Day 0, Still in Mobile, Al

My name is Anna Crutchfield. I'm a 4th year medical student going to Rwanda this year and this is my team's blog. Here, you can find daily updates on what's going on from the perspective of all the students participating in this epic journey. I hope and pray we grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually on this trip together. 

Currently, we are getting all our supplies together, weighing luggage, finding passports, and checking visas. We will be leaving for ATL this Sunday Jan. 31, 2016, and from there-> Amsterdam to Rwanda! 

Every day, one person will have the job of posting a story, pictures, or whatever is on their hearts on this page. Thank you for your interest and support!

Day 4

Today was another great day of clinic!  We traveled to a village called Villa Verde.  We set up our clinic in a local church.  When we arrived, we were told this village is known for its witchcraft and voodoo.  We were excited to share the gospel and love the people through medicine, PT and OT.

The physical therapy team saw a man who was stabbed and as a result suffered from a spinal cord injury with neurological deficits from 25 years ago.  He seemed very discouraged by his circumstances.  He did not have a wheelchair and they were able to give him one.  They also provided him with therapy and exercises to improve his strength.  Occupational therapy also worked with him.  They educated him on functional use of his hands and performed weight bearing activities with him.  He left in much better spirits.  The gospel was presented to him and several patients today.  

In the afternoon a few team members decided to take a short walk in the village in hopes to share the Gospel message. To our surprise, a young man named Charlie shared his testimony that served to encourage us! He had been physically abused by his father as a child to the point of abandoning his family to live with his friends in Villa Verde. He mentioned that he left his home searching for a solution to his ease his wounds inflicted by his father. Charlie said that after a friend had shared Jesus with him it wasn't until he had a vision of God that he surrendered his life to Christ. He said that God told him, "I am your solution, your Heavenly Father who loves you and will never leave you nor forsake you." It was without question the Spirit was alive in Charlie, and he is currently leading a small ministry where he is collecting donated items and distributing them out to village members in hopes of sharing the Gospel. 

The medical team saw 70 patients caring for several ailments.  The Physician Assistant Students were very involved in patient care and have been fine the opportunity to interview, assess, diagnose, and come up with treatment plans with some oversight.  They also had the opportunity to provide spiritual care through prayer and encouragement.  It is awesome to see them loving their future profession.  

We had Wacky Wednesday with our scrubs.  Score provides us with our scrubs for the week and some of the choices are quite colourful!!  We had a fashion show and competition for wackiest!  Pictures and possible video to follow.  

Enjoy a video of clinic and pictures from today.  We are really enjoying ourselves and ministering to the people of the Dominican. 

Greetings from the Dominican Republic! We have been extremely busy doing the Lord"s work with some local churches here, but first let me back up and summarize all that's happened since we arrived.

We are staying in a place called Juan Dolio near the capital city of Santo Domingo, in a house owned by SCORE International. The morning after we got here, our group of 25 worshiped at a church in the village of Honduras which was about 45 minutes from where we are staying. We had a great time meeting the villagers and interacting with the children.

On Monday, we packed up our equipment and headed to the village of Forty-One. There, we provided medical and rehab therapy to the community. One of our mentors, Dr. Bob, has been instrumental in providing support and guidance to us. We attended to 60 people medically and spiritually.

One of the cool stories from Monday was when a blind man came into the church. After praying with him and working with a translator, those involved helped lead the man to Christ. It was  definitely a highlight of the day for our group.

Today, we went to a church called Iglesia Bautista Cristo e Unico in the town of Monte Cristy. One of the major ministries of a church is to house 45 residents in a nursing home. We attended to the needs of the residents; the PT and OT students worked on wound care and basic functions with them while the med and PA students did diagnosis and treatment.

It was difficult for many of us to see how underserved the elderly are here, but we are glad that we had the opportunity to minister to them and show them Christ's love.

More to come tomorrow,
Amy Vu (PA student)

P.S. - We are having some internet problems, but we will be sure to update photos when we can!

Here we go!

We are on our way! 25 PT/PA/OT/MD students and faculty from USA going to serve in the Dominican Republic for 10 days. Pray for us! More to come...

Last Day in Rwanda

Today has been long, and very emotional. It is our last day in this little equatorial country, and as we drove out of the compound to head to the capital city of Kigali, I was so sad to see our special spot overlooking Lake Kivu disappear behind us. It has been a quick three weeks, but really, it seems like a lifetime ago that we arrived. The friendships we have made, the hospitality we have received, and the loving nature of Kibogora easily transformed Rwanda into a second home. We said good-bye to Dr. Albertson and Mrs. Francie, Dr. Berg and Mrs. Linda, Matt and Marie, and Umunyu, the resident compound dog, thanking them for welcoming us so completely into their lives.

Once we got to Kigali, it was time to face what many of us had pushed to the side for the time leading up to and during our trip - the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. We visited Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, a beautiful site created in 2001 to commemorate and remember the nearly 1,000,000 native Rwandans who were massacred in only 100 short days. To put it in perspective, the killing rate of the Tutsi race during those three brutal months was nearly three times that of the Jewish victims during the Holocaust. I will not dishonor this horrific event by trying to explain the political, colonial, racial, and socio-economic factors that played into the genocide, because I can not begin to scratch the surface without a mass oversimplification. I will say that the museum was very difficult to navigate after spending three weeks with our Rwandan friends, and the special "Children Section" was especially gut-wrenching. They had blown-up images of sweet innocent faces who had been ruthlessly slaughtered in the massacre, along with the child's name, favorite food or toy or person, a quirky personality trait, and, at the very end, the manner in which these precious angels had been murdered. It brought an even deeper and gruesome anguish to an already emotional memorial. For me personally, the only thing that kept me going was knowing that they were with their Heavenly Father, suffering no more.

I was initially chastising myself for coming on this trip without doing proper research and reading - I am a medical student, after all - but I am so glad I did. I was allowed to come to my on conclusions about the people I met, free of any preconceived notions. And I am afraid, after I have now done my homework, that I would not have been able to clear myself of the images I have seared in my mind. However, I now personally know the Rwandan people to be both loving but stern, joyous and stoic, kind while initially suspicious, and above all else, a deeply loyal and family-oriented group. I can see how this genocide has so heavily influenced the culture, but how, almost twenty years in the "After" period, the principle of forgiveness has transcended all. I am still in awe at how a country so violently and completely torn apart two decades ago can love one another, work beside each other, and live as peaceful neighbors in totality.

If you are compelled to learn more, I urge you to ask your friend or family member on the trip for book recommendations. I just finished "Left to Tell" by Immaculee Ilibagiza, who hid in a 12 square foot bathroom for 91 days with seven other women, only to emerge and find nearly all of her family and friends slaughtered by former neighbors, classmates, teachers, and friends. She sends a wonderful message of how we can find God in even our darkest periods, and how we can begin to forgive only when we rely fully on His teaching. Stories like hers help explain how such atrocious events can remain part of the past while the country steels itself to move forward. I have now started "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch, an American journalist who delves much deeper into the political and racial factors that came into play leading up to the genocide. A very thorough and smart read for those who are interested.

I apologize for the heavy (and lengthy) post at the end of our time in Rwanda, but I think when we were given the opportunity to visit Rwanda, we were also given the responsibility of truly understanding and knowing their history. It is essential that we as a team and we as fellow human beings and Christians know what caused the Rwandan Genocide, how this country has healed itself, and how we may prevent an atrocity like this from happening again in the future. We are so blessed to live in the United States and enjoy so many freedoms, and I don't think we appreciate that enough. I hope I have done my part in honoring the victims' memories, if only on a reminisce scale.

We are now waiting to leave for Istanbul at 2 AM. We will be there until Friday at 10 AM, when we will head to Chicago on a 12 hour flight. We are excited to see a small bit of another culture and country with so much rich history, but we are tired and ready to see our loved ones. Pray for us as we finish our travels, and we will see you all very soon!

Sarah Kelley

Uyumunsi Nabonye Impundu mu Ishyamba Rya Nyungwe (Today We Saw Chimpanzees in the Nyungwe Rain Forest)

Over this weekend, our group had the opportunity to go to the Nguywe Rain Forest to see Chimpanzees. Half of the group went on Saturday and the other half went on Sunday. We arose early in the morning so that we could hit the road by 4am; after a 2 hour drive, and a short pit stop to pick up our guide, we arrived in the rain forest. Upon arrival, our guide, Christopher, gave us an introduction to the rain forest, which has over 1000 species of plants and many different bird, ape, monkey, and cat species. Recently, there have been efforts to conserve the rain forest. The section that we were in has become disconnected from other parts of the rain forest. Conservationalists have hopes to plant trees to build connections to other rain forest segments so as to not keep the animals confined.  Additionally, Christopher told us how we would find the chimps. The park service provides trackers whose job it is to go into the forest each morning and locate the chimps. The trackers then use chimp noises they have learned to influence the chimps to move to an area that is more easily accessible by trails. 

The initial part of the hike was relatively benign but still required looking down most of the time and using your walking stick proficiently to stay on your feet. After hearing from the trackers via walkie-talkie, Christopher took us off of the main trail down a very steep hill. The steep incline combined with the muddy forest floor made for a treacherous trip down toward the chimps. The group managed to stay relatively quiet (so as not to scare the chimps away) despite many slips, slides, and falls. I admit that I was the first of the group to take a tumble straight onto my rear. William’s body managed to do a 360 holding on to a branch above his head while his feet slid beneath him. Skelley fell directly into an ant pile resulting in many ant bites to her torso and neck. We made it down the steep terrain with all of our limbs intact and a few ant bites to spare and were subsequently rewarded by a great view of 6-8 chimps in a fig tree enjoying their breakfast. While watching the chimps, Christopher taught us many interesting things about the chimps:

·         The chimps are social creatures and live in groups called families. A family can be as big as 60-80 members with many adult males and many adult females. There is one “chief” male chimp who is determined by a fight among the males. 

• The chimps eat both meat and vegetables, but meat only makes up 3% of their diet.
• Pregnancy length in chimps is 8 months. The mothers give birth on the ground (rather than up in the trees) and the family members stay on the ground to protect her. Soon after birth, the baby chimp is able to spend time in the trees with the rest of the family but his mother will have to carry him when jumping among trees.
• They can build a nest up in the trees in 2-3 minutes – they build a new one every night and each nest sleeps one chimp
• The chimps know the different medicinal properties of plants and know which ones to eat based on how they feel.
• The average life span of the chimpanzee in the wilderness is 50-60 years.
• Similarly to humans, they like to sleep in on rainy, cold days.
• The chimps communicate with each other. When they see or hear something that is unfamiliar to them, the chief will initiate an alert which the family will then echo.

Big shout out to my dad for getting me a new camera before this trip and to Mrs. Kris Black for lending me her zoom lens for the trip!

Please pray for safe travels tomorrow as we drive to Kigali and then fly to Istanbul and then again for safe travels from Istanbul to Atlanta via Chicago on Friday. Thank you!

Bragg

March 7, 2014

Miriwe (good afternoon)!

We are nearing the end of our journey here in Kibogora, Rwanda. It is most assuredly bittersweet. We have been discussing the things that will be among the first done once at home – most of which revolves around food. We have also taken some downtime to reflect on our experiences here. While in the hospital, each team member worked in the department that we hope to match into. This has resulted in each of us having different encounters and moments that will stay with us forever.  As a budding OB-Gyn, I have been working in the “maternitie” ward while in Kibogora. Very much like in the United States, there is never a dull moment in this department. It is mostly staffed by nurse-midwives with a doctor or two on duty during the day. This hospital serves as the district hospital for 12 outlying health centers, the furthest of which is 2 hours by car. Thus, most of the routine, non-operative deliveries occur in those facilities. Any delivery that appears to be higher risk or requiring a c-section is sent, mostly by ambulance, to Kibogora Hospital. As you can imagine, they do not have the monitoring capabilities that we are afforded in the US. Remarkably, they perform MANY more cesarian sections than we do. This greatly surprised me considering the significant recovery time and the potential for complications. They are very efficient with the supplies they have, and perform the deliveries of many healthy babies each month.  I personally have assisted with or performed an average of 3-4 c-sections per day while the midwives manned the labor unit.

The experiences I have had while in the hospital have undoubtedly shaped me professionally. There have been moments of sheer pride, moments of frustration, moments of uncertainty, and an occasional moment of sadness. It is impossible to discount the presence of God in this place. Many of these deliveries seem to surely result in poor outcomes while reading the charts. However, by the grace of God, these women power through and, more often than not, have happy, healthy babies. I am forever amazed at the pain and sacrifice that mothers will go through for their children.  

I am trying to wait until I return home to read the other blog posts, but I am sure that my teammates have commented on the joy and resiliency of the Rwandan people. They are truly nourished by their faith in the Lord. He has blessed them with a beautiful landscape that abounds with resources and fresh produce. They take tremendous pride in this gift, as the streets are often lined with colorful plants and flowers. They spend many hours a day tending to the landscape and to their agriculture. It is uncommon to encounter litter around the areas we have seen. This weekend, we will be going on a hike to see the chimpanzees. Supposedly, our guides will be clearing the paths with machetes in order to lead us to the chimps. It will surely be another exciting adventure.

As we wrap up this trip, please pray that we will finish well. It is easy to shift our thoughts towards the obligations and events that are waiting at home. However, we must be sure to use every moment we have to share and work alongside fellow believers in this beautiful country.

“Then the righteous will answer him, saying. ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ “ Matthew 25:37-40

Amy Boone