July 6

I thought I would include more pictures of folks I have been working with at the hospital. Emmanuel is the head nurse. In this picture, I think he is wearing a lab coat contributed by a visiting doctor. He's very soft spoken. At times his voice is almost like a whisper. Soft spokenness is very common here. The general culture is to be polite and unassuming, with exceptions of course - it's rarely accurate to generalize about 9 million people. :) Emmanuel has kindly shared his office with me on many occasions when I needed a place to write or work on my computer. At the other end of the work hierarchy is Rose, who is basically a cleaning person and jack-of-all-trades. She has a wonderful smile and always goes out of her way to greet me. The hospital has a very catchy name for the people in Rose's position, sounds something like travalliers. Travalliers wear green uniforms, and nurses wear white. (Administration wears black.) Both Emmanuel and Rose speak very good English, which is how I got to know them. I have leaned on Emmanuel to be an interpreter for me a few times.

Most of today I worked on understanding the insurance billing system here in Rwanda. Easy to be discouraged by the language barrier. It is slow going, but I do feel I am making progress. Took a 3 mile walk with Lisa during lunch. It was warm and sunny, but not humid and therefore not unbearably hot. I would say it was about 80F. The roads are cut into sides of hills - it's a very hilly place - and so everywhere I looked during the walk, there are remarkable views of valleys and terraced hillsides planted with banana trees. Also views of the lake, which is never far away.

Some of the managers have formed an English club, and tonight they invited me to join them. We read passages from an English book together, and I explained words or phrases that they did not understand. The passage which I chose tonight unfortunately included the expression "bear hug", and I spent a long time trying to explain what that is to people who've never seen or heard of a bear. It was pretty comical! Well, they seemed to have a good time and to learn a little bit, as they invited me to join them again on Thursday evening, and also twice a week until I leave here.