Democratic Republic of Congo, Day 3

Today I actually got to sleep in until I woke up on my own, which is always a nice experience. Granted, I woke up on my own around 6am when breakfast wouldn’t be served until 7:30, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Because nobody had done a recon of Muanda, the town that we’re in, nor had I heard from anyone how safe it is/isn’t, I didn’t plan on going for a run in the morning (and it’s never a really good idea for a white woman to be running through the streets of Africa by herself), which was too bad, because one of the majors ended up going for run at 6, right around the time that I was awake anyway. Oh, well. We’re already planning on going running together tomorrow.

After breakfast, the day started by driving to Kitona Base. Our first meeting was with the deputy base commander and commander of the infantry, a brigadier general (one star). He claimed to already know what we were going to be doing for the mission, but then when we brought up medical stuff, he seemed surprised and said that that was out of his lane. He proceeded to take us to the infantry school and give us a presentation there, which we calmly listened to before insisting that we go to the hospital so we can actually do what we had planned on doing.

Shiny new infantry school buildings, courtesy of EUSEC (EU military, kinda)

The hospital commander, a colonel (not sure if that’s equivalent to our colonel or lieutenant colonel; he didn’t give a card), briefly explained his hospital to us: the Hospital Militaire de Reference de Kitona is a referral hospital, a tertiary care facility for the Kitona region (the DRC equivalent of, say, Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas—not the national-level military hospital, but the largest one in the area). Unlike our military hospitals, though, the population seen by the hospital in Kitona is about 40% military and 60% military, which is pretty normal for DRC. There are four military physicians, each of which is a general practitioner, who sees patients in all four departments of the hospital—medicine, pediatrics, OB/GYN, and surgery. On Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the physicians see consultations, which means two of the physicians see outpatients and two manage the wards. On Tuesdays and Fridays, two will do surgeries and the other two manage the wards. On Sundays there is one physician on call. For each patient who comes in (about 50-60/day), they will be seen by the registrar, then triaged by a nurse before being seen by the consulting physician. It actually seems to be a pretty efficient system that is working well for them.

The hospital on Kitona Base

The majority of the patients are there for infectious diseases—malaria, TB, HIV, diarrheal diseases, etc. This is actually exactly what we’re looking for, for our Medical Readiness Training Exercise  (MEDRETE) in June. The goal of the MEDRETE is to train U.S. military physicians in tropical diseases and public health, while doing good things that will (with any luck) have a lasting impact in Africa. We still have some discussing to do, as far as how many physicians we can bring on this mission, but I think it’s going to be a go. Which means I’ll be back in the DRC, at Kitona Base, in June.