Week 12: Kari's Experience - Saying Goodbye to Mbarara

---

Hey everyone! It has been over a month since you last heard from me, back when I was just leaving Rugazi with Brooke and Shania. So much has happened since we’ve been back in Mbarara, but my QES pals have done a fantastic job updating our dedicated readers (thanks for sticking with it mom and dad). It is crazy to believe that our time in Mbarara will be over right away. While it seems to have gone quite quickly, we are all more than ready to trade in our lab coats for safari hats.

The past 6 weeks living in Mbarara has been quite the experience! Regular questions we ask each other include “Do we have water right now?” “Is the power off again?” and “What?! The shower worked for you?” Luckily there are nearby water taps we can use to fill our jerry cans just in case our water conveniently disappears right before it’s time to wash dishes. Safe to say we have all built a little muscle from hauling water over the past few weeks. I must have since a local man surprisingly asked me a few weeks ago if I was a boxer. I assured him I am most definitely not a boxer.

I have managed to remain quite busy during my last few weeks in Mbarara. As usual, I go to the hospital in the morning and participate in community work during the afternoon. We regularly volunteer at two different places: Divine Mercy – a very busy orphanage, and Bright Future Transitional Home – a home for children looking to be placed in a loving family. While I enjoy spending time with the kids at both places, I always look forward to seeing my pal John at Bright Future. John is a 6 year old boy that loves to do puzzles and read books. Whenever we visit he always manages to find me and will instantly grab a puzzle for us to do. He also loves reading books and has quite good English as well. Since meeting him I have bragged about how smart he is because his English is so impressive! A few of us even made hand-drawn flash cards to assist with teaching the kids English and he crushed all of them – even the ones where our drawings were more than questionable. On our last visit to Bright Future, I found a new buddy named Aine! He is 3 years old and has been at Bright Future since he was a newborn as he was sadly abandoned at birth. He is the sweetest, cuddliest little man. A few of us have always said we wanted to try putting a baby on our back like the mothers do here so I decided to try it with Aine (even though I didn’t have a piece of cloth to tie him with). He fell asleep almost instantly, it was so sweet! I put him to bed and tucked him in for his afternoon nap. It was so hard to leave all of the kids on our last visit there – I will really miss John, Aine and the rest of the Bright Future family so much!

My mornings spent working at the Mbarara Hospital has also been filled with its own set of challenges. I learned very quickly that there is a severe shortage of pharmacists in Uganda so the hospital relies heavily on pharmacy interns (4^th year pharmacy students) to operate the ward pharmacies and dispense medication solely on their own. It turns out only 2 fully licensed pharmacists are employed by the hospital which has a bed capacity of 600+. Even with the pharmacist shortage I was still able to learn a lot from the pharmacy students and interns I have worked with. While I am weirdly getting used to seeing students sign off on their own medication dispensing, the U of S student in me still refuses to sign off on anything despite a few friendly suggestions to do so. Working in the dispensaries has given me insight into what it is like to work in a government-run health care facility in Uganda. Certain supplies, medications and resources are hard to come by, or completely out stock. During my time in the Maternity Ward pharmacy I witnessed many post-partum mothers present to the dispensary with 3 or 4 prescriptions and leave with only 1 medication because there simply isn’t a large enough budget to keep the shelves fully stocked. Along with cases of medication shortage, there are regular shortages of much needed supplies. The pharmacy strictly monitors each ward’s usage of medical supplies such as gloves, bottles of normal saline, syringes, gauze, etc. On Wednesday, a few of us witnessed a medical emergency occur in the Maternity Ward that had us all handing over multiple pairs of the examination gloves we brought from home because they did not have any in stock. These types of shortages are devastating to see and I admire all of the health care staff for making things work with such limited resources.

While I enjoyed working with all of the pharmacy interns I decided to venture out of the dispensaries and onto the ward rounds to gain more clinical knowledge. Even though I was often the only pharmacy student who participated in rounds, the physicians and nurses were always very kind and welcoming. One of the first wards I rounded on was Surgical Emergency. As the name would suggest, this ward includes patients that have suffered trauma, accidents or illnesses that require emergency surgery. This ward was eye-opening in so many ways, but one of the main things I learned was how dangerous boda bodas (scooters) are! In just one week I saw many victims of boda boda accidents. One in particular was a little girl about 2 years of age who got struck by a boda while trying to cross the street with her older brother. Luckily she is going to be all right, however she sadly appeared to be in more distress and pain than any toddler should have to experience. After rounds I gave her 2 sunshine stickers (one for each hand of course) which seemed to brighten her spirits at least a little bit.

Outside of our day-to-day hospital work, I have been very lucky to participate in 2 AfriPad presentations in communities surrounding Mbarara. Our most recent presentation took place last Monday in a small community called Kahenda. In true Ugandan fashion, we piled 10 of us into a 7-seater van and went off-roading for an hour on the side of a mountain that eventually led to Kahenda. We split ourselves into 2 groups for the day: the 4 nursing students educated the secondary female students on breast health, while the remaining 5 of us taught the girls in grades 5 through 7 about menstrual health and handed out reusable pads. It is not uncommon for girls to drop out of school once they start menstruating so it was incredibly rewarding to give them a gift that they will not only use, but will also help the girls get a higher level of education.

Along with our participation in the AfriPad project, the great people at Vets Without Borders (VWB) have also let us participate in a couple of their projects as well! The first was a regular goat vaccination day for the VWB crew. They let Brooke and I tag along one day and taught us how to withdraw blood for testing, inject vaccine, give oral wormicide and ear tag the goats (our least favorite part!). I never would have imagined I’d be giving needles to goats this summer so it was really cool to have this experience and see a bit more of rural Uganda! We also got to meet some local paravets who work with VWB. Paravets are local people who are trained by VWB to assess and treat common ailments that goats experience. Goats are an extremely common and important component of the rural Ugandan lifestyle so the paravets are a crucial component to keeping the welfare of many families sustainable.

While moving from one farm to the next during our goat vaccination day, we tried, as per usual, to squish 7 of us into a regular sized car. As I was trying to share the passenger seat with Janet, a local paravet, I struggled to get the door closed and she charmingly tells me “you got big hips.” Apparently a passenger seat typically fits 2 people in Uganda, who knew? The next week, at a second event hosted by VWB, I met with my paravet pal Janet once again. As I greeted her she formally shook my hand and said “Ah, big hips!” So, from here on out, my Ugandan nickname has been and will continue to lovingly be “Big Hips.”

Even though I am still getting used to blunt remarks made by the locals we have come to befriend, I will say that Ugandans are the kindest and most welcoming people I have ever met! Every health care worker I have met in the hospital has welcomed me to Uganda and invited me to observe and learn from them. So many people ask, “how is Canada?!” and genuinely want to know if we have enjoyed our time in Uganda thus far. Most people are just as interested in our culture as we are in theirs and kindly answer all of my questions about Uganda and its beautiful, yet sometimes bewildering, culture.

As we near the end of our time in Mbarara, some of us have developed an “Mbarara Bucket List” comprising of activities that we intended to do but haven’t exactly made time for in the last few weeks. One of the main activities was going for beer and pork. I’ve learned that beer and pork are commonly eaten together and you can only get authentic pork at a local restaurant. Our Ugandan pal Damian took a group of us to get beer and pork and had to order for the whole table since there was no menu and we could not overcome the language barrier. We all loved the new combo but Stephanie loved the adventure through the restaurant’s kitchen to find the latrine even more. The local restaurant was more of an experience than just a meal, and Steph loved taking pictures of the huge spider webs in the latrine because they reminded her of Harry Potter.

I’ve learnt A LOT during my time here but what I did not expect to learn was what it is like to live as a celebrity. I will miss walking down the street and seeing kids run at full speed out of their houses shouting “it’s a Mzungu!” or “Mzungu how are you?!” We have all become very skilled at giving out stickers, high fives and handshakes to our dedicated fans. In the words of Mama T – we will never be this cool again in our lives… so we better enjoy it while we can!



That’s all for now – watch for a new post next week from MamaT/Terri!



Xoxo

Big Hips

aka Kari

---

Photos

John and I!
Teaching John how to selfie!

Sleepy Aine
Putting kids to sleep Uganda-style

Kahenda Students
The girls each just received their own AfriPad!

Janet and Big Hips
Successfully sharing the passenger seat with Janet.

Beer and Pork
Anxiously awaiting our authentic pan-fried pork

Fan Club
Saying goodbye to the girls in Kahenda!