"Woke up this morning unsure of what I was going to do. That is perhaps the best feeling on a trip. Live in the moment, don’t worry about an hour from now.
Ran into a few of the volunteers at breakfast this morning, and decided to go with them on their errands. I got to experience the “Walmart” of Kigali, which is basically a huge store full of everything, just like Walmart! Got a watch (kind of important as a nurse when there are no clocks on the wall) and then got to see basically the stuff behind the curtain. In order to make this trip possible, a lot goes on behind the scenes.
There are newsletters and phones to be programmed and things have to be bought in order for us as a team to be successful. And that is only one part of it! We have one guy whose job it is to make sure we have all of our electrical needs met and that our equipment doesn’t blow up when we plug it in. And that we have the correct plugs for everything. And we don’t put the power out in the entire hospital!
Speaking of power, our rooms are powered by our keys! So in order to have any electricity work in the rooms, there is a little place for your key to go and that turns on your power. Talk about never forgetting to turn your lights off!
We also had to basically buy all new phones when we got here. The teams in the past used cell phones with minutes when they got in country, but somewhere between two years ago and now, they got lost. The cell phone companies want everyone to have a smart phone, so they wanted us to buy all new smartphones for $50 a piece! multiplied by 20-30 people (we were able to find some of the old phones), that is a lot of money. So we went to one of the Rwandan nurses, who was able to take us to the black market to purchase some dumb phones for $13 a piece. Much more reasonable.
Of course then we had to program them all. Sandy and Cecelia programmed 38 of them, not an easy feat. It took 6.5 hours, and they had a Sim card to copy too!
Since I decided to volunteer today, I decided to take a crack at the last 7 phones. I had tips from previous times thankfully, but I’m pretty sure it still took almost 2 hours.
Tomorrow we are off to hike a mountain to see a species of gorillas of which there are only 300 left in the world. Only downside is I have to be up at 4 am. At least it is a long car ride there? Until tomorrow then…"
Thanks, Laura
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