I wake up at 8 am every day in my apartment. With four girls and two bathrooms, it’s a pretty nice place to stay. No cockroaches, few mosquitos, and at 7,000 feet elevation it never gets too hot. We all have breakfast in the pavilion. A staple of Ugandan cuisine is chapatti, which is basically like a tortilla but even better. When you put an omlette on top of chapatti and roll it up it’s called a Rolex, and it is my favorite thing to eat for breakfast. Being so high up in the mountains means that mornings are chilly, so throughout the meal I warm my hands on a bitter cup of hot chocolate that the first week I thought was disgusting, but I now think is delicious. We never know exactly when breakfast will be- 8:00, 8:30, sometimes even 9. Time is relative here. If someone tells you breakfast is at 8, it really means it could be anywhere from an hour before to, more commonly, an hour after.
Today we did a rural outreach, where the healthcare organization we are partnered with, KIHEFO, takes supplies and doctors and medications to a rural community that doesn’t have access to medical care. We were supposed to leave at 9 but the van arrived at 10 to take us into the field-typical. Today’s outreach was in a town about an hour’s drive from our apartment in Kabale. We arrived to see hundreds of people gathered and waiting in line, ready to be processed and treated. They had come on foot from neighboring towns all over: children, adults, elderly, even the weak and ill. This was a rare opportunity for them to find cures for things that had been paining them for months, years, sometimes even decades. I went into the tents that had been set up for consultations and partnered with Bruce, a new Physician Assistant. For the next six hours (with a quick lunch break), we saw patients and attempted to diagnose them and provide them with treatment.
Bruce teaches me throughout the day, drawing diagrams in my notebook and explaining conditions common in Uganda that I was unfamiliar with. He lets me ask the patients questions and asks me what my diagnoses would be, and we work together to puzzle out many interesting and unique cases. We send people to the lab setup in the adjoining building to test for conditions such as HIV, malaria, syphilis, pregnancy, or do a urinalysis. They return to us with the results that help us to more correctly diagnose. When we have finished, we send them to the pharmacy tent to pick up their medications, or give them a prescription to go to a pharmacy in town. Sometimes the cases are too severe for us to treat, and we have to refer the patient to a hospital. After 6 hours we have finally seen every patient, and our minds are exhausted, but our hearts are light. It is incredible to know that you have helped save someone from years of pain and suffering, for example through something as simple as prescribing antacids.
We travel in the van back to the apartment. With a few hours to kill before dinner, we do things such as go to town for shopping, read, do homework, and above all- play cards. We LOVE cards, and they keep us distracted until dinner time. Rice, beans, chappati, and pineapple taste so good after a long day’s work. After dinner I took a warm shower and tucked myself into bed. We are not allowed to leave the apartment grounds after it falls dark around 7, and at night we bolt ourselves into our apartment and padlock the inside, so we know that we are safe. The night is chilly, and I snuggle under two blankets to stay warm. Tomorrow the whole process will repeat, in a different location with different patients and all sorts of new things to learn and to see.
Uganda Maternal/Child health and HIV 