Busy Amy + a lot of rain = the weeds have officially taken over my backyard

I didn’t realize how truly busy I’ve been until I had my Rwandan friend, Janviere, and new friend, Betsy, visit my house today. And what made me realize it? The fact that Janviere took one look at the atrocious state of my yard and wide-eyed and open mouthed yelled “Amy!” at me. I looked around, and was immediately embarrassed by the large weeds and overgrown grass that have sprouted up everywhere. Hadn’t I just spent three straight mornings weeding the entire thing? Oh wait, that was a couple of weeks ago. And considering it rains for at least a couple of hours every day these days it’s no surprise that my backyard has turned into a jungle.

So where has the time gone? Mostly I’ve been sucked into the awesome black hole that is the district library. We’ve catalogued all of the books, have sorted almost all of the books and are currently planning our official opening ceremony! More and more people are glancing in the windows and wandering in to see what’s going on with all of these books. I showed up today to see a 12 year old with his nose buried in The Lion King, and by the end of the day two secondary school students had pulled out the Organic Chemistry textbook and asked if I could tutor them.

I’ve also been jumping back into my work with the Access Project. I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week visiting 6 health centers to conduct pharmacy management activities with Zimy, the Access pharmacy specialist. Ever since working for SCMS back in the states I’ve been interested in pharmacies in the developing world, and this week was definitely an immense learning experience for me. We toured stock pharmacies, giving recommendations on their organization and ensuring they didn’t have any expired drugs present. We sat with the distribution pharmacists as they handed out drugs and checked their registers against what they were actually distributing. We retrained some of the pharmacy managers on the quantification formulas they should be using when they reorder drugs from the district pharmacy. And I guess it goes without saying how happy I was to stare at mathematical formulas once again. I’m even going to begin IT training next Monday with the pharmacy manager at the health center in my sector.

Oh, and how could I forget, my first water project was approved!! I should receive the money next week, so I can pass it on to the Director of Bisate Health Center and they can begin putting running water into their hospitalization and consultation rooms. The project has been fully pre-funded through Water Charities Appropriate Projects, but if you’d like to donate money to support it, have a look here!

http://appropriateprojects.com/node/397

On top of all this, tomorrow I’m going to Kigali to have the first planning meeting to bring more needed books into Rwanda. The Rwanda Books for Peace Project has already brought more than 20,000 books into schools, community centers and health clinics around Rwanda, and my group of health volunteers wants to continue this amazing project. I’ll have a lot more information about this in the future, particularly since we’ll be needing to raise a bit of money to cover the shipping costs for the books.

So I guess that explains the current state of my backyard, but considering how busy and happy I am right now I don’t mind too much. Though, that didn’t stop me from grinning from ear to ear and shouting “Yego!” (yes) when Janviere asked if I’d want her to come over on Saturday morning to help me weed.