CU Denver doctors help future doctors in Rwanda

BUTARE, Rwanda - If you were one of the 10 million people in Rwanda and you needed surgery, if Dr. Theo Twarumugabe were in your operating room, you'd be considered lucky. He's one of only 11 anesthesiologists in the entire country. He graduated from the only medical school in Rwanda but also had to go to France to get complete training.

"When you go abroad to learn something, you get some good skills, but when you come back to (Rwanda) there is a big gap," said Dr. Twarumugabe.

He's talking about the gap between what you know how to do, and what you can do in a country with tremendous need but little equipment for its few experts.

"We're having blind people with situations which are curable, but people are getting blind just because of lack of qualified people," said Dr. Charles Muhizi. He's one of only nine ophthalmologists in Rwanda. He's also vice dean of Rwanda's small but fast-growing medical school in the southern city of Butare.

At the National University of Rwanda School of Medicine, it's a weekend and yet students are spending hours in the classroom. That's because a visiting professor is here, and the students want and need every opportunity they can get for such knowledge. It's the kind of help now coming from a medical campus in Colorado.

"We realized that we have a wealth of qualified professors and teachers here in specialties and sub-specialties, so we offered to help as much as we could," said Dr. Calvin Wilson.

Wilson is director of the University of Colorado Denver Center for Global Health (CGH). In the past couple years, the CGH has sent dozens of visiting professors to the medical school in Rwanda. They impart as much knowledge as they can in their short visits, but it's hard for the medical school to maintain a high quality program when professors are only there for two weeks at a time.

The CGH recognized this need for better coordinated training, specifically in family and community medicine. It recently attained funding from USAID to place a full-time faculty member there to establish and oversee the new program.

Despite the challenges the Rwandan medical students have in their training and practice opportunities, Wilson says they do their best to overcome the obstacles.

"They are very dedicated students. They realized they don't necessarily have all the facilities or advantages that a student in a more developed country might have, but because of that I think they work to make up for it," said Wilson.

In a country where people were once told to kill, these medical students are learning to save lives.

"What impressed me was that so soon after the horrible catastrophe of the genocide, which basically touched every single family in Rwanda, Hutu or Tutsi, it impressed me to see the fact that they were not only moving on with life, but thriving," said Wilson.

These young minds are the nation's future doctors. They're working hard so that one day, when any one of the 10 million people in Rwanda get seriously sick, survival won't depend on luck alone.

For more on the University of Colorado Denver Center for Global Health, visit http://thunder1.cudenver.edu/ctrglobalhealth/index.htm.