July 12

This is Bacquie (I'm not sure of the exact spelling), a very tall and hardy Rwandan man who does a lot of maintenance work here at the mission compound. When part of the tree in front of Lucas' and my house fell onto our fence and also partly in the driveway, he arrived within minutes with his machete and started chopping up the branches and dragging them out of the driveway. Today he was carrying a bag of sand or concrete around when I stopped him to ask permission to take this picture. He is very friendly and is one of the men here who first coached Lucas and I about how to say good morning, how are you, I am fine, and so on in Kinyarwanda. He really worked at it too - if we just looked blank (which we did quite a lot at first), he would exaggerate the words and draw them out, until we successfully repeated the proper response. He looks about 70 years old to me, but Sheila tells me that he is only in his fifties. I suppose that he has lived a hard life, and he has earned those extra few lines on his face.

I took the other picture at Kumbya yesterday. These lavender flowers grow wild among the rocks right at the water's edge. They look a little like petunias, but I don't think that they are. You can see just a little bit of the lake in the corner of the picture.

Visited the HIV clinic at the hospital today. If I understood correctly, they have about 2,000 patients. Unicef and the Rwandan ministry of health report that the country's HIV prevalence is 3%. That is lower than I would have expected - significantly lower than south African countries. They can run HIV serology lab here at the Hospital including CD4 counts. The guy I was talking to said that they try hard to keep up with new research about HIV. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is plenty of funding for anti-retroviral drugs at the present time. Catholic Relief Services is the most frequently mentioned NGO providing the ARV meds. Hopefully that funding will last long term.

Today I met some new visitors to Kibogora: Ella and Brandon. They are engaged and in their 20's. Ella is British and about to begin her last year of medical school in Edinburgh, and Brandon is studying music production in England, though he is originally from South Africa. It's interesting to hear Brandon's stories about South Africa, and Ella is very bubbly and outgoing. Ella scrubbed in at the OR today to get some surgical exposure, and since Brandon has a flair for landscaping, he was put to work on the grounds. They are a fun couple and a nice addition to our little group here!