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In This Issue:
Egidia Rugwizangoga, center, with Team Heart patients Claudine and Dorothee.
Life and death—that’s the difference between the circumstances that brought Egidia Rugwizangoga, BSN, RN, back to Rwanda this April on a medical mission and those that caused her departure ten years ago in the wake of genocide.
A genocide survivor who escaped from war-ravaged Rwanda in 1999, she came to Boston, learned English and worked as a patient care assistant at BWH while earning her nursing degree from UMass Boston. This April, she returned to Rwanda for the first time as part of a life-saving mission with Team Heart, caring for patients undergoing heart surgery.
“It was so special to use what I have learned here to help change lives in Rwanda,” said Rugwizangoga, a nurse on Tower 4. “I was very excited to be home.”
Rugwizangoga already was familiar with King Faisal Hospital, where she completed nursing practicum during high school. On Team Heart’s mission at King Faisal this year, she translated and cared for cardiac surgery patients who had suffered from rheumatic heart failure, a disease that claimed the lives of many she knew growing up in Rwanda.
“Without surgery, these patients wouldn’t live,” said Rugwizangoga. “This was an incredible mission. Lives were changed forever.”
She bonded with all 13 patients, but especially two young teenage girls, Claudine and Dorothee, whose families were unable to be with them at the hospital. “It broke my heart to hear how difficult it is for them to get two meals a day. They didn’t even have shoes to wear home from the hospital,” Rugwizangoga said. “But they were so appreciative of the fact that people from another country came over here for them and gave them hope that they are going to live.”
Rugwizangoga spent three weeks in Rwanda, visiting family and friends, including nieces and nephews she’s never met, and traveling to clinics and hospitals throughout the country to screen potential patients for upcoming Team Heart missions. She noticed many differences in her country since she was last there.
“It’s very clean and the services are improved—it’s changed for the better,” she said. “I think people are more hopeful that things are going to get better.”
She said that people like Team Heart members play a big role in that hopefulness. “These people are changing the world,” she said. “You don’t know what these patients are going to be or do to make this world a better place. We need to help each other.”