Yes I'm working!

This post is for the friend who after noticing that most of these blog posts document our travels and adventures, all of which sound exotic and exciting, asked "are you getting any work done or doing your Fulbright duty or just having the ultimate sabbatical safari?"

I've had a full teaching load this term at Kigali Health Institute.  Courses are taught as modules and most of the faculty in the department teach 1-2 modules for a total of 10-20 credits.  I was assigned and agreed to teach 3 modules for 23 credits, yes, KHI is getting their Fulbright's worth out of me.

1. From January until mid-March I taught the Biostatistics module to the 4th year students. 
2. From mid-February until early April I taught the Clinical Epidemiology module to the 3rd year students.
3. From April until early May I taught an Orthopaedics I module to the 2nd year students. 

The 2nd year physio students, all students are supposed to come to class in their lab coats

Teaching was a tricky experience.  These students speak fluent Kinyarwanda, in secondary school their instruction was in French and a couple of years ago the language of instruction in secondary and higher education was changed to English.  Now I think I have the easiest accent and many students agreed but it turns out my lecture style and joking manner were quite new to them.  Very few lecturers use active learning techniques as the most common style of conducting a class is the straight lecture.  Often students seemed not know what to make of my methods.  I quickly discovered that the trick to successful teaching was to work with material on Monday, review it on Tuesday and start Wednesday with the same material as on Monday with something new added in.

Students do not have textbooks (faculty don't have many themselves) and they rely on published notes that faculty provide (from what I've seen that faculty plagiarize from elsewhere).  I felt writing a full set of notes was too much pressure since these notes are essentially textbooks themselves and I couldn't write 3 texts while I was here.  Luckily I brought some orthopedics materials to give out to the students and I provided them with the ubiquitous and ugly PowerPoint slide sets that helped me to organize the content.

In between teaching, I have been holding clinic hours Tuesday and Thursday morning at the KHI Kiyovu clinic.  Prior to starting their own clinical experiences, the 4th year students would join me in seeing patients.

As of May all of the students are out on full-time clinical experiences.  These experiences are SO, SO different from our approach to clinical education in the US.  The students go out in groups of usually 6-10 depending on the clinic size.  All the clinics are hospital based since all physio here is hospital based.  The students are assigned patients and it appears to me that they are often seeing these patients with little supervision.  Two days each week a KHI faculty member visits the clinic and the students see patients with the oversight or assistance of a faculty member.  Thus far, I've visited Kigali based clinics including King Faisal Hospital, Kanombe Military Hospital, and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Kigali (CHUK).  There are rumors flying about the future of Kanombe Hospital which is near the airport; for the curious, keep your eyes on the US military Africom which apparently may be a partner in the hospital's renovation.

The ultra-modern King Faisal Hospital which was recently accredited by some international group

The waiting area at Kanombe

The gym at CHUK

In the next two weeks I will be out in the provinces at Gatagara and Gahini.  I'm not so sure how effective my clinical teaching has been, it's pretty clear that the style of orthopaedic treatment in the U.S. is pretty different from the style here.  There is barely any patient documentation written and I've seen loads of use of massage, hot packs, infra-red and a few other modalities that I thought had disappeared with the dinosaurs. 

This set up was done by a student after I explained why modalities would be ineffective in this patient's case

Signage at King Faisal, can you say Physical Therapy?

Signage at CHUK now I'm really confused about how to say this in Kinyarwanda

4th years at King Faisal

In addition to teaching and clinic, I've been working with my Rwandan colleagues to assist them with their scholarly endeavors.  I've worked on a number of different projects including one that will be presented in June at WCPT (I got last author credit).  I'm right now drafting a manuscript for a special issue of  the Journal of Physical Therapy Education about the issues with and potential for further research collaboration between US physios and those in developing countries based on my experiences.  Aside from helping with my colleagues work, be on the lookout for 2 articles in which I am an author in July of this year (Phys Ther and JOSPT).  The finishing work for these articles was completed while I was here.  Oh yes, how could I forget, one last piece of scholarly work...that darned book continues to occupy my time.  J&B, our publisher now has a website for it so I guess it might be published one day this year.

Adventure and work, I think these past few months we've tried to maintain a balance.  If this post sounds like more than a person on sabbatical should be doing...think again...after all, I'm not the chair/program director while here, instead I'm just another faculty member doing her bit and enjoying it too.