Instructor's trip to Rwanda an eye-opening experience

07/15/08 By John Bailey / RN-T staff writer   Children at an orphanage in Rwanda show their excitement at having their picture taken. Contributed photos .. ..Frustration mounts as a team of anesthesiologists ventures through the Rwandan highlands. Their medical equipment, brought thousands of miles to the remote African region, is broken. A resident at a Rwandan hospital looks at the equipment, points and says, "you mean that piece of equipment right there is broken? I think we have one of those in the closet." Hospital staffers bring out some boxed items, equipment donated by charitable organizations. The equipment is sorely needed — but no one knows what it is or how to use it. "Many of the hospitals I went to had ultrasound equipment in a box they didn't even know they had," said Leif Penrose, an ultrasound programs instructor at Coosa Valley Technical College who visited the African country this summer to educate their ultrasound users. Click here to watch a video interview with Penrose. Click here to read Leif Penrose's blog. During the genocide 14 years ago in which hundreds of thousands were murdered, many with higher educations were targeted. "They killed the Tutsis," Penrose said. "The Tutsis were the educated class, which means they killed all their doctors. They killed their teachers. They killed their bankers and they killed their lawyers." Now that the nation is rebuilding, many of the professionals, especially doctors, are foreigners under contract with the government. When looking at Rwandan hospitals from a purely Western sta One of the ways Leif Penrose relaxed was to go "gorilla trekking," he said. ndard, they are lacking, the training is substandard and the equipment is poor, Penrose said. There are 11 anesthesiologists in a country the size of the state of Maryland with a population of 10 million. The graduating class of five that Penrose taught will bring that number to a grand total of 16. "They haven't raised another generation of people with enough education to be the teachers," he said. Ongoing cost of genocide Mass graves dot the countryside. The Kigali memorial has a wall with the names of those killed that were identified — many more lie unnamed. Penrose visited a macabre memorial at a technical school where hundreds of white, lime-covered, mummified corpses are still kept in the open to show the price of genocide. Militias killed around 45,000 people in two days with guns, clubs and machetes after the victims fled to the technical school for safety. As a part of a deal with Coosa Valley Tech, Penrose recorded his experiences in a daily blog — including pictures of the sites. According to CIA statistics, economically, the genocide decimated Rwanda's already struggling infrastructure, but recent growth has curbed inflation and has almost completely restored the country to its pre-1994 economic level. Penrose said he could see the signs of the country rebuilding but "one of the things that causes us to be able to have that is peaceful transition of government" — something many African nations do not have. Socially, there is a trend not to talk about the estimated 500,000 Tutsis and thousands of Hutus who were killed. Penrose said the reality of it struck him when he realized many of the people he was sitting with knew someone who was killed. "Almost everyone I met knew someone who had been murdered or had a family member murdered," he said. Fourteen years later, pink-clad prisoners, held for their crimes committed during the massacres, are a common sight in Rwanda's capital, Kigali. Helping hands The entire journey began when a physician in Kigali e-mailed requests to technologist Web sites asking for volunteers to travel to Rwanda to teach ultrasound. "Dr. (Terry) Konn, who teaches radiological imaging … noticed there were ultrasound machines but almost no ultrasound exams being done," Penrose said. "There were very few individuals who were trained to do ultrasound exams." Many others sacrificed so he could make the journey and share his knowledge with a country attempting to grow out of devastation. Although Penrose said he got more from the trip than he gave, at times the entirety of the destruction would begin to overwhelm him. One of the small changes he could bring about concerned the purchase of a pair of electric hair clippers. A co-worker noted some of the children at the Mpone orphanage had gashes on their heads. They learned to cut the children's hair at the orphanage using an old-style razor that had no handle, and had to hold down the children to cut their hair. The gashes were a result from the children struggling. The razor was not cleaned between haircuts. Many of those children are HIV positive and parentless because of the genocide. Penrose immediately went to buy hair clippers and instructed them how to clean the blades between haircuts.

--
Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
Procurement Consultant
Gsm: +250-08470205
Home: +250-55104140
P.O. Box 3867
Kigali-Rwanda
East Africa
Blog: http://www.cepgl.blogspot.com
Skype ID : Kayisa66