16. House search start: visit to Sue & Bill in Gacuriro

Friday, Nov. 6, 2015

Sue and I had already "connected" via email before we left the U.S.  Our contacts in the Human Resources for Health (HRH) program* had helped us get into the HRH network via email. Sue and Bill are both nurses who joined the HRH program in July 2015 and started renting their 3 bedroom house in Gacuriro. They now want to move, however, so they are looking for someone to essentially "take over their lease." Sue was so kind to invite us over for not only a tour of the house but a pizza dinner and she even made homemade butterscotch bars for us!

Master bedroom w mosquito net at Sue & Bills

Stove & oven with butterscotch bars!

Pretty nice kitchen, really!

We learned that Sue & Bill were medical missionaries for several years in the southwest part of Rwanda for many years. Their children went to boarding school in the US while they were in Rwanda. Now their children are grown and having their own families.

I took the opportunity to ask these new-friends-who-are-nurses about mosquito nets and malerone. Like us, Sue & Bill are not taking daily malerone pills to avoid mosquitos. But we did not have mosquito nets on the beds at the BnB house! Sue advised us on which store to go to. So we took the taxi from their house at almost 8pm, had him take us straight to this store in town (which is thankfully open until 9pm). Isaac and Naomi then helped me find my way through this strange Chinese-Rwandan version of a Meijer store with lots of cheap stuff -- including mosquito nets! We bought two.

Back at the house Francoise was kind enough to help us get makeshift hooks put into the ceilings above our beds. Since he doesn't speak English and I (Ruth Ann) don't speak much Kinyarwandan, the process required a lot of sign language!

*HRH is a program funded by the Clinton Foundation that is committed to capacity building in medical specialties in the countries where they are invited to work. Rwanda is where they started. The program pays a stipend and living expenses for physicians and nurses to come work in Rwanda for 1 year.