jinja (not the weed) and outreaches

I think one of my favorite things so far is my morning walk to buy a newspaper: inevitably, a small group of schoolchildren congregates behind me, and collectively whispers about whether or not I'm a mazungu (which translates from the language of Luganda to, "white person"). Sometimes they erupt into a pretty heated discussion, and I tend to settle the debate as soon as I leave the vendor's stand. One boy seemed a little disappointed by the fact that I was just a visitor, and subsequently asked if I was sure that I wasn't just a really pale Ugandan.

Last weekend, I opted for whitewater rafting instead of bungee jumping when we were in Jinja. Our guide was a forty-year old Zimbabwean man, who shared stories about his hippopotamus-wrestling days as he led us for 30 km down the Nile. In his non-rafting spare time, he was singlehandedly doing everything possible to cause further collapse to Mugabe's economy in the hope that it would drive him out of office. In fact, I'm pretty sure that he spent the past four months in the "money laundering" business. Jinja was beautiful, and the picture below is a view from our point of portage . I'm hoping to go back during a lazy weekend and reconsider bungee jumping.

I'm excited that my project is becoming more lucid as I get a better grasp of the situation here. I've spent the past few days working on outreach visits, which are supplied by UNICEF and orchestrated by RHU. We drive to the slums of Kampala and post up an office, consisting of two benches, a cooler with vaccines, and a duffel bag of generic drugs. For four hours each day, I sat with a nurse as we diagnosed and treated patients as they came to our post. I learned that in order to get babies to take their oral polio drops, I have to make the strangest facial contortion before they'll open their mouths to laugh. I also learned how to give a subcutaneous measles shot, and recognize malaria from a mile away. While I'm almost certain that I'm entirely unqualified to do most of these things, I discovered that it really doesn't matter. Dire need trumps almost all else.

I've spent the remainder of my time researching different types of health indicators in order to write evaluations on the quality of these outreaches. Assessing quality of care is pretty difficult when you have to make immunization cards out of post-it notes, but I'm working on figuring that out. I think I lucked out with my job in that I'm being exposed to both sides of a constantly growing, yet flawed, system. I get the feeling that there is a serious disconnect between the administrators of projects and the actual implementors, and I'm not sure on which side I'd fit best at this point. It definitely makes for some interesting conversation with the doctors here.

My Luganda is getting better with time. I can now ask, "What is your name?" and "Have you been tested for HIV?"

Thanks for the emails, and for checking to make sure I'm still alive. My internet connection is sporadic at best, so I apologize for my delayed responses (though they're actually fairly characteristic of me when I'm in the US, too...). Let me know about life and everything else when y'all get a chance.