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!

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.

BACK AT IT

Well, we have been preparing again for next year. We had our first post-February 2010 and pre-February 2011 meeting. We are all excited about the work and lives we were able to serve and cannot wait to do it all again. Our first order of business will be recruiting our team and ordering and gathering supplies.

MISINTERPRETATION (aka WEIGHT=WAIT)

As it turns out this number of boxes at King Faisal Hospital does not translate into the number of boxes that left Spokane, oops. So while we were ecstatic that our shipment cleared Kigali Customs, we did not realize only two thirds of the shipment had arrived. (The weight of the Supplies that left Spokane did not equal the weight of supplies that arrived in Kigali.) We believe one third of our shipment is still in London somewheres. We are like hound dogs on a fox hunt trying to locate them.

Katie Bland, Jane VanTassel, Jim Dixon and Jennifer Day helping to unpack the Supplies that actually arrived.

Our second, mostly surgical, team arrived tonight. Finally able to relax and have a bite to eat at the Top Tower Hotel before going to King Faisal tommorrow to assess the situation.

Wish us luck as we try and locate the rest of our supplies and deal with our ever-changing surgical schedule. We are hopeful we will still be able to commence surgery on Monday, since we are all eager to start changing young adults' lives.

WE HAVE ARRIVED!

Dr. Hal Goldbert, Sandy Goldberg and Jim Dixon relieved to finally be on the plane.

Andrea Daugherty, Katie Bland and Morgan Lonsford entertain themselves while waiting in the San Francisco Airport.

Jane Vantassel at the "Yotel, Motel, Holiday Inn..." at Heathrow's Airport in London.

The first team arrived at noon yesterday. We cleared Customs at Kigali International Airport with no problems and we were greeted by our wonderful colleagues from King Faisal Hospital, there to make sure our Customs experience went smoothly.

It was great to see all of our pallets of supplies unloaded in the CICU and ready for us to unpack tomorrow. We are all looking forward to a quick dinner and a long rest as we plan to start this organizational process.