Mbasi Centre de Santé - Rwandanmark initiative

As Muriel already mentioned, today we attended a session of the 'Rwandanmark' initiative that is, at the moment, run by Iben -from Danmark, as you might have already figured by the name of the project ;-). The project consist of informative sessions on family planning and HIV -two of the main issues when it comes down to preventive health care here in Rwanda-, given by Rwandese medical students.

So we visited the Mbasi Centre de Santé a couple of kilometers from Butare. From these smaller centres people can be referred to the bigger District Hospitals, such as Kabutare where we do our internship, and if needed they can then be further referred to one of the University Hospitals in Kigali or Butare.
As you can see on the fotos, these primary centres are only small buildings with consultation rooms and some basic materials, but for interventions and hospitalisation people are sent to the District Hospitals.

Many women, and children -many tucked in on the back of the mothers in very colourful tissues; the common way of carrying the children around, that actually keeps them warm, safe and close to the mothers and the mothers themselves still have their hands free to do some work!- and some men attended the session. Everybody payed a lot of attention when information was given on oral anticonceptives, condoms -these are distributed for free in the health care centers-, implant pills, spirals, the kalender method, spermicides, sterilisation and so on.

The students -Gracien, Abdellah, Louise and Alice- did a great job explaining and demonstrating -even we could understand, though it was in Kinyarwanda!- and they got there 'public' to laugh quite often :-) Just have a look at the pics, and you'll see... And to conclude they mention the importance of having a small family of maybe 3 children -having 6 or more children is very common- in order to give the children a chance of having proper education.

You might make the remark that in theory this is all very nice, but the question is ofcourse how much effort will be needed to actually change peoples ideas (for example: breast feeding is still the main way of feeding the babies here, so discouraging HIV positive women not to breast feed there babies in order to avoid transmission is not very feasable... So why perform a cesarian to avoid transmission if the babies will be breast fed afterwards with much higher chances of transmission... And that's but only one example of course.) There's still a long way to go...

To conclude: it was a very interesting morning, another look on Rwandese health care and a very good, very needed intiative! Better to prevent than to cure... but a lot of initiative, effort and time will be needed!