In three days I will return home from a  9 week trip to Uganda and when I arrive I am sure my friends will ask "So, how was Africa?" I have always found that question overwhelming... Is it referring to the politics, the culture or the weather of Africa? Are they looking for the play-by-play, or one all-encompassing adjective.  Do they want my opinion of Uganda, or just the facts? Either way, its virtually impossible to translate the feelings, fears, and primitive reflexes of my experience into words.  Uganda defies description. English languague is not equipped to illustrate .... it.  Usually, I will simply reply 'good' and immediately feel that I just did the past weeks of my life a tremendous injustice. So, in anticipation of this question I have decided to blog for the first time in over a year:

                                    UGANDA

 Uganda is hours in the car everyday through the greenest hills, the bluest skies, and the blackest people you can imagine. It is tall mountains, indistinctly defined, bannanna trees, tea farms, goats, steers, pigs, the nile river, the national parks, the exotic birds. In short...it is an eyegasm. 

Uganda is a front page news article of a middle school where the students  became possessed by demons on exam day and rather than testing, spent the day on the exam lawn shaking themselves and rolling their eyes in their heads. The teachers, in holy fear, responded to the crisis by calling in priests for exorcisms.  (no joke, this even made the t.v. news that night)

Uganda is a country where justice is somewhere between a  $150 fine for raping a 2 year old, and being beat to death by a mob for stealing a goat.

Uganda is really good avacadoes, with your french fries and hot sauce.

Uganda has 27 million people, and is growing by 1 million people per year. Because who needs birth control when you have cesarean sections?

In Uganda, size matters. No one carries a hand-gun ,and and a concealed weapon is an oxymoron... only rifles, shotguns, and machine guns adequately say Uganda.

Uganda is a hand shake with a person who does not squeeze your hand but rather gently holds it in what appears to be an act of submission, except they don't let it go, they just keep their hand in yours until you can't take it anymore, because trust me, it does not bother them to shake hands indefinately... without ever shaking them.

Uganda is a really beautiful child that follows you giggling and waving but refusing to speak to you, for a reason you don't understand.

Uganda is a  different grown man following you home every day,  insisting to get your contact information, desiring to be 'friends,' refusing to take no for an answer because a lady "never says yes the first time", all for a reason you do understand.

Uganda is an adolescent girl getting kicked out of school because she got pregnant,  while the father of the baby gets to continue teaching there.

Uganda is on the Equator. 12 hours of day. 12 hours of night.

Uganda is marvelling at all the mercedes, BMWs and Lexuses!

Uganda is a health care system where the ORs have no gloves, the floors have drugs, the hosptial has no electricity, but someone in administration has a BMW and millions of dollars of American USAID money!!!

Uganda is when you are at a rural health care facility with zero patients and only a midwife available for your survey, and suddenly a person approaches bleeding from a deep wound in his wrist, and as you are trying to apply pressure ( so  that your research partner can clamp and tie the radial artery with catgut suture, outdoors, arm suspended in mid-air), blood squirts into your face, and just at that moment another woman arrives with similar wounds except this time also in her head, and you begin to gather that there is someone in the village attacking people with a machete. And you want to call 911, but there is no 911. And you want to transfuse them with blood, but there is no blood, and you want to go home to america, but instead you wipe the blood off of your face, tie your belt around his arm, and curse the day you boarded the plane to Uganda.

Uganda is waking up at 4am to watch the election results come in with other Americans, and then having a drink as the sun rises on Mbarara and sets on Bush's reign of terror.

Uganda, is being called 'mzungu' which means white person, because in Ugandan anyone not black, is white.  This continues until Obama wins the presidency... and then you are called 'Obama'.

Uganda is running a race called the MTN Kamapla Marathon that should be called the Kampala 10K because 30 people registered for the Marathon and 10,500 people registered for the 10K! And it is the hottest, slowest, most crowded race you have ever run. And finishing it is sooooo sweet!!!

Okay, I have not said everything I have to say about this country. Mainly, becuase I feel obligated to end on an up-note.  If you would like to hear my full diatribe about Uganda, simply ask me for the monologue the next time we meet. Otherwise know that my trip to Uganda was 'good' !

Scenes From The Back Seat

So it turns out some parts of New Orleans are still jacked.  Here are some pics from my spring break trip there a couple weeks ago. I actually had an excellent time. I consider it my formal introduction to blues (taj majal... wow) and construction work.

This house actually floated from across the street and landed on the car and the house behind it.

 

This is what is left of the Louis Armstrong elementary school in the Lower 9th ward. Most people have moved back to New Orleans. But the Lower 9th ward was pretty poor, and hard hit so the area is altogether deserted.

what struck me the most is about the lower 9th was the level of destruction. Sure its poor, but it hard to assess the degree of poverty when it is abandoned. All you can deduce is that the people must be pretty hard up if 19 months after the storm their homes remain untouched if they were fixable, and demolished if they were beyond repair.

Here is the beautiful Mississippi. You can see the downtown area and the french quarter accross the water. This area really didn't sustain degree of damage as the lower lying areas. When thinking of New Orleans, it is important to remember that Hurricaine Katrina was not the problem. When it hit land it was a level 3 hurricaine. Thw problem was the levys.  There is debate about how exactly they gave out. The government proposes that a barge in the storm broke loose and crahed into a Levy releasing the water. Among the remaining residents, the popular consipiracy theory is that they blew the levys with dynamite in such a way that the poor areas would flood so the richer  areas wouldn't.  There is no evidence of this (not that anyone would relase it if there were), but I wouldn't put it past the good ole'  US of A. There is history to this theory. The last flood in the 1940s people belived the same thing (though there was no evidence), in 1920s the government admits to blowing a levy to control flooding in Mississsippi or Tennessee or somewhere, but it wasen't that malicious (poor blacks and whites were displaced equally).  Whatever you believe, it is very convenient that the poorer areas always sustain the worst damage.

 Here is a barn or something. We walked up and down the streets just taking pictures. Pics like these were so commonplace we debated about taking them because we began to regard them as normal.

These ladies are my heros. They decided to sit out the storm when it his (a decision that cost many their lives). When the flood waters rose they fled to their roofs where they stayed for two days until a helicopter found them and flew them to the dome. This picture was taken in the inside of a FEMA trailer.

For those of you who haven't been graced with my company lately, here is what i look like. My days on the trip consisted of waking up around 5:30 to fix breakfast for the soup line, then heading out around 9 to gut houses. On this day, I was laying sheet rock.

3 years after graduation, for some reason I still care about RICE events.   5 Rice students have died this year alone. I find this figure disturbing. The most recent death was a basketball player who was stabbed in College Station 3 days ago. Prior to that, someone apparently OD'd the night before beer bike, prompting the festivities to be cancelled.  I know this stuff happens, and I propbably was never on campus at the same time as any of these people, but the news is dissappointing just the same.

POVERTy and Exploitation

So, I am a poor poor student. and in order to raise money I have decided to whore myself out to medicine. My top choice would be a sleep study but none are open. I was hoping to be the guine pig in an anesthesia experiment where they put some tubes in your nose and  make you ride a bike for a couple hours while slowly lowering your blood sugar, but I am too young. So I am left to the good old clinical trials which are forever trying to recruit. I am taking a poll to decide which to pick. Please give feedback. Below are the options. I don't think I can do two at a time. Also, keep in mind that I will either recieve the actual vaccine or a hepatitis A vaccine which I already have. And I will probably never know which one I actually got.

1. HIV vaccine ($750 over 12 months) -you are probably saying, but there isn't an HIV vaccine falan... and you are kinda right. I am not really sure what this does, but they seem to think it will reduce the odds of me getting AIDs and I happen to represent the highest risk demographic in this group.  The people behind this are really enthusiastic...

2. Herpes Vaccine ($640 over 13 months)- I know...your probably thinking "nalaf, you are more likely to get Ebola than Herpes"... but they would still take me. My chances of getting Herpes are probably higher than my chances of getting AIDs so the vaccine would be good, but since having AIDs would stink worse than Herpes, maybe I should go for the aids.

3. Flu Vaccine ($550 over 14 months)- Last but not least. I get a flu vaccine every year, so this one would just save me the hastle of having to schedule one next year.  And flu is actually something I am around, and could very well contract. Even though, in my 24 years of living I have never had a case of the flu while being exposed to it each winter. I think I am already immune!

Decisions Decisions... what is a poor medical student to do?   I tell myself that it is my personal contribution to science and public health, but who am I kidding. I would not be doing this if plane tickets were free.

“I love life, Mr. President,” Mr. Welby, 60, who has battled muscular dystrophy for 40 years, wrote to Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, in September. “Life is the woman who loves you, the wind through your hair, the sun on your face, an evening stroll with a friend.

“Life is also a woman who leaves you, a rainy day, a friend who deceives you. I am neither melancholic nor manic-depressive. I find the idea of dying horrible. But what is left to me is no longer a life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/world/europe/20welby.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin