Day 1 in

After a good night sleep (sort of) we went to the Serena Hotel today to meet some fellow Americans living in Rwanda for lunch.    Emily Nelson (anesthesiologist from the Brigham) and her husband (orthopedic surgeon) are living in Rwanda for the year working in Butaro with PIH.  It was nice to finally meet her in person after communicating over email for the past several months.  We shared stories and it ends up her husband is actually from Savannah (my home time).  What a small world.  She shared many stories with us about the difficulty of providing anesthetic care in a country with limited resources.  Last week a 7 year old child came into the hospital with tetanus.  Unfortunately there was no ventilator available for the child so even with tetanus toxoid they were not able to adequately care for the child.   It just reminds me how fortunate we are to live in a country with so many resources that we take for granted.

We continued our adventure by heading up to the Nakamatt. (grocery store).  Very interesting experience.  We were able to buy pretty much everything we needed.  Tonight we are headed to  a restaurant called Zaffron to meet some colleagues from Boston.  It is a working dinner to discuss the Safe Course/Lifebox/Surgical Check List implementation project.

Tomorrow is our first day at CHUK.  We are really looking forward to meeting the residents and starting our month.  We have many things on our agenda to accomplish.  Hopefully we will be able to accomplish 1/2 of them.

More soon!