Life in Butare

This is the beginning of our fourth week living in Butare, a small historic city in the Southern Province. It has a much slower pace than Kigali, for example the motos don't drive like maniacs! The city is known as the former capital of Butare, during the pre-colonial times, and it is also home to the main campus of the University of Rwanda, a large genocide memorial, kings palace, museum and the only ice cream shop in Rwanda.

We live with the Emmanuel, the head technician at the hospital, his wifi (Celine, an ICU nurse), their a year and half old son, and a house boy and girl. Communicating is rather difficult because the only one that speaks decent english is Celine, so we tend to usually play a game of charades if we want to speak to the house people. Our guard dog is a really nice Labrador mutt, who I trained the first week to jump on my partner everytime she sees her. Every morning we are awaken by the loud clucking of the 6 chickens living outside our window, gospel music playing, and the baby crying. Who needs an alarm right? For dinner the first night, we were fed rabbit and it was delicious! And throughout the days we have ate thus far, goat intestines, liver, kidneys, spleen, and dries up little fishes. We have running water, but no heater, so if we would like to take a running shower, it is best to be prepared to shower with freezing water.

We start our day going into work at 7am, we have a meeting with the ten other technicians in the hospital. The first part of the day is usually inventory, inventory, and more inventory, and we tend to devote the second part of the day, before leaving at 5pm, to working with medical equipment. CHUB, the university teaching hospital in butare, is one of the larger, better equipped hospitals in Rwanda. They have four x-rays and a CT machine, however after working here for three and a half weeks it seems like the place where they need the most help is in the Neonatal ICU. So far we managed to fix infant warmers, incubators, syringe pumps, suction pumps, surgical lamps(in progress, waiting for the bulbs), oxygen concentrators, and dialysis machines. Many of the problems we come across is just poor preventive maintenance, for example: many of the batteries wear out, loose connections, dusty insides, blown fuses, etc...

Even though every department in this hospital has their own technician, it is still very limited by the lack of spare parts, surge protectors, and consumables. So basically all we can do is improvise, or how our professor put it Macgyver it!