Bringing Care to Life
Turning waiting rooms to learning centers for mothers in Rwanda
When Samuel Byiringiro saw our breastfeeding videos, he immediately realized they’d be fantastic to teach mothers and the waiting rooms in his hospital would provide a way to reach them efficiently. According to Sam, “patient education is often neglected because of dire shortages of health care providers in Rwanda. These videos can help fill this gap.” He soon had all nine of our breastfeeding videos for mothers translated and narrated into Kinyarwanda. We added the new voice tracks to the videos and made them available to be viewed or downloaded from our website.
The videos will be displayed on a small flat screen TV in the neonatal waiting room and in maternity at the University Teaching Hospital of Butare (UTHB). Sam also keeps the videos on his laptop so he can access them to teach, review, and answer questions as needed. UTHB is only the first step for Sam, as he plans to distribute the videos to many other hospitals and health centers in Rwanda to help turn waiting rooms into learning centers and make sure newborns get the best chance to be breastfed exclusively for the first six months of life.
Sam is a nursing student at the University of Rwanda College of Medicine and Health Sciences. He is grateful to his mentor, Medie Jesena (a pediatric nurse in the HRH program) for supporting this project and to the neonatology nurses at his hospital for reviewing his translations. We would like to thank Sam for collaborating with us to expand the reach of these videos to mothers in Rwanda.
If you would like to help make our videos available in your local language, please contact us. We would be happy to guide you through the process.