NRT Kyrgyzstan

This week was spent in Kyrgyzstan participating in 4 days of Neonatal Resuscitation Training. The flights in and out of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, are all in the middle of the night so the travel part of the trip was less than fun. We ended up with a 7 hour layover in Almaty on the way down but the missionary couple, E/S Moore, in Almaty picked us up at the airport and took us to their apartment until our night flight. We had a wonderful time getting to know them and she fixed us a great dinner. Our flight home had a 6 hour layover in Almaty - midnight to 6 AM!! So we tried to sleep on the benches in the airport but it was fairly futile. Viviane made friends with a lady sharing the bench with us. She was from the city of Shemkent in southern Kazakhstan and was on her way to Moscow for a conference. Viviane communicated with her via broken English, hand signals, and written words for about 3 hours and the two ended up knowing a lot about each other by the end. It was amazing to watch.

The special thing about NRT is the hands-on parts of the training. The Church sends in manikins that are specially made to simulate a baby. With these manikins the students can simulate the needs of a new born that is not breathing when it is born. They practice ventilating and resuscitating the baby with proven practices that they learn about in the lecture part of the training.

Dr. Bennett (retired) and Dr. Underwood (on the UC Davis Medical School staff) volunteered their time and came from the States to help with this training. They partnered with 4 local doctors that they had trained 2 years before. The picture at right is Dr. Bennett with some of the local doctors during one of the practice sessions. The picture below is of Dr. Underwood teaching at a session. They would describe a new born baby's condition at birth and the students would have to save the baby's life.













This is one of the Kyrgyz doctors doing a practice session. They had 6 tables set up with about 7 students at each table.















The training is started with a pre-test to determine the level of their knowledge, then tests at the end of each section of training, and a post-test to determine if the knowledge increased. We hold a little celebration at the end of each 2 day session and all participants who completed all the 2 days of training get a certificate. The picture above is from the 2 days of doctor training. Unfortunately it was raining at the end of the second 2 days and so I did not get a picture of all the mid-wives.

At the end of each day we would go back to the hotel and rest a bit before walking about 30 minutes to dinner. It was a nice walk through a park and down some busy streets. Here are some pictures of the park, our restaurant, and food. The food was very good. We ate a lot of lamb and tried some different salads. Below is a beet salad with walnuts and lamb with walnuts and dried apricots.













The dish below is lamb cooked with a lot of garlic and broiled potatoes and tomatoes with onions (they cook with a lot of onions) and pistachios. The last meal was with the Kyrgyz trainers and it got very stormy so the restaurant handed out blankets to wrap around ourselves. Viviane and I had matching orange blankets.























Lastly, to my surprise, one of the groups of mid-wives ask me to have my picture taken with them. Maybe it was their way of getting back at me because one of my assignments was to go around taking pictures. All these ladies had a lot of fun learning these resuscitation techniques and took the training very seriously.