It’s just after midnight in Rutshuru. Tomorrow morning Dr. F, the French anesthetist who arrived here with me, and I leave for Goma. Unfortunately the schedule worked out with me on-call at the hospital and I missed tonight’s farewell party. This morning we had a fairly typical day in the OR, doing 12 procedures between 8am and 1pm including performing a skin graft, placing a traction pin in a patient with a fractured femur, draining a few abscesses, debriding a few wounds plus a handful of dressing changes including two children under the age of three with 2nd degree scald burns over roughly 30% of their bodies plus an eight-month-old who had her foot amputated for an infection two days earlier. I also admitted a 16 year old girl from the ER with chronic osteomyelitis [bone infection] who will need a fairly large operation in the next week or so to remove infected dead bone from her tibia. Chronic osteomyelitis in children is rare in the US but fairly common here in the DRC.