We are All Rwandan
The next day would be my last with this cohort of students, so I bid them all good luck in their rotation when I boarded the Friday afternoon bus back…
The Bus Can Wait
I’ll admit that I was having a great time working at Butaro district hospital. So many of my projects have taken on a more educational flavor that I don’t get…
The Trenches
The typhoid case was one of several that slipped through the cracks due to system failures in that first week. In that same stretch, we also had an 18 year…
Typhoid Fever
Typhoid fever, caused by the bacteria salmonella typhi, is a form of dysentery (infectious bloody diarrhea) spread through contaminated waste that has been part of our lives since likely pre-history.…
The Butterflies Emerge
As I progress in this journey, I continue to ask myself how best to approach this mission to bring about positive change. One of my primary goals for this phase…
Warm, Humble, Hospitable, and Friendly
Through the next several days, I repeated the ultrasound course for a completely new cohort of residents. This time around I was able to improve on the first iteration, with…
The Orphanage
On the last day of the course, I merged the last case review session with Abdullah’s classroom session on biostatistics. An additional group of residents approached me to ask if…
A Body in One Bed and a Head in Another
The next day we hit the ground with a bit more pizzazz, and I was able to start only slightly later than our pre-arranged time of 9:00AM. We covered cardiac…
Twelve Foreigners in a Hotel Conference Room
After being woken by the sounds of Morning Prayer the following day, I got the ultrasound probes and tablets together before heading down to meet the team. Once everyone was…
Pistachios and Kalashnikovs
There are few places in the world as difficult to understand for outsiders as Afghanistan. A country that has been destroyed by war several times over the last 45 years,…