University of Rwanda Day 3 and Departure for the SAFARI!

What a day! We started our day off at the University of Rwanda for the last day of the global health practicum. Our leader Waleed gave the lecture this morning. Today was my favorite day yet! We talked about how storytelling was becoming an extremely important aspect in public health. This is in terms of conveying a convincing message to patients you are trying to educate, donors you are trying to get funds from and educating government officials on the importance of health policy. We split up into groups and we had to come up with a play about a given health topic. My groups topic was maternal mortality. I was the only American in my group so it was a little challenging to communicate with my team to create a play but somehow we made it work! Most of the plays ended up being a little comical despite the topics simply because of the language barrier. It was a really fun morning! One member of my group got a little carried away and did a little improv at the end and extended our play a bit. It was so funny. The rest us us were just standing there watching him get really passionate about public health! After our last day at the University we got lunch (can you guess what I had?!) and headed out for our Safari! We were picked up in these super cool land cruisers! We had to get two since our group is pretty big. For our safari we went to Akagera National Park, which was only about 2.5 hours away! I love driving around here because it is SO beautiful. The hills and farms are just stunning. I just looked out the window and waved to the kids pretty much the whole way! It is so so beautiful here. Once we got to Akagera we were surprised to find BABOONS wandering around the hotel (mostly outside). Haha there were warnings posted in our rooms to always lock the doors because the baboons know how to open the doors!! They had a guy at the hotel who’s only job was to chase off the baboons with a stick. We had a really good dinner at the hotel and just played card games. We all went to bed pretty early because we have an early morning for the SAFARI tomorrow!!! Im so excited!

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