Dr. Theoneste with the 3-year old girl with cerebral palsy
View from my balcony at Hotel de Milles Collines
Kigali is so different from Shyira. Louise, the doctor of internal medicine that I worked with at Shyira Hospital, told me that she tells people that the difference between the U.S. and Kigali is the same as the difference between Kigali and Shyira and I think she's right. We didn't have electricity in Shyira so that meant no refrigerators, using lots of flashlights, no oxygen or X-ray machines at the hospitals, and warm showers had to be taken during daylight hours. Now I feel like a cosmopolitan African with a television and lights and a hairdyer! Kigali is such a cool city and there are lots of ex-pats here. In fact, some of Erika's friends from college stayed with us in Shyira last night (they work in Kigali at an international school during the year), and they told us that Ewan McGregor is doing a motorcycling trip from north Africa to Capetown and he is in Kigali right now. I'm typing from a cafe near the Kigali "mall", or the UTC (Union Trade Center), so I'm going to go down to the mall's coffee shop and scope out the situation. The coffee shop is called Bourbon Street and it looks just like a Starbucks; this really is America. I also met a cousin of Louise's that I might meet up with later today/night. His name is Sam and he's a mid-20s USC grad working in Kigali.
My last couple days in Shyira were bittersweet. I was eager to use the internet and have a hot shower in Kigali, but I got to know my apt mate, Erika, and the doctors and will miss them. Erika is doing her family medicine rotation at Shyira and is almost done with PA school. She is from Tennessee, went to undergrad in Arkansas and now is in PA school in New Mexico. She worked in Kenya for a year and was in Uganda right before coming to Rwanda. We bonded by listening to Seinfeld and Demetri Martin on her laptop and trying to bake cakes with no eggs or butter. She was really helpful around the hospital and helped answer my questions about diseases and patient cases.
I did a couple more days of rounds with Louise (she checked the female and male wards every morning) and Dr. Matthias Kohls (he did maternity rounds, C-sections, births and some general surgeries). My last day I got to see a finger be amputated. This woman had leprosy and she lost feeling in her fingers about 5 years ago, so when she developed a really bad infection (probably staph), she didn't notice immediately. Erika and I watched as Matthias amputated her left index finger at the middle joint. Her finger was so large and swollen, though, that it didn't even look like a finger. Then I sat with Dr. Theoneste and listened to his cases. He was working in the outpatient part of the hospital and so we saw a boy who had hip pain (he had likely TB of the femoral head), a 3-year old with cerebral palsy, and a woman who had arthritis and heart palpitations. I have a cool picture of the boy's hip X-ray that I will try to post. Dr. Theoneste thought it was T.B. (tuberculosis) in his hip joint, but the non-African doctors couldn't agree because they'd never seen T.B. in a joint in Europe or the states.
The day before yesterday I interviewed Caleb King (or Dr. King), who is the head of Public Health in the Shyira sector (I think that is his official title). I also walked to the public secondary school in Shyira and interviewed their headmistress. She was a really interesting lady and told me about a program the Rwandan government started in 1999 called "Rwandan Women: the sky is your limit!". She was entertaining and very helpful, since one of the millenium development goals is to empower women and reduce gender inequalities. I learned that over 50% of the Rwandan parliament are women. I'm going to go buy some yogurt (yay for refrigeration!!). Hopefully I can download more pictures from Johannesburg tomorrow.
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