MONEY CHANGERS

One of the jobs for the volunteers is changing money for members of the team so that they can spend a little and add to the local economy for gifts, restaurants etc. This is the way it works. Rwanda is a cash society. Very few places take credit cards. We bring our dollars in the form of CLEAN, UNMARKED, NON-FOLDED $100 bills. Designated volunteers take these pristine $100, each in its own legal sized envelope to the money exchange (these are not banks but have the best exchange rate!). Then we exchange $1500=$2000 at a time (a lot of envelopes!) for dirty, folded Rwanda francs. One dollar buys 6.5-6.78 R francs. So each $100 bill comes out of the envelope, handed to the cashier and we receive a wad (678,000)dirty, Rwanda francs!

FIRST DAY OF WORK

Except for the trunks that keep filtering in with each wave of staff flights, we are all unpacked and prepared to begin our first OH surgeries. This is the recently paved street down to KFH with a lovely cobblestone sidewalk and fresh grass sidelines.




After many years of preparation, they have just received their Accreditation from "The Council of Health Services Accreditation of Southern Africa (COHSASA)." This is the equivalent of our JCAHO and so they were frantically pulling their hair out just like us when the surveyors arrive on site. King Faisal is beautiful and clean and we love working with the staff who have been more than accomodating.

CICU and TELEMETRY NURSE ORIENTATION

Part of working on a Medical Mission of this magnitude is knowing what we are doing and how to impart that information to our own Healing Hearts Northwest (HHNW) Nursing staff and then to the King Faisal Hospital (KFH) Nursing staff.



To this end, HHNW CICU and PICU nurses have had 2 hours of ventilator training and the CICU, PICU and Telemetry nurses have had 3 hours of Pediatric Congenital Open Heart Training and also a 2 hour Orientation Course on what to expect and how to function at KFH in Kigali, Rwanda. That is a lot of unpaid classroom hours, which gives a whole new meaning to volunteers.

Add on top of this, the 5 HHNW staff that plan on presenting during our full day Cardiac Education Day for the KFH nurses and staff. They will be teaching Ethics, Blood Product Administration, Pediatric Congenital Heart Surgery, ECG Rhythm Interpretation and Coumadin Pharmacology. I am telling you, we have some amazing staff volunteers.

As mentors, we plan to implement a more formalized documentation system of whom and how we have mentored the KFH nurses. Hopefully, this will assist us in future Medical Missions, deciphering who has been trained and is capable of recovering Open Hearts on their own and who still needs full training or just a little refresher.

This is no easy task for any of us, on either end. Traveling clear across the globe, to a foreign country in a foreign city and still having our wits about us to teach appropriately. And, on their end, coming to work one day, seeing all of us Muzungus (white people) and being paired up with one of us to learn as much as possible through a language barrier.

The most fascinating aspect of the above is that it actually works! It is amazing how universal sickness, hospitals, nursing and charades actually is. Unbelievably, we all seem to communicate in the same way about the same subjects or ideas. Although we may struggle to find words or props to show what we mean, somehow each party gets their point across.

And it works because we have such amazing nurses volunteering their own funds to pay for their trip, volunteering their own vacation time and volunteering all of their years of expertise. Sometimes we do not realize what a plethora of useful information we hold within ourselves. My hope is for each HHNW and KFH nurse to find and share and rejoice in each other's knowledge, for this is true collaboration.












So wish us all godspeed in our success, for this will bring King Faisal Hospital one step closer to performing their own Open Heart Surgeries with their own Open Heart Program with wonderfully capable nurses and staff.

PERFORMING SURGERY OUTSIDE THE BOX

Operation Open Heart from Australia allowed me to shadow their each and every move so our Healing Hearts Northwest team knows what to expect.