Rwanda or Bust!

I've been working on my thesis/scholarly project for a couple of months now. My original plan was to create a curriculum for an advanced medical surgical nursing class which I would then teach during spring semester. The proposal for the class had gone through the office of the Provost, gotten approved and had been added to the course catalog. I had written a syllabus, a course outline, and a couple lesson plans when situations beyond my control swallowed up my project. Despite heroic efforts for its resuscitation, I was unable to revive it. I was three days from a deadline and was without a project proposal and no time to get over the nearly disabling disappointment of loosing my previous project. This had the potential to be a major setback pushing my graduation date further away.
To make a long story short (which I'm beginning to think I'm incapable of doing) an amazing opportunity came up for a project in Rwanda. Last year a former teacher had introduced me a young missionary nurse bound for Rwanda. Julie was about to leave the US for Rwanda where she would work as nurse educator in a large mission hospital there. The two of us had been emailing back and forth since last February.
The hospital in Rwanda has just recently opened an emergency room. Since this hospital has never before had an ER the nurses have had little exposure to what we would call ER nursing.
I was invited to develop a training program that helps prepare nurses to work in the ER. The only easy part about this project is getting excited about it, the rest of it is going to be quite the challenge. First of all I had to present this idea to my thesis advisor to get it approved. I am perfectly aware that the whole idea seems absolutely crazy so I knew that getting it approved would be no easy task.
We did it! On November 3rd at 0400 am my project was given the go ahead. It was rather amazing because I was at work and able to be on my email, Rwanda is 9 hours ahead of us, and my advisor was in Japan at the time which is 16 hours ahead (I think). So... with 15 emails, lots of prayer and three hours my project was approved on the very day of it's first deadline. I now had 20 hours left for a literature review and more formal proposal.
During those three hours of trying to get my project passed my advisor asked "what do you know about emergency medicine in resource constrained areas of the world?" When I told her about some of my rather random sounding experiences she emailed me back with: OK, you've convinced me that you have the experience to do this. Both you and I know that there is no "strange way" that all of this is unfolding. If you feel like God is leading you this way, go for it!" So here I am, going for it. I'll keep you all posted as the details develop.