Well, its official. Even after a month and a half long hiatus, I cannot escape the name Emmy. I moved into my new house yesterday (which is absolutely fantastic) and hired a taxi to move my luggage from Sophie’s. When I got in the car, my driver asked me my name and I obviously said Amy (seriously Scheel? C’mon). After asking multiple times if it was Emmy for Emmanuel, I tried explaining that Amy is different and is not spelled the same way. I think he may have been a little confused because he then replied with “that’s weird, that’s a boys name in Africa. “ I think at this point it is what it is.
When I arrived at my new place I was honestly stunned. Our house is absolutely AMAZING. I am so lucky that Jessamy happened to run into this family and mention that she would need a place to stay. A British family of 4 headed back to the UK for summer break and offered us their completely furnished house with things I didn’t even know existed here such as a freezer, water filter, and a washing machine. They are letting us live here until September for next to nothing just so that someone is here to watch the house. We are located extremely close to town, the hospital (which is a huge bonus) and next to the hotel that has a pool. I don’t even want to think about having to find somewhere else to live come September because I’m pretty sure nothing close to this exists.
Not our chicken…but it waits at the front door like a dog.
side of the house
Every night, women come in to town and line up on the street for “the night market” with all the fruit/vegetables they tended to during the day. Sophie and her cousin Lucy decided that they wanted to fundraise for their good friend Denis, who has a learning disability, so that he can have enough money to enter a soccer league. They made jackfruit pie and mango passion fruit pie from scratch and just plopped themselves down next to some Acholi women selling bananas and went for it. If I thought people stared a lot before…you should have seen the puzzled faces for this spectacle. So many locals walked by asking what was going on. Luckily one of our friends, who is fluent in Acholi, was there to help communicate with them. No one here has ever heard of pie so lets just say they were very confused. Nonetheless they sold almost 8 pies and raised about $35 (which is a ton of money here).
Sophie and her cousin Lucy selling pie
Over the last 3 days, the nurses and I have continued to prepare for the upcoming visit in addition to preparing the schedule of patients for when Twalib returns to the clinic. It is honestly heartbreaking seeing patients come in, extremely sick, asking for an appointment and told to come back in the middle of July. The nurses told me that people had been coming in Twalib’s absence saying that they were going to die if he didn’t come back. This is absolutely nothing against Twalib for he was offered an amazing opportunity for training in India, which will ultimately make him a better physician. We have 12+ cardiologists in some of our hospitals in the U.S. while here they have ONE for an entire region. It’s like having 1 cardiologist for all of Maryland. I can only imagine the line that is going to form when we see our first patients on the 30th of June. Everything spreads by word of mouth like wildfire here; once one person knows Twalib will be back, everyone will. Sadly it is just unrealistic to see more than ~20 patients a day.
Happy Wednesday everyone!
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