Chronicles of a Medical Education: Democratic Republic of Congo, Day 4

This was our last morning in Muanda, which was a good thing. I was getting a bit tired of that place (which is probably going to make it hard to go back in June…). I did finally get to go running, though; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) major went running yesterday morning, so I asked him if I could go running with him today. We did about 3 miles in 30 minutes, which wasn’t bad, considering the heat, humidity, and poor conditions of the road. I’m excited about getting to go running along the Congo River in Kinshasa tomorrow morning (even though it’ll be early).

The main road in Muanda and where we went running

The flight from Muanda to Kinshasa is the same plane that does the reverse trip (makes sense), which means it doesn’t leave until the afternoon, after the plane gets into Muanda and the crew gets a couple of hours to rest. So we spent the time in the morning hanging out the lobby of the hotel, with its spotty air conditioning, planning the details of the MEDRETE in June. It’s going to be four physicians—me, two adult infectious disease physicians, and one pediatrics infectious disease physician—as well as a laboratory tech who knows blood safety, and three support/security personnel from USARAF. In addition, we’ll also have five Congalese translators, because the doctors at Kitona don’t speak much (if any) English, and the American doctors probably (in my case, definitely) don’t speak much French. The Embassy has already identified two of those translators; I hope they find another three by June and that they know medical speak well enough to translate it.

In all, the mission will be 11 days, but with travel time to and from Muanda, there will only be eight days on the ground, seven of which are working days (they only have one doctor on call on Sundays and don’t see any new patients). On those days, we’ll have physicians paired up (one Congalese, one American) seeing patients as the Congalese normally do in the mornings. Then, in the afternoons, we’ll be having “summit meetings”, which will be discussions about programs that the DRC Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Health has for HIV, malaria, and TB, as well as the American doctors explaining our programs for these (well, for the ones we have programs for) and going over WHO guidelines for diagnosis and treatment. I think the lab tech will just be doing similar things with the lab personnel, in terms of teaching and learning (learning how to read malaria slides, teaching about blood safety, etc).

Finally, noon rolled around and we piled in the rental cars and headed for the Muande airport, where we again loaded a tiny little plane that stopped at the same places as on the way there before depositing us in Kinshasa. The embassy cars met us there and loaded us up to the Fleuve hotel, where we got reliable air conditioning, hot showers, and good food we didn’t have to wait three hours for. It was nice.