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!

OCTOBER 7, 2013

It's Monday and the last three days have seen 3 groups of team members arrive in Kigali. Boxes have been unpacked, telephones programed and passed out to all team members. The ICU, pharmacy and OR are arranged, equipment working, organized and set up. Yesterday, our film crew of Sandy Konyu and Dawn Worrall went to one of the patient's house to begin filming for our future documentary. Everyone is excited that the patient, Clementine allowed them to go to her home, ask probing questions and continue to film her through surgery and follow-up. All parties involved are excited about this opportunity The OR has 2 surgeries planned for today. The first one was completed by 11:30 am and had gone well. The ICU nurses were anxiously awaiting their first patient. The second surgery will be Clementine. The medical team is happy to be here and ready to put their dedication of helping others to work. Here are some of the pictures of the first few days, including one of sunset over the North Pole, taken from the airplane.

DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS

It's always good to begin and end a journey with some consistency, for us this was the universality of beer. Heffy in the States and Primus in Africa. Especially when the country welcomes you with open arms into it.













Our first group of travelers made it here safely, including all of our personal luggage. Our trunks are having a sleep over in Customs. Sandy, Hal and Dr. Mucumbitsi plan to retrieve them on the morrow.

The rest of us will also be up and at 'em on our way to King Faisal Hospital to unload all of our beautiful shipping boxes. And it will be like Christmas going through all of our belongings we left here last year.

Good luck to the three remaining waves of travelers, we will see you all soon. And you will be just as happy as Brooke to take off your support stockings!!

TACKLING TRUNKS

Ever hear the phrase, "We will never do that again"? Yeah, we could have coined it. After all of the time-consuming work ordering and packing, then unpacking and re-packing, rearranging, weighing and re-weighing ....



It seemed like a never-ending job, we ate, drank and slept it. Labels, numbers, Flight Groups, zip tieing, counting and recounting. Finally! Handling all of these trunks is over.

Sunday, HHNW Mission Volunteers came to SHMC Women and Children's Hospital Entrance to pick up their trunks.

And today we found out that all of the supplies we shipped one month ago have all cleared Customs with flying colors!! What a relief for those of us who put so much effort into shipping and what a relief for our Medical Mission - now we can actually perform the surgeries we have been planning for so long.


After all of this good news, maybe we too can relax on the sofa.

CLEAN YOUR ROOM!

You will notice tables in the background. Yeah, I know it's hard to tell what they are because they look more like heaping mounds of blue but there are actually tables underneath that.

Now looky here. You can actually see table tops. Sandi Kessler and Lauran Gilbert thought that would never happen. But they did it!  Which means most of that mound is tallied, packaged and organized into shipping boxes.

"Look Ma, we cleaned our room!"

It is an odd crew that gets excited over "great shipping boxes!" Doesn't take much to make us happy. Can you believe it, we are nearly 4 weeks ahead of schedule. Just have last minute items to pack. All those boxes will help us perform 13-14 mitral valve surgeries and 4-5 congenital surgeries on young adults in Kigali, Rwanda. We leave April 14th! Yikes, just around the corner now.