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Published: July 13th 2008
Sorry it's been a little while since my last confession - internet at work went badly wrong as the IT people tried to do something very complicated (don't know what as the story changed every day) and broke it. All better now so I can spend my lunchtimes tippy-tapping away.
So I thought I should tell you a bit about work. My working day is about 8.30-5ish - if it's not too hot I stay a bit later but when it's very hot I reach a point where I can't function and have to be in a darkened room. IHK is well resourced compared to most places where VSO volunteers work but it is still a struggle to do a lot of day to day things as there's a major lack of printers - and all of them hate me - and the photocopier is extraordinarily temperamental. Or stubborn as it's termed here - one of my favourite Ugandan English things is that objects as well as people can be stubborn.
Also the accounting system (Navision) which is used at the hospital is horrible - you can't do much reporting from it and you have to e-mail things to
yourself and then copy and paste them into excel before you can do anything. And by then it's Thursday and you've forgotten what you were trying to do. And not everything is posted into it - the up country clinics don't use it all and all sorts of odds and ends are missing. Or put in more than once. Or in the wrong place. It is maddening and getting any sensible financial information is like knitting with spaghetti. But the worst worst thing is that everyone in the hospital uses Navision but there are only 32 licences so if you arrive later than dawn you've got no hope of using it until someone leaves. I have been taught a clever trick of leaving a stapler on the enter key of my keyboard if I'm at a meeting as sometimes this gets me a session.
When I first arrived at IHK I found myself getting embroiled in all sorts of things - most of which were to do with the profit-making part of the organisation so not really where I wanted to be. So I had to be a bit bolshy and define some boundaries and now I'm mostly sticking
to IMF (International Medical Foundation) things which are all of the charity projects. I will dally with other things when time permits - my great love (!!) of doing budgets is bound to come to the fore soon - but at the moment I'm fully occupied with spending donated money. Or rather making sure it's spent appropriately - I am of course entirely trustworthy and completely above board. Actually for the first time in my life I'm in charge of real money and have a drawer full of cash to look after. It terrifies me and I'm on the way to developing an OCD related to obsessive counting of money. On Friday there was a rather strange security 'raid' on the desks, bags, drawers of everyone at the hospital who handles money as there has been suspicion of petty theft - this left some of my colleagues feeling very disgruntled. But considering that there have been 2 quite major frauds since I've got here I can see that it's necessary to do something ... just not sure how effective it was.
One of the biggest projects we're doing is the oddly titled 'Touch Namuwongo' - no dirty comments from
the filthier minded of my audience please. This is an HIV/AIDs project which is funded by DFID/USAID/DANIDA and IrishAid - so all of your taxes will have contributed to it. There are about 31 projects across Uganda who are doing different activities linked to HIV prevention. Ours involves doing community outreaches, where people can come and have Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT), health education and some free treatment. People who are HIV positive can come to the clinic for further tests and treatment - mainly ARVs. So I've spent some of 2 Saturdays helping out with the outreaches - my very limited Luganda (local language) and even more limited abilities in health education mean that there isn't a huge amount that I can do but I've certainly learned a lot. The % of people who've tested positive has been quite scary - 14% at the first session and about 11% last Saturday. This is a lot higher than the reported infection rate for Uganda (about 6.5%) - I've no idea how much the rate is skewed by people who already knew they were positive but want to come to the IHK clinic as it's free.
I've also been out and about visiting other projects outside Kampala - to Jinja and Mukono which are both towns to the east of Kampala. Jinja is quite well known and touristy as it's the site of the source of the Nile and the adrenaline capital of Uganda - rafting and bungee jumping. It is also chock full of NGO activity ... possibly because it's a nice place to be based and attracts a lot of gap year projects. IMG has a clinic there and employs a clinical officer called Judith who spends most of her time going out to the rural villages and doing health education on sanitation, malaria and HIV - including distributing mosquito nets. Jemimah, who is the IMF Program Co-Ordinator, Kevin Duffy, who is the UK-based chairman of IMF and I spent some of the day with Judith and it was a real eye-opener. I'm very new to almost everything that IMF does and I was amazed to see her in action - the villagers who we met were so engaged with the training they've had over the last few months. The aim of the project, which is funded by and Austrailian organisation called Hands of Help, is that community volunteers will be trained in health education and then go on to train the rest of their community. A lot of the diseases which contribute to the shockingly high infant mortality in Uganda are preventable - malaria, diarrhoea etc - and the resources which are needed are simple and relatively cheap. As well as being very educational for me the day had it's comedy moments - we had to abandon Ian Clarke's very posh BMW X5 as the track was too slippery to cope and Kevin was worried about getting it stuck and so had to walk the last bit into the village we were visiting. For once I was wearing appropriate footwear and so didn't end up ankle deep in mud or fall a over t ... Jemimah was wearing her smart black office shoes and so had a few problems negotiating the mud. I had my laptop with me as I was planning doing some accountant stuff at the clinic and must have looked very odd marching into the village with it.
The Mukono clinic is based at a Dutch owned flower farm (RVZ) and is also used as a base for HIV outreach - VCT for the local community and support for people who are on ARVs. Jemimah and I travelled there with Ivan from a partner organisation called HIPS - on the journey I was subjected to a very direct interrogation about why I don't have children and why I'm single!! 'Flower farm' sounds idyllic but in fact it was a series of poly-tunnels growing cuttings which will be exported to Holland for the flower bit - not a single flower in sight which was a huge disappointment to Jemeimah who pictured herselk skipping through fields with armfuls of lillies. We met Robert who is the HIV counsellor employed by RVZ - I think he had polio and so uses a wheelchair or tricycle to get around. Disability is a big issue in Uganda - although on paper the government is committed to supporting disabled people there is very little provision for mobility etc and there is a lot of stigma. Robert was telling us about how difficult it is for him to get around - particularly to the villages where he visits clients - and that boda and taxi drivers will often overcharge him.
I think that's enough about work - especially as it's Sunday and I don't really want to think about it! Next weeks challenges include trying to do a half year report for all of the IMF projects, meetings about various new activities - including one in Pader in the north of Uganda and trying to plod on with the cost centre project. This is basically trying to get monthly reporting for each of the parts of the organisation and each of the clinics. Due to the inadequacies of navision etc etc this is mind-bogglingly hideous so I have decided to set myself rewards for each task that I do - not all of them are glasses of wine - the Wine Garage has started doing cocktails as well yippee!
I think Alison asked about languages - Uganda has loads which are spoken by different tribes in different regions. They're mostly bantu-based and very difficult for mere mortals like me to learn. In Kampala, and particularly at the hospital most people speak English so I've been able to be quite lazy about learning Luganda which is the language spoken in the Central region. Swahili is spoken quite a lot aswell ... although it's associated with the army and Idi Amin. Most Ugandans speak at least 2 languages fluently and one of the things I love about work is hearing people having conversations where they flit between the two. Byron, who is one of my colleagues has been attempting to broaden my vocabulary beyond formal greetings but has been banned from doing this by our boss Anita as apparently the stuff he's teaching me is 'unladylike slang'. I think my efforts to curb my appaling swearing at work have worked - she thinks I'm ladylike!
And Mum wanted to know if I've been on any more trips - apart from work outings I've been to Masindi which is in the north-west of Uganda and only really known for being on the way to Murchison falls, which is one of the better known national parks. Cheryl and I went to visit Pamela, who is another English VSO who has been sent to work in community health. Her placement is proving to be a very tough one as there are very few resources and little support from her colleagues so we wanted to lend some moral support and have a bit of a nosey around. We travelled up by Post Bus, which is the slow, cheap and 'safe' form of public transport - we were a bit worried when we realised that the Masindi bus was the oldest knackeredest looking vehicle, but it left exactly on time at 8am and got us there in one piece by 1.30pm. The only really dodgy bit of the journey was when we stopped at a junction and street vendors were shoving sticks of cooked meat into through the windows - Cheryl is a vegetarian and was feeling a bit travel sick so I was a bit worried that something horrible would happen. Masindi is quite small but not as quiet as I'd expected - there's an amazing market where you can buy everything including the kitchen sink and it's a brilliant place for people watching. Pamela took us on a tour of the hospital where she's based - including the infamous chair where she often spends 4 hours at a time waiting for something to do. I'm getting so much better at hospitals - I even went into the wards. There were lots of young children who were ill with malaria and gastroenteritis (preventable!!!) and we met a woman called Sarah who was paralysed from the waist down and had developed bed sores which Pamela was treating. I was completely in awe of Pamela having seen her in action - she treated Sarah with such tenderness and compassion and was so careful to maintain her dignity. The other thing which struck me was that Sarah's husband and her two sisters were all staying in the grounds (literally - no visitor accomodation) of the hospital so they could look after her. This is common practice in Uganda as nursing care does not include feeding or washing of patients - IHK is different but relatives often expect to help look after patients. By coincidence there was a VSO organised 'Walk for a Cause' while we were in Masindi - a sponsored walk to raise money for a local HIV charity. We did the walk - not with the main group which included 100 children and a police escort - and saw quite a lot of the local landmarks. Including the local drunks in the notorious 'Blue Cat Bar' - I've never drunk a soda (pop for the northern contingent!) so quickly in my life and at one stage I was almost consumed by the fumes of stale waraji. One of the good things about visiting other VSO volunteers is having a nosey round their houses - Pamela has a 2 bedroom house with a large living-room and kitchen which includes a very gaudy mottled green fridge. She has a vegetable patch and a view of rolling hills - it would be idyllic but for the major flaw of no fence or wall around the house despite the fact that it's quite isolated and she lives on her own. I felt quite sad leaving Masindi on Sunday ... and a bit nervous as there was no post bus and we were at the mercy of a minibus taxi driver. When we got to the taxi park there were about 4 people waiting for the next taxi which boded well for a not too long wait ... we tried to ignore the fact that it had to be pushed and bump-started to manoever. And that a cockerel had been loaded into the back of the taxi and might well escape and peck at our feet. The journey back was quick (4 hours) and fairly uneventful ... at one stage we left the road and went down a dirt track but we were just cutting a corner rather than being abducted!
That's all for now - want to go home and fashion myself a lemsip out of paracetemol and lemon as I've got a cold. Will attemp posting more pictures next week.
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Alison Lay
non-member comment
Navision
Well, this information-rich account appears to have stunned everybody into respectful silence. Good to hear that you're sticking to the non-profit side of things. Navision was originally a Danish accounting programme, bought out by Microsoft, sounds like you're blessed with one of the older versions. All is well here, Steph back at school next week. Weather is diabolical, the kind of heavy rain we used to have in Zambia, summer seems to have gone far too quickly. Will soon be square-eyed from too much Olympics (but Danes will soon all be out of the running for everything except handball and clay-pigeon shooting). Had to laugh at one of the footballers who won't be playing because the journey out gave him a bad back. Love, Alison