My 21days Village life Experience

Hello my beautiful readers. I have been away, doing some medical school stuff. I know…..that’s not an excuse good enough for me to not post a thing, but let’s just say I have been lazy to write 🙈.

Well, this past month of June, I was in a village far away from my home town. Let’s say it was still about school work, but this was kinda different. So, I just completed year 4. Yeiiiiii…one more year to go. But well, back to the story. Every year, students that just completed year 4 of medicine and students from different courses are sent to communities to go do some volunteering and also start up projects.

MAIZE by the road side

Well, for the start, I was worried about going to Rukunyu village in Kamwenge District where I had been posted. We were to spend 3 weeks. Please note that this would be the longest duration I have been to any village. Also to mention that the students who had been placed there the previous year had scared the crap out of me . they told us about having no electricity, having to fetch water from a well, accommodation not so descent, and not to forget a bathroom they described as traditional😹.

After sucking in all that……well because I had no choice or possibility of changing my placement site, I shopped well enough, bought my “all weather” pair of shoes….. Thanks to Aggie and Sue for the recommendation, and yeei, I was ready to hit the road, with my team of 6 other students.

my all weather shoe

Along the way, I was silent, and still worried of course. I listened to music and stared out the window the whole time. Nice road by the way, but all I could see were trees, bushes, maize gardens and more maize gardens. About 3 hours later. We arrived at the health centre of Rukunyu. The in charge welcomed us and handed the team over to a nurse who had booked our accommodation. As we drove off the health centre compound, a moment of silence hit the vehicle that was carrying us. The time to unveil our new home had come. We drove through old houses and right ahead of us, we saw an orange painted house….it looked new. Deep down I prayed that was our new home for the next 3 weeks. Turns out all of us wished the same. And just as luck could have it. It turned out to be. This house was new, tiled, piped water, solar. Life was to be better than what the previous group had experienced.

upon arrival

We settled in fine . living there was quite easy. The people loved us . they welcomed us to their homes and their community. Did I mention they also gave us free food from their gardens. My team and I countless times joked about village life being better than town life. No traffic jam, I mean who cared about what you wore or what your hair looked like on a particular morning. Actually on two Tuesday mornings,…Tuesday being the day I had to make breakfast, I walked in the town centre at 7am to go buy a match box dressed in my pyjamas. Hahaha. This I would never do back at home. Not even for a bet of a huge sum of money. But yea, we loved it.

Back to why we had been to this village. So we were to identify a health challenge of any kind in this community, and come up with a project to solve that challenge within 21 days. My group settled for HIV. And our main aim was to raise the number of people 12 years and above who knew their HIV status from 18% to our new target of 50% with in 21days.

After one of the community meetings

This I must say was a big goal to achieve, but with a great team, and a go getter like me…wink*, we could do this. We worked with different stakeholders, went to schools, interviewed different local leaders , did home to home visits , and had community outreaches. At all this, we offered health education about HIV/AIDS, and provided testing and counselling services to the interested clients.

Your girl (Me) giving health education about HIV/AIDS to the locals

Guys, it was a lot of work, but we did all . and right after our last community outreach, we did the maths, and actually realised we had raised the number of people who knew their HIV status from 18% to 46.5% . Proud team.

We made a great contribution to this community. Here are random pics from our time in Rukunyu village. Enjoy!