Uganda Love This

On Thursday morning, I walked into the office and asked to see the list of appointments the nurses had made while Twalib and I were away. As I mentioned before, it is only realistic for Twalib to see a max of 20 patients in a day by himself so we tell the nurses to book around 15 (to leave room for emergencies etc.) When I asked to see the book, I was handed a list with THIRTY patients each for both the 31st of June and 1st of July. Now for those of you that think this looks weird…that’s because its does. We now have 30 patients (which is too many anyway) booked for a day that doesn’t exist. These patients also do not have phone numbers so we cannot call and give them a new date. Needless to say the week of “June 31st” is going to be a chaotic one.

Minus the little scheduling “mishap”, everything has gone relatively smooth this past week. We were able to schedule all of the necessary meetings for the incoming team. In addition, I was able to practice the RHD registry consent forms with the nurses and acted as the patient while the nurses asked me the 14 pages of questions. I use to absolutely hate when teachers would say, “don’t just memorize this but make sure you understand” and I found myself saying it over and over. This whole process will definitely require some learning as we go along but hopefully the first week of enrollment will go smoothly, or as smoothly as things go here in Gulu.

On Thursday night, we had the whole gang over (Matt, Frankie, Lucy and Sophie) for dinner so that they could see our new house. We ordered Indian because Jess and I were both too lazy to prepare something. As we were sitting around chatting we noticed the biggest spider I have probably ever seen in my life. Instinctually, Frankie grabbed a broom and took a whack at it…Apparently this spider was so large because it was carrying all of its babies on its back…so when she made contact there were HUNDREDS of baby spiders scattering around our house. To make matters worse, she didn’t even kill the mom. I honestly wish I were making this up because I can’t get the image out of my head. I’m sure that the screams coming from our house were probably heard from a mile away. We were able to drown the babies with some cockroach killing spray (don’t even ask) but I probably woke up 5 times that night convinced that I was covered in spiders.

 

 

After our traumatic dinner, we decided to head to BJz for quiz night. Upon our arrival we were surprised to find that they made the executive decision to make June 18th St Patricks day. Every worker was wearing a large green Guinness hat and they had “tubes” of Guinness on sale. I’m pretty sure that Guinness sponsored this by sending their leftovers from actual St. Patricks Day to Uganda but nonetheless it was hysterical. We were once again stumped by some extremely challenging questions in quiz. My favorite was probably “which of these colors is a shade of blue?- beige, indigo or maroon. Challenging but we managed to come up with the right answer. I wont mention the details of the US government question that Jess and I got wrong. We are still a little ashamed. We managed to get 3rd place out of about 20 teams but are planning to head back this Thursday to redeem ourselves.

On Friday evening, Jess and I headed to the TAKS center for an art festival that was hosted by a group of Canadians in partnership with UYE (Ugandan Youth Entertainment), which is a local organization. Unfortunately the weather put a damper on some of the festivities that were originally planned such as dancing but nonetheless it was a very interesting evening. They had extremely talented locals doing live paintings and showed a bunch of short films that were produced locally. The whole group was so passionate about their work and you could definitely see the potential for growth within this organization. They ended by saying they hope to help inspire the creation of“ Africawood”, just like Hollywood, one day.

 

 

 

On Saturday, we all headed to Chobe Lodge one last time as a group. Sophie, Lucy, Matt and Frankie will all be leaving next weekend so we wanted to do something special for our last full weekend together. The Chobe Lodge is about 2.5 hours away from Gulu and will let you use the pool for a small fee. We laid by the pool almost all day and went on a few walks to observe some of the wildlife. It was honestly the perfect day and it made me so sad that some of the first friends I made here will be leaving.

I am currently waiting on the arrival of the RHD/research team that is on their way to Gulu. Tomorrow we will be showing them an RHD clinic, giving them a tour of the hospitals, attending a few meetings and taking them to St. Mauritz. I am super excited for their visit and can’t wait for more details of our upcoming projects to take shape. 

PS- Happy Father’s Day to my favorite guy- wish I could be there to celebrate! I love you!