Advertisement
Published: June 17th 2014
Just a quick note – so there has been a glitch on the TravelBlog website, and anyone who has tried subscribing to the blog hasn't been added to the email list. Until it gets fixed, just message me your email on Facebook or private message me on here so I can manually add the addresses to the list. Sorry about that!
Now that our orientation/class was finally finished it was time for us to head out into rural Uganda to work in the small communities and the local health clinic/hospital.
Snoop Dogg told us to be at the school by 7am sharp and although we had serious doubts that we would leave anytime close to this, we were on time just in case. And, as we expected, somewhere around 10:30am our bus, packed to the roof with bags and people, finally left the school. Good ol' African Time! But at least we had seats, and didn't have to stand, or sit in the aisles or on the backs of the seats, half on top others like some unlucky few.
About a half hour later, into what should only be about a 4
to 5 hour trip, we hit some serious road construction that put us to a complete stop . . . for a good hour and a half. After the long wait in the hot, sweaty bus we were back on the road! For about 20 minutes. One of the tires on the bus blew trying to make its way over one of the many potholes that litter most of the Ugandan roads. Since we were going to be stuck there for a while, Leandra and I decided to get out, stretch, find some food, and hopefully a bathroom, as it was shaping up to be a much longer day than we anticipated. Fortunately, the tire blew right in the middle of a small village that had all the basic amenities we were looking for, African style!
After buying some questionable street food, we went on a search for the closest thing that resembled a toilet. With the help of a classmate as our translator, we found an outdoor latrine. Our first African squat toilet! This particular model was made of wood and mud, and contained four walls to nearly enclose you inside, with a small hole in
the ground. These advanced features would not always be the norm, as I'll later discover, with the other three-walled latrines that lack a hole entirely. But what they lack in privacy, they make up for in great views while you do your business and “water the earth”. When in Africa!
Eventually, about 8 hours after we left Mbarara, we finally arrived in Kabale. The bus dropped us off on the side of the road, and we quickly grabbed our belongings (aka they were practically tossed out the bus windows) before it took off again. As our luck would have it, the university completely forgot to inform Kihefo that we were coming, but after a fair amount of confusion and scrambling, they managed to find rooms for us after all.
The following day we met some of the other people who were staying at Kihefo, which surprisingly enough included another fellow Canadian. Trina, from Edmonton originally, has been living in Kabale for the last year and a half with her boyfriend Atayo. They both work for Kihefo, which I found out is not a rural community after all, and actually stands for Kigezi Healthcare Foundation,
but I'll go into more about that later. We also met Lauren, who works for an NGO in the US called Child Family Health International (CFHI), who was in Kabale organizing a partnership with Kihefo. Anyways, after introductions, the three of them showed Leandra and I their amazing garden and then took us for a tour of Kabale, helping us purchase a ton of fruit from the market without getting ripped off. We bought a bunch of bananas, a pineapple, avocados, garlic, a lime, oranges, a mango, and several mini passion fruits. . . for less than $4!! At least we can supplement our all-carb diet with fresh fruit for cheap. It didn't take longer than a day of being here to fall completely in love with it! I see why Trina stayed – they had the most beautiful garden, where pretty much anything grows all year round, the weather is nearly perfect and life is so much more relaxed. There is a bigger focus on the important aspects of life here, without all the filler and superficial bullshit that people are forced to consume in the Western World. It was quite inspiring to see life in a slower, healthier
pace, and it definitely planted more seeds in my head about living and working in places like this in the future.
That evening would be our welcome dinner where Dr. Geoffery Anguyu, Kihefo's founder, gave us an orientation on what Kihefo is, the work it does and what we would be doing while volunteering for him. And thank god, his accent is much easier to understand! Leandra and I got singled out (this time in good way) as he had very important plans for both of us related to our university backgrounds. One of the biggest health concerns for Kabale and the surrounding areas is malnutrition, which is quite surprising considering the wealth of fresh fruits and veggies available here. Most of this stems from lack of education about the importance of a balanced diet, so Leandra will be doing a lot of work at the nutrition centre, and continuing to build on a past project to create a nutritional guide for the communities. As well, she will be working on starting a database of the nutritional history of the malnutrition clients that come into the clinic. This relates to the project I will be in charge
of progressing – the rabbit-breeding project. Basically, I will be helping to introduce rabbit breeding into different rural communities to combat two of the leading problems – extreme poverty and malnutrition, with the ultimate goal of developing a sustainable agriculture plan in the Kabale region. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to be a part of such an incredible sounding project! Many families cannot afford to eat meat and other than having beans on occasion, they have no other protein food source, which is one of the several factors leading to malnutrition. The benefits of raising food rabbits is the short breeding time, the minimal land required to house them, and the vegetation to feed them readily grows all across this country.
I will be working with Alphonse and Trina (who have already started the breeding program) going out to family farms helping them build rabbit hutches and I will provide advice from a veterinary perspective on how to raise them and prevent diseases. My plan is to create a “rabbit raising and care guide” that can be distributed to the families when they begin breeding. I should mention that before coming here I knew
very, very, VERY little about rabbits and have been researching them in the evenings (when the internet is working). Again, learning as I go!
As a team we will be involved in other areas of Kihefo, as well. We still have a team project where after surveying the rural communities, we decide on a couple problem areas and create a plan of action to help solve an issue. Later in the week, we decided to target the lack of clean drinking water and poor sanitation, but more on that at another time. We will also be working in the local health clinic and travelling to rural communities to do outreach work. So you can see there is a lot going on!
Since Kihefo didn't know we were coming, and we just suddenly got dropped on them out of nowhere, the first week we were here was pretty slow. Not much was prepared for us to work on, and several of the key people to direct our project were busy or out of town, so we spent most of our time volunteering in the local health clinic. The clinic is not at all what I
expected and is considerably smaller than I thought it would be. There are only a couple treatment rooms and about half a dozen critical care rooms for when patients have to stay overnight. However, they do have an in-clinic pharmacy, lab, x-ray and ultrasound room, and they also do dentistry. They have a neighbouring HIV clinic and a nutrition centre across the street.
Being a vet student in a human clinic is a little strange, and obviously I don't have a set position or place to be, so I've been wandering around the stations and help out when I can, or at least observe. Most of the time I follow the doctor around as he does his morning ward rounds of the critical patients, or sit in the treatment room with him as he sees new patients. He explains the conditions to me and allows me to flip through the files. This may come as a surprise to many of you, but there is a considerable amount of overlap between human and animal illnesses, plus the bloodwork and urinalysis reports are pretty much exactly the same. So many flashbacks to physiology class – apparently I retained a
lot more from first year than I expected! I also got a chance to practice taking blood pressure, although it's not the same as I would do on animals. Many of the patients come from rural communities and don't speak English, but lucky for me, the doctor doesn't speak the local language either, so we have a translator sitting in with us most of the time. I've also spent some time in the lab doing tests for HIV, malaria and typhoid, or looking at parasites under the microscope. The cases haven't been too severe as of yet, mostly HIV, malaria, typhoid, and a whole bunch of diabetes patients, and diarrhea and vomiting cases. Ok, yes those are very severe illnesses, but all were under control or being properly managed (relatively) and treatment was available.
Leandra spends most of her time at the nutrition centre, which is also quite slow, with only one patient having been admitted since we've arrived. He's a 3 year old boy who came in extremely malnourished, and incredibly sad looking and quiet. He looks as though he would be under 2 years old, doesn't speak and wouldn't walk on his own. As the
days progressed he has gotten more lively, is putting on weight, and is much more interactive. Somehow, despite not being the best with kids, I was the first person to make him laugh at the centre!
The highlight of the week was when we all piled into the clinic ambulance (our main method of transportation here) and drove to a rural community to set up an HIV outreach clinic for the day. The first thing I noticed upon arrival was all of the children at the outreach. It was a very sobering thought realizing that all of them had HIV, most likely from maternal transmission. They were the first people we visited, bringing them stamps, stickers, paper and markers for them to colour with; they were so excited about all the gifts! After they drew a bunch of pictures for us, they sang for us with the cutest little voices! Since their songs were so beautiful, we figured we should probably perform a little number for them too. The only song that us Canadians and Ugandans both knew was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” so we sang a pretty brutalized version of it for the kids. Hey, we
Nutrition clinic
I swear I made him laugh, but he does look miserable most of the timetried! We also rewarded the children with “sweets”, aka a strong dewormer. We were told it tasted like chocolate, and I figured I also deserved a “sweet”. After all, I did sing a song too! And Leandra definitely needed to take one after drinking foul tasting water that came from a tap near a sewer, and accidentally eating raw meat the week before. So we popped a pill of Albendazole too! FYI, listen to your mothers when they preach, “don't take 'candy' from strangers” because it might taste like chalk. Oh well, hopefully that kills whatever was colonizing inside me from all the tap water.
The rest of the time at the outreach we worked with adults, getting their history and progress, and then administering their medications. My job was to weigh all the patients, mostly with the help of Tonny, as my translator. However, when he was busy I quickly figured out some “sign language” to direct the patients to what to do.
At the end of the week I did get a chance to spend some time with Alphonse, and learn a little bit more about the rabbit project. He took me
to where the main rabbit-breeding centre was in the process of being built, and showed me the some of their rabbits and the style of hutches we would be helping people build. In typical African-style, the 15-20 minute walk took almost and hour and a half (each way). We also encountered one the most disturbing sights of this trip so far – a dead man on the side of the road. We're not completely sure what happened, but he had a pretty bad gash on his head so we think he may have been hit by a vehicle. For me, what I found to be just as unsettling as seeing him lying there, was that we just had to walk on by. Several people had stopped and were looking at him, but they would just continue walking too. It really bothered me knowing that there was nothing we could do and there was no one we could call. We drove down that same road a couple days later, and I didn't see him, so I'm guessing his body was eventually removed.
Well, that's a pretty depressing way to end a blog, but that's all that happened that
week! When we're not volunteering, we're wandering around the town, hanging out with the team or relaxing around the yard. I'm still playing catch up with these blogs, but I promise the next one will be better as I talk about my weekend getaway to Lake Bunyonyi!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.11s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 9; qc: 74; dbt: 0.0679s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
