Tumultuous times at the end of my stay in Uganda.

Since my last blog post a lot of S*@& has gone down. I don't even know if I can remember it all. I'll start by saying I noticed that the word to describe the events of this week was definitely tumultuous!

So we left Gulu, which means we said a farewell to our families, on Wednesday. We drove the 5 hours to Kampala, stopping only twice. Once for lunch at the same exact restaurant we had visited on the way to Gulu; none of us were excited to say the least. I had plain rice and a soda, thankfully I had chocolate to tie me over on the bus. Our other stop was at Luwero Triangle in the Buganda region of Uganda. There is a mass grave of all the skulls and remains found throughout the “triangle” during the early years of the conflict when Museveni and his soldiers were fighting the then brutal government for Ugandan leadership. While it was quite sad to “see” these human remains, it was not nearly as bad as I had thought it would be. They are covered by some type of tile covering/lid and only a small opening shows what, or who, lies inside. The hardest thing for me was to remember that those skulls had once belonged to people just like you or me. Since we do not know who they were or where they were found and they are literally just piled 6 ft deep into the grave, it is very difficult to think of the site in terms of the personalities and family members lost. (Or maybe that was just me).

When we finally got to Kampala I began to recognize parts of the city and got excited about being back. We stayed in the same hotel as our orientation, the Jeliza Hotel. This I was very thankful for. In fact I ended up with exactly the same room, only this time I roomed with Hanna Newman (my Goucher buddy). It had been a long hard day, and people were ready to eat dinner and head their separate ways. Well.... dinner preparations took almost 2 hours, though (I think) they knew our group was coming. Not too much happened that evening after dinner.

The next day, Thursday, we had 3 lectures scheduled. As usual some were completely interesting topics but horribly disengaging lecturers, and some were quite dynamic. I don't remember the specifics. After classes my friend Danielle and I walked to a cute coffee shop 2 ½ blocks from the Jeliza. It is called 1,000 cups and it is to die for! There were many other whites there (and Africans too), one of which I actually recognized from the Gulu Coffee shop (he's an SIT alum who now has a Fullbright Scholarship to work in Uganda). I wrote a paper, attempted to write the other (more important) paper but failed and enjoyed 2 mocha espressos before deciding to walk home in the dark. I did almost get hit by a Boda-boda on the way home, but that is a common occurrence in the horrific traffic and driving conditions of the city that is Kampala.

The real drama happened that night at the hotel. So my friend Taylor has been feeling horribly sick for about 3 weeks now, almost the whole time we've been here, but she keeps receiving different diagnosis from each doctor. She has been told she had malaria (of course), an upper respiratory infection, food poisoning, a bacterial infection and more. Each of these diagnosis has come with different treatment courses which she had been following. I just have to say, she has been such a trooper about it the whole time. She goes to the clinics or hospitals, gets “check out”, tries the treatment and continues to feel sick.... on and on! Well on this particular night she was NOT feeling too hot, but there was no one to take her to “the surgery” where the good/better doctors are, it was closed and the 24 hour phone line was not picking up. So Taylor suffered through the night with little sleep, waiting for the moment she could go to the doctor who was most likely trained in Europe and could give her a better check up.

All the while this is going on, my other friend Tonia was out with 2 of the guys from our trip at a Salsa dancing class. As Tonia and Jeremey were finishing their dance, he spun her and when she finished spinning her knee popped out of socket! Unfortunately ambulances in Kampala are on “African time”, so the three of them had to wait a LONG time for the ambulance, and none of them had the 60,000 shillings needed to pay for the drive. All of us back at the hotel found out about this during another of our late dinners. Jeremey had called the academic director and then called my friend Alex to inform them of the situation. Alex went around the dinner tables and collected money from us to help pay for Tonia's hospital bill. Our program director, Stella, and Alex had also called a taxi of their own to meet the three in trouble at the hospital, but the taxi never showed up! In the end, our driver Mouna picked the three of them up, paid the ambulance fee with SIT money, and brought them back home. We were all freaking out before they got back, because we really didn't know how bad it was or if she would get taken care of. We learned a few lessons from this that have been MUCH talked about in the last few days. We need to have “emergency money” available for situations like this and dependable drivers.

To get back to Taylor quickly, the next morning (even though she'd been awake all night worrying and in pain) she was taken to “the surgery” to get checked out along with Tonia for a check up. I quickly learned once Tonia got back that Taylor was in trouble. Apparently the medications prescribed to her by her Ugandan doctors could have been fatal if she had continued to take the combination! This scared all of us, especially some of her closer friends (myself, Hanna, Kat, Laura and Alex). We were all emotional and frustrated with the way the medical situations had been handled by both our Ugandan AD and the doctors in Uganda. Taylor was given a sedative so that she could sleep through some of the pain, and then she was headed back to the hotel where the rest of us had been attending lectures even though we were a wreck (myself especially). In the end she is fine now, but it was a terrifying ordeal for her in terms of medical care in this developing country. It really makes you think about the Africans who only know and trust this kind of care. And there are so many people who can not even afford the “better” care Taylor was receiving in Gulu. It's eyeopening and very saddening to think about.

Well that's all for Uganda! I had a great time, even though this post may have not made you think so.
I'll post soon from Kigali, Rwanda with an update. Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to my posts.