When I became a GHC fellow and moved to Rwanda, I expected to work on my language skills. I picked Rwanda as a placement country largely because I wanted to practice my French, and even before I left the US my co-fellow Remy was already writing lists of key words in Kinyarwanda for me to memorize on the flight to Kigali. While it’s true that I can now haggle with a moto driver for a ride into town or greet my neighbor in the morning in Kinyarwanda, the work was supposed to be in English. So imagine my surprise at the number of new words I’ve had to learn in the course of my work this year.
It turns out that “nephrology” is not the study of dead people (that’s necrology), but the study of kidneys. When a Department Head tells you she is looking for an “otolaryngologist”, it just means that she wants to recruit an ENT. And apparently a “urogynecologist” is not someone who is both a urologist and a gynecologist, which seemed totally logical to me, but in fact a surgical subspecialty of gynecology.
These words never seemed applicable to me. Unlike many of my peers in high school and college, I never seriously considered medical school, so I never thought too hard about the numbers of different kinds of doctors there are. But in my role managing physician recruitment for the Government of Rwanda’s Human Resources for Health (HRH) Program, I’ve kept track of 90 doctors, nurses, and health managers living in Rwanda while recruiting for the more than 150 we are planning to have next year. While tracking down our faculty in hospitals across Rwanda I’ve learned the difference between the NICU and PICU, not to call the place where surgeons work a “ward” (it’s an Operating Room, or an OR), and that your “house staff” doesn’t necessarily refer to your housekeeper – it can also refer to your residents.
Over the course of the year I’ve gotten familiar with the language of health care in a way I never thought I would have to. Sometimes that language is traumatic, like the day I sat in on a Ob/Gyn departmental meeting and learned so many nauseating new words it made me seriously reconsider having children. Sometimes the new language is technical and appeals to my inner data nerd, like when a surgeon explains what a trauma registry is and how it can be used to help shape safety laws and even public policy. But sometimes my new vocabulary is actually kind of cool, like when I meet a nephrologist at the campsite bottom of Mount Kilimanjaro and can ask enough informed questions that he asks me if I’m a doctor.
Sometimes it’s even enough to make me consider going to medical school – at least until someone uses the word episiotomy in a presentation and I’m silly enough to Google it and find out what that is.