Logistics

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 4:00pm

Yesterday was a really early day where we had a meeting with Dr. Luboga in his office at 7:00am (yea, we got a ride in with him, but it's nice not to mix business with pleasure). We discussed the project, which I just realized that I did not explain to everyone. I could include the abstract, but I feel like most won't be that interested in hearing too much scientific babble so here is a breif summary:

Lauren and I are looking at children's lead levels in their blood and taking soil and dust samples in their houses in order to better understand the prevalence of high lead levels in children. The plan is to go to 7 schools and get 25 kids from each school. Anyone found to have high levels (really high) will be treated at a local hospital for free :) . The hope is to continue this project to include water and air samples taken from all around Kampala so that we can track the sources of lead in the city. We are going to use GPS to coordinate locations of measured blood levels.

So we woke up early on Monday and went to a conference after the meeting with Dr. Luboga. The conference was about the changing role of a surgeon and basically explained that the surgeon in Africa can not specialize too much because he/she will be called to do all types of surgeries regardless of his/her specialty. The entire presentation was horribly dramatic pictures of different patients who came in for surgery to his practice in the DRC (congo). Most were gun shot wounds, though there were interesting C sections, cancers that went way beyond stage IV, and other crazy cases. It was a lot to handle and I had to look away for some of it.

There is a lot of "freak show" stuff in African Hospitals (I heard that term from a doctor at Sinai). Stuff we don't even think of in America. People wait way too long to seek treatment for minor things that eventually become makor. They come on the verge of death and they worry only about making sure that it doesn't cost too much to save their lives. That is the healthcare system in Africa, at least here in Uganda or some parts of it.

Yesterday, we also met the students and docs staying in the Yale housing, which is just an apartment, not the dorm that I imagined. Anyway, one of the docs saw a woman with ebola who vomitted blood on his gown. We didn't let him touch any of the food, he is also on contact precautions (jk).

Last night we went to Dr. Luboga's 60th birthday party at the snazziest restaurant in town, Fang Fang (Chinese food). I drank water and snuck a cliff bar... oh and they had some fresh pineapple. I should really bring one of those home with me. They're delicious. And besides, we are bringing soil, blood, and dust samples back so who cares about a pineapple.

Today was a slow day, relaxed a lot, did laundry with rainwater collected by the family cistern in the back of the house, which is the coolest thing ever. Think about it: instead of water that comes down your gutters and drenches your basement, collect it, and install a system to fill up toilet bowls. You could save thousands of gallons a year. You could also have the water from your laundry machine get pumped into the toilets... no more cleaning toilet bowls!

Tonight I start Luganda classes, they should be really challenging, but fun anyway.

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