Jordan Stanislaw Pyda, MD MPH: University of Maryland School of Medicine, Abdominal Transplant Surgeon

Rwanda: February 2025

 I would like to express my gratitude to the Benjamin H. Josephson Fund for sponsoring my first visit to Rwanda. I travelled with Dr. Jeffrey Punch to King Faisal Hospital in Kigali, Rwanda to support the Living Donor Kidney Transplant Program for one week (February 23-March 1). On Monday, we met the nephrology and transplant surgery team and together we reviewed six donor and recipient pairs which were presented by the two transplant surgery fellows. As part of the selection committee, we chose four clinically appropriate pairs, and we scheduled them to be transplanted that week. Every day, in operating room #2, I assisted Dr. Engida Abebe, an Ethiopian surgeon, and a transplant surgery fellow in the open living donor nephrectomy operation. After flushing the kidney, we walked it over to operating room #1 and it was sewn into the recipient by the other team. Each morning or afternoon, we rounded on the previous day’s patients to ensure that they were recovering appropriately and that the grafts were working well. On Friday, after the last transplant, we met with the leadership of the hospital to provide positive feedback on the kidney transplant program and provided continued assessments of the fellow’s progress. On Saturday morning, prior to my evening flight I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Thank you to the BHJ Fund for making this wonderful clinical and program building visit possible!