, and took another picture.  Then he said something that made everyone laugh.  Translated, he said he liked me and that I should be his mother.  J  Little did he know that I might be fun at a naming ceremony, but things would be a lot different if I were his mother! J

Baby-Naming Ceremony

    Yesterday I went to a baby-naming ceremony.  One of my pharmacy coworkers had a baby in November.  The pharmacy staff and I visited her before Christmas to meet the baby.  But yesterday the family finally had the ceremony to name the baby.  Traditionally, this happens when the baby is eight days old, but this baby is 2½ months old!  

    The ceremony was to start at 1:00 p.m., so we arrived at 1:30.  But the family traveling from other towns had trouble finding taxis, so they arrived at 3:00.  We waited until they arrived. Thankfully, there was a tarp overhead and a breeze to cool us!  When the family finally arrived, they paraded in with gifts of food, fanta, milk, etc.  After singing and a short sermon, the children were brought to the front and fed.  After the kids ate, each one chose a name for the baby, telling an adult who wrote it down.  Then the adults each wrote down a name for the baby. If a person picked the correct name, they'd receive a gift of some sort from the family...but no one got it right.

    Then it was time for everyone else to eat.  The important guests went through a buffet line to dish their own food up while the rest of the guests were given a foil dinner box like for take-out fast food.  After that, the parents stood up with the baby and gave her the name Joyce.  In Rwanda children don't take their father's last name.  Instead a child is given a new last name, which makes it tough to figure out who is related to whom.  And because each person is given their name at birth, a woman doesn't change her name when she gets married. 

    Other than the long wait for the family to arrive, it was quite a nice afternoon.  However, I’m a little sore from sitting on a wooden bench for so long.  And this evening there's a party at the police station to which we've been invited.  Hm-m-m…more bench sitting!  

Yove

Yesterday Sue, a nurse practitioner, and I went to Yove where it seems the worst of our badly malnourished children come from.  For some reason I pictured a dark place, under the canopy of the rainforest with only a little filtered sunlight, with people dressed in dark clothes, and always sad.   Of course, none of this was true!!  I thought it was a small town, but it's actually a region.  As we drove, our hospital social worker pointed out different hills where some of our past patients live.  Suzanne, a little orphan girl, was at Kibogora for two months with malnutrition.  She's twelve years old and is starting in first grade on Tuesday, so we went to her home to give her some school supplies and see how she's doing.   Suzanne was off washing clothes, so a child ran down the hill to find her.  While we waited, we threw a balloon out for the kids to play with because we, of course, had a crowd of kids watching us.  J  Suzanne soon came, looking tiny and a bit embarrassed that she had white people visiting her!!  We chatted a bit about her starting school then went outside to take pictures of her and the crowd we'd collected.  It was a very special visit! (Suzanne is dressed in her blue school uniform in the picture with the group of kids)

Finally

Today I finally balanced the mission books for 2009.  That is a good feeling!  I've been wanting to get it done but just haven’t had time.  So today, I committed to getting the job done.  I have to before we get too far into 2010!!  J  After ten hours on Sunday and 4 ½ hours on Monday, the books are balanced and I can sleep tonight…very well, I hope.  J  Still a little work to do at the hospital before I can turn in my 2009 report, but soon I can put 2009 behind me and move on to 2010.

 

Another Lightning Strike!

While Sheila and I were in Kigali this week for a meeting, we received a phone call Friday from Kibogora.  A small storm which didn’t seem like much suddenly became a bolt of lightning that struck the hospital restaurant.  What an expensive half second that was!!  A wall broke in the restaurant and the fridge and electrical outlets burned out.  At the hospital the digital developer for the x-ray machine was destroyed even though it was on a huge voltage stabilizer!  One of the washing machines doesn’t work now.  Our internet system that we had just replaced two weeks earlier due to another lightning strike was also fried…again!  The saddest was the new generator.  It arrived almost four months ago, but it took us two months to get the needed panel and then another two months to get the panel installed.  Two days after it was up and running, the lightning bolt fried the panel!  At the mission station, a hot water tank, fridge, and microwave, plus some internet parts no longer work.  Sometimes we wonder here if all this technology is worth it.  J  So if you haven’t heard from me for a while…now you know why!!

Rather Dull

I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth or anything like that.  I've just been really, really busy working on end-of-year statistics for my 2009 annual report.  I'd hoped to have this done by now, but, sadly, I found a number of math errors on the part of my coworkers, so I've had to go back and check almost everything to make sure the numbers are correct.  That's taken me a good two weeks.  Now I’m to the point where I can start writing reports based on the statistics we gathered during the year, like how many gloves we used, how many syringes for each department, and so on and so on.  So my life's been rather dull lately, sitting in a chair with paper and calculator, day in and day out.  On the other hand, it's been good for my flat tire average.  I haven’t gone anywhere for a week, so no flat tires. J  However, Wednesday I go to Kigali with Sheila for a church board meeting.  Watch out, tires!

Hanging Curtains

    Ndasu, our newly married Congolese surgeon, is moving into a hospital house.  I was given the keys to bring the mattresses in, then told to give the keys to the man in charge of cleaning.  I suggested that maybe we should do it the other way around.  J

    Then I found out I had to make all the curtains by the next day.  Yikes!!  Thankfully, Ndasu couldn’t move until Monday, so I had four days to get the place ready.  It's tough hanging curtains in this country!  Culturally here in Rwanda, the pretty print is to face out the window with the wrong side of the fabric, seams and all, showing in the house.  I had to work hard at remembering to hang the curtains the way Ndasu and his wife would like them, rather than the way I'm used to!

Care Packages

My dad is good at sending care packages.  So when Sheila arrived from Kigali with a package, Jack, a nine-year-old from the UK, helped me open it.  Butterfingers, Almond Joy, granola bars, cake mixes, canned chicken, and a book.  Pretty exciting stuff in Jack's mind although he wasn’t too excited about the book. But when he got to the bottom, he hollered, "What's this?!” as he pulled out pieces of a disassembled hand plane!  "NOT a good thing to get in a care package!!" he declared.  Guess it just depends on your perspective, as my dad would love getting a hand plane in a care package.  J  Jack went away quite happy with a handful of candy for the family’s dessert that night.  I was pleased since my candy supply had been desperately low.  Now I have a bit of a reserve! J  Thanks, Dad!!

No Internet...Again!!

The night of the flood at Matt's house, the lightning blew the hospital internet system…once again!  The last time the internet was fried, we said we'd get a voltage stabilizer, but, of course, we never got around to it.  You won’t get this e-mail for a few days because of all this.  It was interesting to hear different people’s reaction to the fact we'd have no internet for a week.  My coworker in the pharmacy was one of the worst.  But you can’t really blame him as he can’t send an e-mail order into Kigali until the internet's working.  So even here in Rwanda, we're addicted to the internet, just like in the USA.  J  (This time we're going to buy that stabilizer!) 

The Flood

    When a lot of people think of Africa, they think of desert, sand, hot sun, very few trees, and only a little green.  Well, Rwanda is not that Africa!!  Rwanda is very green, and tonight we had more than enough rain!!  It started about 5:00 p.m.  No big deal, but it rained harder and kept on and on.  I felt sorry for the Rwandans with leaky roofs.  As the rains kept on, I wondered if some houses would collapse.  

    Around 6:00 p.m. Matt called to say their mission house was being flooded.  Okay, no problem, I’d come help out, but I didn’t know what I was getting into!!  The house is built on the cutout of a hill.  All the water on two sides of the hill was running down the walkway to the front door.  The  drain near the front door was blocked with leaves.  And on the far end of the house, the yard slopes up a little, creating a huge lake on two sides of the house.  These were, of course, the two sides of the house where the three doors are located!!  Matt's family, sitting down to dinner, didn't realizing their house was slowly being taken over by water until it reached the dinner table!!  So they called for help.

    The more hands the better in a situation like this.  I came with brooms.  I had my umbrella up, but by the time I got there, I knew it was useless.  It was just raining too hard.  The deep water soaked my shoes, so ditching those along with my umbrella, glasses, watch, and cell phone, I went to work.  While Matt's family mopped out the inside, I attacked the outside!  Why mop out the house if the water level outside is higher?!   First, I cleared the blocked drain at the front door, creating a whirlpool of rushing muddy water.  Then I looked for another drain along the back of the house.  There wasn’t one!  I suggested to Matt that he might consider putting a drain there, and Matt said he'd have to think about it. J  The next plan of attack was to push the water up an incline to the drain, away from the main flooding at the two back doors.  Another reason to put in a second drain!  

    With the rain pelting down, lightning streaking across the night sky, and thunder crashing all around, I worked in stocking feet in ankle deep water, trying to keep up with the water racing down the hill and the rainwater barreling off the tin roof of the house. Ezekiel, one of our day watchmen who hadn’t gone home yet because it was raining so hard, helped out.  We got a pretty good system going.  With brooms and floor squeegees, we walked down the sidewalk side by side, pushing water ahead of us as fast as we could toward the drain!  We don't speak the same language, but we worked well together.  Thanks to teamwork and a slackening of the rain, slowly the water level lowered, so the water being pushed out of the house didn't run back in.  The plan of action for tomorrow:  dry out the many wet area rugs in the sunshine and install a new drain!!