Chicken?

I just noticed there's what appears to be a chicken on the Uganda flag Frank put on our blog page...is it supposed to be there? I thought the flag just had 3 bars of black, red, and yellow. I feel too stupid to ask a Ugandan about it and the time it takes to load an image on dial up is too long for me to look it up online.

Greetings from Uganda! Before I get too far, I want to give a caveat to my blogging. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I often say things in a way that isn’t always the most tactful, even if I had the best intentions. Sometimes when I blog, it just comes out all wrong and occasionally I don’t proofread. So then, sometimes when I write I thoughtlessly offend someone, and I apologize in advance for that. I think I can honestly say I never mean to be hurtful but I know it doesn’t always come off that way.

Frank has told you about our trip to Uganda so I won't rehash. I'll start from our home here.

We live in a house with essentially 8 other people, 3 kids and 3 adults; there is another couple who doesn’t actually have a room in the house but they are here all the time so it’s like the 10 of us are living together. 5 of them are part of one family-- one of the attending doctors from Portland and her family; the other couple is her brother and sister in law, and the last person is an ob/gyn resident. There will be two more doctors joining us shortly. You would think sharing 2 showers and 3 toilets would be a problem, but it really isn’t at all. It’s fun having so many people as there is always someone to do things with and always someone making yummy meals. And the food! Though we are missing some things, in general, the fruits and vegetables are fabulous---the pineapples! Passionfruit! Mangos! Cucumbers! Tomatoes! Mmmhhhh…the first day, Frank and I ate a whole pineapple for lunch; then snacked on passionfruits; then for dinner I wolfed down a salad full of tomatoes, avocados, cukes, carrots, and garlic; and my stomach told me in no uncertain terms to please never eat so many uncooked acidic foods in one go ever again. All the fruit we have lying around generates a lot of fruit flies but fortunately, there is a baby lizard living under our fruit basket so that helps a lot. The Ugandan food is similar to Nigeria’s with some sort of starchy mashed staple and a meat “stew” of some sort, but they have this deep-fried samosa-naan-tortilla thing that is SOOO good, yet so unhealthy….and they drink a lot of tea. British influence, I guess. Though there are a lot of Indian people here, Ugandans can’t take hot foods of any sort in general so they don’t understand our obsession with the expensive Indian restaurants.

My days here have already gotten into a pattern. We are generally at the hospital from 8AM-12:30 PM, starting with some sort of meeting or lecture; then at 9, we have “post-take” rounds, where we talk about last night’s admissions. At 10 AM, we do work rounds, seeing every patient. I'll tell you more about the actual work and patients later. We break for lunch, and since I live across the street from the hospital, I come home. In the afternoon, I try to have teaching sessions with the medical students a few times a week and the other days I spend the afternoon preparing for the sessions. It’s actually a hard task because Ugandan students ALWAYS want to know EVERY detail. If you tell them a medication helps preserve kidney function, they want me to explain the mechanism behind it. If you tell them a burn patient may have low potassium, they want me to explain why. And they can patiently sit for 1.5 hrs asking question after question until we tell them that’s it for today! Then at 5PM we try to go back for afternoon post-take rounds, where we go over admissions of the day time, and then we’re done. I have no call here, as my task is primarily to teach, so evenings are always a big dinner, clean up, and then a few hours to talk, email, read, and play games, mainly. The weather here is perfect, almost always highs in 70-80’s, at night in the 50-60’s, and it rains madly, like a monsoon, about 1 hr a day, then clears up. The equator is a nice place! There aren’t that many bugs, either. It’s actually quite safe and we leave our windows and doors wide open till the last person goes to sleep. Tonight, we stood on our covered porch and watched first the many stars, then the lightning while rain poured down. It abruptly went away and now there’s just a cool breeze with the sounds of crickets everywhere. It's such a change from life in the US; so much slower, and social. You feel like you can savor every minute.