Saturday

Looking forward to another lazy Saturday on the belt of the Earth. I have some good stories from this week, but I need to pull some photos off of a friend's camera still. In the mean time, have a listen to the link below, it's a song that I hear at least two times a day around town.

http://m.b5z.net/i/u/6129093/m/Bread_n_butter_-_Radio_n_weseal.mp3

Rejuvenation thy name is DORITOS

So I was cleaning my room about an hour ago when one of the other volunteers knocked on my door. She handed me this bag of doritos saying "is this that stuff you're always talking about?". I just about danced around the room while eating them, I've been looking for doritos all over Jinja but up till this point had been unsuccessful.

Not much to report over the last few days, I've been putting a lot of time into completing secondary applications for med school so some of my projects have had to take a back seat for awhile. This Friday I'm taking a team of five to the clinic, having all of us walking to the taxi park together should create quite a stir.

Progress

Today I went to another session with Women at Risk (WAR), I was pleased to find out that one of the children that I examined a few weeks ago has started to resolve his skin condition due to the hygiene training. Today's lecture was on the importance of hand washing, I'm going to go next week and show how to construct hand washing stations out of water jugs, sticks, and some string.

My friend in today's picture is one of the WAR children, I believe that this is his second appearance on the blog. A few weeks back I posted some photos of me working, I think he is the child that I was examining in those pictures. Tomorrow I'm heading out into the village with no set agenda, I'm taking my trauma bag with me so I'll just patch up any bumps or bruises that the parents present. The rest of this week should be relatively light, the only thing that I have on Friday is a brief first aid review with one of the base staff.

Climbing is hard, but it's easier than growing up

Day 1

Left Jinja in the morning for Mbale, ended up getting literally thrown onto a moving bus, they don’t seem to like to wait. Arrived at a place called Rose’s Last Chance about four hours later, run by a lady (Rose) who realized that it would be a good idea to open up a backpacker’s hotel at the base of Mt. Elgon. Our nightly rate of 20,000 shillings (<$10 US) included a bed, plus a huge dinner and breakfast. Rose is also a close friend of the chairman of the Mt Elgon porters and guides association, so we didn’t have to worry about arranging meetings. We ended up getting three porters to carry our excess equipment; I wasn’t comfortable with this initially, I would have rather carried my own gear to the top. However, this type of work is the main source of income for the community and it wasn’t that expensive anyway (roughly 15$ for each porter for the whole trip). Met our guide (Isaiah – pictured above), who was surprised to hear we wanted to climb the mountain in three days instead of the normal five.

Day 2

Woke up at 6, grabbed a quick breakfast, and then met our ride to the trailhead. Incidentally, our mode of transportation was a squad of motorcycles, all of which didn’t seem to be fazed by the muddy roads. After a short ride up into the hills we started hiking, fast forward eight hours later and we were at mude cave camp (2900m). I was rather surprised at how good our dinner was, we packed fresh vegetables and managed to make pretty decent pasta over an open fire. That night was probably the coldest I’ve experienced since Wisconsin winter, it’s a strange feeling to know you’re twenty miles from the equator and you can’t sleep because your teeth are chattering.

Day 3

Most of the group was already up from the cold at 6; we quick downed some tea and bread and left with our guides for the summit. The initial climb was rather flat, the interesting thing about Mt Elgon is that the summit lies very deep within the park; you can’t even see it from the park entrance. After about two hours of hiking we finally got to the point where we could see our destination (second picture, highest peak in the background). It was about an hour after that when we breached the rim of the caldera (third picture), it was quite a site not only can you see well into Kenya, but the geological formation is the largest extinct volcano in the world. After one final push we made it to the summit at about noon, we only stayed on top for about twenty minutes because of the low temperature, but we managed to get in our fair share of photos (last three). You’ll notice that the flag we made for the trip has the four different countries of origin displayed. Funny thing is that the five of us that made the ascent have only known each other for a few weeks at most, some only a few days. Going left to right, Andrew (Australian - teaching English), Sylvain (Swiss – music teacher), Melanie (Canadian – occupational therapist), Me, Jen (American – Law student). We ended up descending one camp lower than originally planned that evening due to heavy rain, by the time we reached our campsite everything was completely soaked. That night we stayed in the small hut that is usually used only by the porters and the guides, I was sleeping on the ground about two feet from the fire so at least I was warm.

Day 4

Woke up to a beautiful day, had an uneventful hike down to Rose’s Last Chance to recover for a day before heading back to Jinja. I actually felt like I was in a zoo, we were in an area surrounded by a low wooden fence, the local children stopped by in droves to stand at the fence and stare at us. I didn’t get to stay in a room this time around, the place was overbooked so tents were set up in the front yard and I had to spend another night in the cold (though I had blankets this time instead of a thing sleeping bag).

Day 5

The school children were back again this morning, one of my friends was handed a letter by one of the children basically just asking for money. The other travelers staying at the hostel ended up giving out packs of tissues to the kids; I also saw a few random items like hats getting thrown out. We were lucky enough to find a taxi that had an honest conductor; he didn’t overcharge us and even helped find a connection to Jinja when we got to Mbale. Made it back to Jinja at about lunchtime today, I was going to keep the beard that I’d grown over the last two weeks, but I was getting a lot of odd looks from the base staff. Celebrated our return by eating at the expensive Chinese place in town; figured that I needed a good meal to get back into the swing of things this week.

Tomorrow I’m headed back to work, I’m showing a new volunteer how to get to the rural clinic in the morning, and then I’ll probably just work in the lab for the rest of the day. Wednesday I’m back at women at risk teaching hand washing and basic hygiene, then Thursday I’ll probably go along with the children with disabilities team just to patch up any cuts or bruises the kids might have.

Into the wild

Not much has happened so far this week. Tomorrow morning I'm heading to the eastern border of Uganda to tackle Mount Elgon (pictured above). The climb should take about five days so I won't be updating until sometime next week, should have some good stories.

One month gone

This last week has been pretty packed, my clinic day on Monday was basically back to back patients for several hours. The antenatal clinic had it's busiest stop of the month on Tuesday, I personally saw over twenty mothers in the mobile lab. I took Wednesday off to play golf, though I wouldn't recommend it here, I only got through six holes before I ran out of balls. Thursday I spent with Women at Risk teaching basic first aid, the girls seemed to have a lot of fun bandaging each other up. Finally on Friday I went to the big clinic day for Spring of Hope, I was working in the pharmacy most of the day, we ended up dispensing epilepsy medication for over seventy patients. The photo above is from Friday, the director of Spring of Hope asked me to give a brief talk on basic nutrition. The gentleman standing next to me, Emma, is translating for me since I don't really know much beyond "ladies and gentlemen, how are you today?".

The weekend has been very relaxing thus far, except I got a pretty bad sunburn at the pool yesterday. I'm only working till Wednesday of this week, I'll be leaving for Mt. Elgon on Thursday morning, with any luck I should be at the summit by Saturday afternoon. Time seems to be going by pretty quickly, its hard to believe that I've been gone over a month at this point. I already have plans that are going to shoot me through the rest of July pretty quick, and since I'll be leaving for a major project in August I imagine that it'll be September before I know it.

Side note on food

So sitting here in the office on the 4th of July has got me reminiscing once again about food. It seems that all I do in my free time is think about food. Funny thing, there is a Chinese restaurant in town that is REALLY good. I went there this week after a rather long day, ended up getting a huge meal of sweet and sour chicken. It did show the difference in the financial aspects of local and muzungu life. My bill was 20,400 Ugandan shillings, that converts to just under $10 US. The average monthly salary of local laborers is approximately 60,000 shillings

4th of July in Uganda

So surprise surprise, Uganda doesn't exactly celebrate the 4th of July. I am wearing a US flag pin on my shirt today, but that's about the extent of my celebration. We had our usual muzungu breakfast this morning and I'll be heading to a friend's house in a bit for dinner. I tried to get my hands on some fireworks but unfortunately they're not as common as they are in the US

The first picture for today's post comes from my work yesterday, I giving a brief lecture on the importance of hand washing. Apparently it had some effect, one of my co-workers witnessed a lady diligently washing her hands after coming back from the bathroom later that afternoon.

The other day as I left the pool at the resort nearby, I noticed a familiar logo on the back of a parked car. I went up to it and found the vehicle of a Marquette alumnus, small world huh.