Welcome to My Blog!

Hello! Thank you for following my journey in Rwanda as a global health intern. I am so excited for this opportunity, I am constantly pinching myself because it feels like a dream that I get to travel to such an amazing place and learn about what I love most... medicine and public health! First of all I would like to thank my family, friends, professors and anyone else who has helped make this internship possible, it really is a dream come true. I am extremely excited to apply what I have learned thus far in my studies as a public health student at BYU and to be pushed and challenged in brand-new and unfamiliar situations. I have created this blog to document each day during the internship for myself as well as those who are interested in what my day-to-day life is like for the next month (hi mom!!). Whatever your reason may be for visiting my blog, I am so excited to have you here! Please feel free to leave comments if you feel so inclined. I would love to hear from you! Thank you for following along with my adventures, I am thrilled to see what is in store. Next stop... Kigali!!

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Day 1 - Arrival in Kigali

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Well after 36 HOURS of traveling we finally made it to Kigali! It was a smooth trip from Salt Lake City, we made all of our connections just fine. The flights were really really long but luckily I was able to sleep for parts of them. Other than that I just read some material for the internship and watched movies! We got through customs quite fast and when we went outside Solange was waiting for us! She is a Rwandan native who is one of our coordinators here. She is very nice and bubbly. She helped us exchange our money for Rwandan Francs and we were off! She led us to a big white bus which will be our transportation for this trip! As we enjoyed driving by the beautiful hills and city life in Kigali, Solange told us all about the culture, foods, and activities that we have to look forward to! After about 25 minutes of driving we arrived at the guesthouse we are staying at for the duration of the trip. We were surprised to find out that the guesthouse is connected to a catholic church
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Biryogo Health Center - Day 4

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T oday was a pretty simple day! We started the day by meeting with the cleaning staff at the health center. We talked to them about their cleaning procedures and practices. The cleaners are a really important part of the IPC healthcare team that are often forgotten about. We were a little bit hesitant about this meeting because we hadn’t really witnessed any cleaning during our observations and we didn’t smell any cleaner anywhere in the health center. We were pleased to find out that the few members of the cleaning staff were very serious and passionate about their work. One of the workers said you “have to have a heart of perseverance to be a cleaner at a clinic”. Haha he was right! It is so important for the staff to be passionate about their work so it is done right.They explained in detail all of their procedures for cleaning and they showed us all of their cleaning supplies. I was a little sad to see they didn’t have much disinfectant and their stock of supplies was very sma
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A Day in the Life of a Global Health Intern (Part 2) - Biryogo Health Center Day 3

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Today was an amazing day!! I felt like a real public health official! We began the day by presenting our IPC observations and solutions with the IPC coordinator, Cecille and the Health Center director, Veronica. Suzanna, Elise and I presented our findings in the nutrition and vaccination area. They seemed to take our feedback very well. There were a few misunderstandings that took a little while to talk out but I think those were mainly due to gaps in translation. We were talking about how nurses should never recap their needles and they ran out and got sharps boxes and showed us how to assemble them. We knew they used sharps boxes and they did a great job at it! It took us a while to calm them down and explain that we weren’t talking about their sharps box use. They were extremely gracious in taking our criticism and very happy we were there to help them out. Some of the issues we observed, such as drying hands, required more money and weren’t very possible for them to fix. So we
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