About my job

I guess that, today, I will write about my job since I have been promising people information on it. Let me see, as you know, I am a health care volunteer currently in the middle of training, an intensive ten week period involving countless hours of language training and a little tech training thrown in. When I first received my job assignment, I thought I would only be working in HIV prevention. It turns out my job could be more than that. I will also be doing preventive work and education on malaria, water sanitation, other infectious diseases, family planning, nutrition, and anything else related to health. My specific job assignment will depend on the nonprofit organization I am paired up with. I could be doing any number of these health projects and many more. I will also have secondary projects. The Peace Corps director is pretty flexible about my secondary projects; I can basically do anything I want. For example, I could teach English to my co-workers or to schoolchildren. I could set up health clubs, afterschool activities or even summer camp for the kids in my village. I could teach computer skills to the villagers (yes, me teach computer skills!) or help with “income generating activities” for the women in the village. Anything, basically, it all will depend on what the villagers want me to help them with.

By the way, if you have noticed that my grammar and punctuation is getting worse in my letters and blogs, that’s because it is. Try typing on keyboards with letters in the wrong places and learning a whole freaking language in ten weeks. Yeah, my English is getting bad. I find myself simplifying it a lot to “caveman speech” to talk to the Rwandans because their English is somewhat basic.

Okay, back to my job. The other day, we visited the clinics in our province. The clinic I visited was a public one that is a five-minute walk from our center. They have a staff of 12 with six nurses. One of the nurses said that she was really busy but she gave us a tour of the facilities. She showed us around exam rooms and a vaccination room. They had a laboratory too with a technician and two microscopes. The waiting room had around twenty people sitting around with their babies strapped on their backs staring at us. Around the waiting people were all the medical files as well. I could just walk up and start looking at a patient’s file if I so inclined. I guess you don’t have to worry about getting sued here. I loved the posters on the wall too. The government is really trying to emphasize family planning so one of the posters showed a family with babies and children all over the place. They were skin and bones and the house was falling apart. There were broken pots on the ground with no food. To contrast, the poster showed another family with just two children. This family was healthy and had a beautiful home with a cow in the backyard. Another poster showed a family using a mosquito net at night to prevent the spread of malaria.

After the tour, our nurse answered our questions and explained to us the insurance system of Rwanda. I asked all the dumb questions like “Do mothers vaccinate their children regularly?’ “Do people use contraceptives on a regular basis?” “What are the most common diseases people get treated for?”, etc. If you are curious, the answers are yes, no, and malaria and respiratory infections. Let me tell you about the insurance system. It’s available to all Rwandans for a sum of 1000 RWF a year (less than two dollars). If you have insurance, clinic visits will cost you 250 RWF and that includes medicine. Family planning and contraceptives are free. Anteretroviral medication (for HIV/AIDS) is also free but it is only available in certain facilities because personnel have to be trained in how to administer the drugs and manage compliance, etc.

I love going to my tech classes because I like learning about the biology of the diseases and prevention. Many diseases could be prevented if people only had the right information. For example, diarrhea is the leading cause of death among children under five in Rwanda, but many parents think that diarrhea is just a normal course of childhood. They do not take easily preventable measures to combat diarrhea and many children die as a result. It is really sad.