Pauline Hill the wife to Sarasota obstetrician Dr. Washington Hill, whom both are heading to Rwanda to help set up a hospital and teach doctors, nurses to provide quality care as a part of the Duke University School of Nursing will arrive on monday to start a new life helping her students learn the crucial lesson of how to keep preterm babies thriving in their first three months of life.
Hill, a longtime Sarasota registered nurse who teaches at the University of Tampa, has accepted an 11-month position with Duke University to educate nurses in Kigali, Rwanda.
She will be joined by her husband, Washington Hill, when he retires next year on January 31, 2013. Until then, she said, they will stay in touch via Skype.
The couple will spend 11 months of teaching, working with Rwandan health workers, treating patients as well as build up a hospital in the country.
Rwanda has an infant mortality rate of 59 out of 1,000 live births, compared to 6.6 out of 1,000 in the United States. Hill will be attached to a busy district hospital that sees more than 20 births a day. “In the United States we can resuscitate 22-weekers,” she said. In Rwanda, newborns generally survive at 32 to 34 weeks, she added, but their early life is precarious because of a lack of information about nutrition and hydration.
She looks forward to finding ways to educate nurses and new mothers, despite a language barrier that will have her relying on translators.
“I’m bringing a tablet so I can draw pictures,” she said. “Just from them wanting to learn and me wanting to teach, it will happen.”
Hill’s appointment with Duke is part of an eight-year commitment among major medical universities and the William J. Clinton Foundation to revolutionize public health in Rwanda by training medical professionals. The first year’s program, she said, will focus on maternal and child health.
The Hills have traveled to to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana with Hearts Afire, a Christian outreach organization based in Sarasota. Pauline Hill has served on the group’s board since its founding in 2006.
“Without going and doing those short-term missions, I’d never have had the courage to try this,” she said.
Among the challenges she expects in Rwanda is the necessity of boiling water for her own use, laundering her own clothes in basins at her apartment, and getting to and from the hospital.
“What I’m hoping to do is walk.” she said. “I’ve requested to be within three miles, but I believe in they are dirty roads you share with goats and people and little motorbikes.”