"You
are most welcome!"
Americans
for UNFPA East African Leadership Safari August 2005
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The women's hospital in Ruhengeri
The hospital has 800 beds and provides care for women and their children. It was raining heavily while we were there, and the rain thundered down on the sheets of corrugated plastic that made up the roofs of some of the buildings.
Like other health facilities I visited, the sparse furnishings of the hospital made it easy to keep clean, and it was very clean.
The mothers were pleased with the UNFPA t-shirts we gave them, although their traditional clothes were so much more graceful, colorful, and dignified.
A grandmother widowed by the genocide...
...with her grandchild, orphaned by HIV. With no income, the grandmother was unable to feed her grandaughter, and brought the child to the hospital. The child, small, with the swollen belly of starvation, with open sores where the skin had broken down on her legs, cried all the time we were there. We were given differing prognoses by various hospital personnel.
The delivery room - once again, very spartan.
A postpartum ward for babies not well enough to go home.
And a kitchen where family members cooked food for patients. It was raining heavily at this moment, and we were talking to these women from a dry spot under a verandah. We would have been soaked if we'd walked across to them.
They were laughing and carrying on in the most riotous way, as if they didn't have a care in the world.
Rwanda: 3 of 9 pages
(c)
James Cowan
2005