Angie's Embarrassing Moment on House Hunters International

Well… It is been a few days since our last blog, but we have been very busy. For the past five days we have been filming for the reality television show House Hunters International, which is slated to air in September or October! What a blast that has been! In spite of long 10 to 12 hour shoots each day we have been having a great time. What’s amazing is we will capture almost 20 hours of video, which will be edited down to a 22 minute show. Let me just say that the Kutz family has proven to be quite the actors! We can really ham it up for the camera – our director Heidi says we are made for TV family – and I’m sure it will come out in the final edit! I can’t wait to see the final product on television. They have so much footage that there are so many different angles of our family life that the editors could take. In other words, a big part of the final product will be a surprise to us as well depending on which sound bites and clips they decide to use. The film crew has been absolutely amazing and they have helped us discover parts of Kigali that we didn’t know existed! This experience has truly enhanced our trip to Rwanda and broken up a little bit of the monotony and homesickness we have been experiencing the past few weeks. On the fun side, Angie and I have really been able to develop and stretch our acting skills… Angie is a total piece of work. Don’t let her fool you, but she loves, loves, loves being in front of the camera.

Us and the HHI Crew!

Here we are haming it up after 10 hrs of shooting HHI footage

Angie’s embarrassing moment

Perhaps the funniest thing that happened during our filming occurred yesterday. We were filming our decision scene and Angie and I are supposed to be casually walking along this path near a golf course and a pond. It was on our third take when we were walking at a distance from the camera down toward the pond where we were supposed to start our walk and talk… As we are walking down to restart our shoot I mentioned to Angie what awesome actress she is and how easy she is to work with… You know, making jokes about her not being a snobby, stuck up actress… She replied to me in her Marilyn Monroe voice, “auhhh... You’re just saying that because you want to get me – implying she is a famous actress – into bed.” All of a sudden the whole filming crew starts laughing… Because Angie forgot that we were microphoned for the shoot. They heard the entire conversation – and Angie was mortified and that is an understatement. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so embarrassed! When Angie gets embarrassed all she can do is laugh hysterically and fall on the ground. So here we are trying to film the third take of our decision scene and Angie is having a laughing fit that she cannot control because she was caught live in on camera saying something embarrassing. Now that was a memorable moment!

Teaching a KHI

Back on the school front – I finished my last stint at the Kibuye campus. I’m sad to say that I will not be able to enjoy the beautiful scenery any further. But, I am elated over the fact that I no longer have to take that grueling, butt-numbing, rodeo-esque three hour bus trip. I have transitioned into a new role for the next two months here KHI. I no longer will be lecturing in the classrooms, but I will begin to visit the students in their clinical placement sites. In fact, I have already begun. In the last two weeks I have been observing and supervising the students working on patients in the local Rwandan hospitals. So far I have visited two district hospitals where we have placed physiotherapy students and I have been surprised at each hospital over the lack of available equipment. The staff at the hospitals are very professional and extremely qualified! However their resources are extremely limited – so much so that probably 80 to 90% of their treatment plan involves joint mobilizations and massage, regardless of the diagnosis. Because of the limited resources manual therapy is almost all they can offer their patients. On the plus side, the physical therapists here and students are extremely talented in the use of manual therapy techniques. So I’ve been having the opportunity to brush up on a few of my manual therapy skills as well.

In addition to supervising students at their clinical placement sites I have also been collaborating with my new colleagues on some research projects. In fact, Nuhu (my department head) and I are about 90% completed on an epidemiology research project dealing with rate, incident, and severity of injuries to African soccer players. I was surprised to find out that no research of any kind has been done in this area. So, the two of us are looking forward to getting a manuscript prepared and a poster presentation submitted. I’ve also been meeting with several of the dental school faculty members here at KHI and we are developing a research plan for investigating leadership practices of dentists and allied healthcare professionals here in Rwanda. There are tons of opportunities for research here! The faculty all would love to do research, but do not have the resources, background, or equipment to do so… So my presence here is really lit a fire under several of the faculty members in multiple departments on the importance and role of research in Rwanda.

Here are the new office accomodations for the faculty. KHI admin decided without warning to move all faculty office 5 miles away to a downtown office building. so between classes - sometimes for hours - we hang out in our old office space which is empty - so we use the student's desk chairs for our office space.

All-in-all these two roles – clinical supervision and research – will keep me busy for the remaining eight weeks of my Fulbright scholarship. What I can’t believe is that there are only eight weeks left. Several months ago I remember thinking “holy cow” we are only eight weeks into this… Now we’re thinking there’s only eight weeks left. We do have one more small trip planned to Zanzibar, which is an island off the coast of Tanzania at the end of June. We are excited about that trip and hope that everything we have read and seen in pictures is true. One of the things we found out about Africa is that there are absolutely no copyright or trademark laws and if there are they are not enforced in any way. In fact, we have been joking around with that with the house hunters crew all week… What many of the places do is Photoshop pictures from the Internet and use them as if they are their own products. For example, in the restaurants here you can be guaranteed that the pictures on the menu are not pictures of their food. What the restaurant owners do is cut-and-paste pictures from restaurants in the United States from those menus onto their menus. We also found that many of the brochures and advertisements used here are pictures taken from other places and not the actual place that the brochure is promoting. When the brochure says our hotel offers beautiful scenery… They have no qualms about taking a picture off the Internet of beautiful scenery anywhere and putting it on their brochure as an “example of beautiful scenery." Anyway, that makes for quite a bit of adventure and any traveling that we do is blind. We also have a short stay in Frankfurt Germany planned. Our Flight back to the United States includes a 72 hour layover in Frankfurt Germany. We are going to be able to take a tour of the Rhine River and visit a few castles in the German countryside as one last hurrah before we land in Detroit Metro Airport!

FINALLY found "Mr. Chips" food the way God intended it to be eaten...

Crown crane wandering about the garden (or yard)

Need this guy to us pack for our trip home...