Waking Up in Kigali

Made it to Kigali safely last night with all my luggage! My roomies are really nice (fellow ex-pat interns) and have been really kind in making me feel welcome. My first day of work was pretty great -- just got introduced to everyone at the clinic and in the lab, and spent the rest of the day working to understand the flow of how things work at the clinic starting from the very beginning with recruitment of new HIV-discordant couples. It has been really interesting to learn how the other end of the process works, since our molecular work is so far downstream of those critical preliminary steps. The basic Kinyarwanda that I learned from the SpeakRwanda series has really caused a lot of surprised and delighted faces from co-workers (and a few patients). My first "murakoze" (thank you) generated a very shocked noise from one of our data/IT co-workers. It was pretty funny. :) Surprisingly, some of the more anecdotal notes from the series have come in handy. For example, at the beginning of Lesson 3: Speaking with Children, the narrator makes this hilarious comment about the proper way to wave your hand. Apparently, the right way to wave is like a beauty queen - side to side, not fingers to palm. In my time here, that has been confirmed. I've not had the chance to speak to children, which is good, because that lesson is really hard and I still haven't made it all the way through it. Hah.

Weather is very warm, as anticipated, however I think the BBC weather was a little off with the heavy rainfall predictions for yesterday. The Internet is not that reliable, but if anyone is interested, I do have a cell phone number for which you can use Skype credit or Reliance Global credit to call. If interested in the number, let me know. Otherwise, I'll try to update here when I can. Took some pics of the intern house (amazing) and the outside of the clinic, but I think the Internet is too slow to bother posting it quite yet.