Hey guys,
Now that we're back in the States, Anne Marie and I have been working hard to create a volunteer organization called Sister Link. Sister Link is a group of women in Columbus, Ohio that exists to help new mothers from every background with... whatever. By linking volunteers one-on-one with pregnant women and new moms, we provide a resource to help with rides, cooking, cleaning... and friendship. Please visit our site at www.sisterlink.org, or like us at facebook.com/sisterlink!
Thanks,
Connor
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
7/19/11
Today has been exhausting but good! We said goodbye to Amy, who has a couple of kids and a job and everything back in L.A. and so had to get back to her real life, and then went over to Ali's host house to pick her up and help her move into our house. Ali has had a bit of a rough experience with ELI so far. She arrived in Entebbe at 1am and wasn't collected by the ELI representative, so she just caught a matatu out to Iganga with the help of a friendly fellow traveler. Within a couple of days, another problem came up: $100 was stolen from her wallet while she was bathing, and the host family ended up accusing another ELI volunteer of taking it. Happily, we love Ali and have another room in our house for her, so our host family ok'd it and we moved her over here with us.
We also had to do laundry today, which would be really nice if there were a spot of shade to do it in, but as it is we have to sit in a concrete courtyard in sun, which has been pretty hot recently. Connor is the laundry-doing master- he has the physical strength and patience for it which I lack, so all I have to do is organize all of our clothes to be washed in order of whiteness to less-whiteness (because the water gets dirty pretty fast) and rinse them and hang them up to dry. Really, Connor has been so helpful on this trip- he's genuinely cheerful and selfless so much of the time- he's just a joy to travel with. I would go on, but everyone except for Connor's parents would probably find it irritating.
We also had to do laundry today, which would be really nice if there were a spot of shade to do it in, but as it is we have to sit in a concrete courtyard in sun, which has been pretty hot recently. Connor is the laundry-doing master- he has the physical strength and patience for it which I lack, so all I have to do is organize all of our clothes to be washed in order of whiteness to less-whiteness (because the water gets dirty pretty fast) and rinse them and hang them up to dry. Really, Connor has been so helpful on this trip- he's genuinely cheerful and selfless so much of the time- he's just a joy to travel with. I would go on, but everyone except for Connor's parents would probably find it irritating.
7/18/11
Four of us decided to spend our last morning in Sipi Falls on a coffee tour. Most of the coffee tours I've heard about from working at Lamill in L.A. involve tours of some major plantations, huge farms with a lot of equipment. In Sipi, which is on the Eastern side of Uganda, next to Kenya and Mount Elgon, the tours are pretty much given by individual families, who show you how they make coffee for themselves. The whole process was delightfully simple. I won't go into all the details, but the most interesting part for me was the end of the process- instead of selling the raw beans to a cooperative, they roast them and then grind them in to a fine powder themselves. This powder is what they consume as instant coffee- it's pretty good when it's fresh of the fire, but not as much when I have to drink it out of a tin weeks after it's been ground. This is why Ugandan coffee does quite well outside of the country, where it is properly roasted and brewed the way I like it, but Ugandan coffee in Uganda is a bit disappointing.
After the coffee tour, we all headed back to Iganga for another week of work. Connor and Ali and I will all try to work nights in maternity- we'll see how that goes!
After the coffee tour, we all headed back to Iganga for another week of work. Connor and Ali and I will all try to work nights in maternity- we'll see how that goes!
7/17/11
We went on another fantastic hike today, Sunday. We hired the same guide who took us last time, but Connor also wanted to abseil...
Digression: I have become so used to looking everything up on Wikipedia! None of us knew what abseiling was, and I actually assumed it must be spelled absailing- a quick search just now revealed that it's a German word. Anyway- it's just rappelling.
...so we left him on top of the 100 meter waterfall and then hustled down to watch him rappel off of it. I had initially been pretty excited about doing this also, but when they showed me the point from which the rappelling actually takes place, I again confronted my aversion to risk-taking. Also, I've always been pretty afraid of heights, and 100 meters is high enough that when we were standing at the bottom, Connor was a tiny little speck. He admitted to a little apprehension as he leaned back over the edge of the cliff, but he was rewarded by a really spectacular view of this waterfall, only twenty feet or so away, as he descended. From the bottom at least, the scale of his tiny human body against the cliff and the waterfall was pretty spectacular.
Conversations with our friends Anna, Ali, and Amy were really the highlight of the weekend for me. I feel very lucky to have met such wonderful people when I've moved around over the last few years, and have spent a lot of time recently thinking about all the people I love who live scattered far and wide. So it's almost bittersweet to make such good friends and then lose them immediately to distance. I know that I'm not the best at keeping in touch with people, but I hope that everyone I've neglected over the last few years knows that I don't forget friends, and that I'm thankful for them.
Digression: I have become so used to looking everything up on Wikipedia! None of us knew what abseiling was, and I actually assumed it must be spelled absailing- a quick search just now revealed that it's a German word. Anyway- it's just rappelling.
...so we left him on top of the 100 meter waterfall and then hustled down to watch him rappel off of it. I had initially been pretty excited about doing this also, but when they showed me the point from which the rappelling actually takes place, I again confronted my aversion to risk-taking. Also, I've always been pretty afraid of heights, and 100 meters is high enough that when we were standing at the bottom, Connor was a tiny little speck. He admitted to a little apprehension as he leaned back over the edge of the cliff, but he was rewarded by a really spectacular view of this waterfall, only twenty feet or so away, as he descended. From the bottom at least, the scale of his tiny human body against the cliff and the waterfall was pretty spectacular.
Conversations with our friends Anna, Ali, and Amy were really the highlight of the weekend for me. I feel very lucky to have met such wonderful people when I've moved around over the last few years, and have spent a lot of time recently thinking about all the people I love who live scattered far and wide. So it's almost bittersweet to make such good friends and then lose them immediately to distance. I know that I'm not the best at keeping in touch with people, but I hope that everyone I've neglected over the last few years knows that I don't forget friends, and that I'm thankful for them.
7/16/11
We headed out on Saturday morning to Sipi Falls with a few of our fellow volunteers and pretty much relived the weekend we had a couple of weekends before. We traveled by matatu to Mbale where we caught another one up to Sipi Falls. Happily, this time we didn't need to take a boda (motorcycle) up the mountain. I'm starting to appreciate that I really don't have very much of a thrill-seeking personality, but Connor does. I blame Dad's many hours in the trauma ward working on motorcycle crash victims and others, and then his dinner stories, through which I was convinced at a very young age that it's perfectly possible to be maimed or killed by doing stupid things. Happily, Connor doesn't do stupid things...but my tolerance is probably a bit lower than I would wish, and so there remains some small difference between his comfort with sky diving and motorcycle riding and such, and my desire to ride horses and rock climb. More on this in tomorrow's post, I'm sure.
Anyway! We made it to Sipi Falls and settled in at the Crow's Nest, a really rustic but comfortable group of cabins perched on some cliffs overlooking the falls. Our weekends have been more important to me than I could have guessed. At the more touristy places, kids are so much more accustomed to seeing white people that I can get away with waving and shouting "Hi!" to their calls of "Mzungu!!!"...walking anywhere in Iganga really does mean being tugged on and held onto by a number of four year olds and laughed at by the adults. It doesn't bother me nearly as much as some of the other volunteers, but it's enough that I'm kind of glad to get away for a day or two every week.
Anyway! We made it to Sipi Falls and settled in at the Crow's Nest, a really rustic but comfortable group of cabins perched on some cliffs overlooking the falls. Our weekends have been more important to me than I could have guessed. At the more touristy places, kids are so much more accustomed to seeing white people that I can get away with waving and shouting "Hi!" to their calls of "Mzungu!!!"...walking anywhere in Iganga really does mean being tugged on and held onto by a number of four year olds and laughed at by the adults. It doesn't bother me nearly as much as some of the other volunteers, but it's enough that I'm kind of glad to get away for a day or two every week.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
7/11/11 - 7/15/11
Back to work in the hospital, it was a bit of a stressful week. We spent most of our time in the male ward learning more about tropical diseases, but the week just seemed harder than most for some reason.
Monday was very exciting, as they often are here- the surgeries that have kind of piled up over the weekend all got done, so I saw several C-sections, got to really assist one, we saw the craziest appendectomy ever (the appendix had grown to be literally about 8 or 10 inches long!), but none compared to this guy with horrible peritonitis. Peritonitis is basically when you have a generalized puss-y infection of your abdominal cavity. They cut him open and this incredibly foul smelling liquid puss just squirted out, having been building up pressure for who knows how long. They took out his guts, which were all lined in this yellow, bacteria-laden puss stuff, and basically just had to scrub his intestines clean bit by bit. They then, and this is absolutely terrible and tragic, washed his whole abdominal cavity out with tap water. Tap water which we don't even drink, it's so incredibly not sterile. I suppose they had no choice- they certainly don't have gallons of sterile saline sitting around- but it was tough to watch. He died on Tuesday.
We also met Johnny, another new volunteer (there have been quite a few recently!). He too is a med student, and will also be helping out at the hospital. We got to see Amy (the respiratory therapist) at work too, especially because the hospital got an oxygen tank over the weekend (WOOOO!)!! She really has saved some lives this week, it's been great to see.
In addition to all this, on Monday Anne Marie was patient advocate extraordinaire. Apparently exploding out of "getting acquainted with the hospital" mode and kicking into "get stuff done" mode, she got a found a patient with appendicitis who had been here for 2 days and got him actually scheduled for surgery (this was the crazy one you've just read about, in fact!); she found a little kid who had re-broken his leg which had been in traction for a month, and got an ortho consult, Xray, and got it re-set for him in three hours; in short, she made things happen. The patients really need someone who cares to come around, basically just doing rounds, and pushing things through hat have fallen through the cracks. It was great.
Wednesday, dear readers, your hero's health took a turn for the worse. As I lay in bed, all achy and sad, making the most of being sick and getting a day off to read, I realized that this could be Malaria - after all, two of our roommates had already contracted the super-easy-to-cure-but-only-if-you-get-treated disease. I got tested, but no, I was only milking a cold or something, so I happily went back to reading. Anne Marie stayed home to take care of me. Frankly, I kind of think we both just needed a day off.
Thursday and Friday I threw myself into a project - getting two oxygen concentrators they apparently have in a back corner of the maternity ward to work. Oxygen concentrators, as I'm sure my worthy readers have pieced together, are amazing machines that concentrate oxygen out of the air in real time, as a patient breathes- to about 95%, even, which would be outrageously useful for babies who've been in fetal distress. I was told that the machines, which were donated by the US, work but require a transformer to get the 240V here down to 120V (plus an adapter to get the plug to fit). In the operating theater, I found an old voltage stabilizer that did both of these things! But no fuse. So I began an epic search, all around Iganga, for a 10 amp fuse- a nothing part. But here in Uganda, there are no Home Depots or Lowes. There are tons of shacks, however, with "technicians" who have taken apart every piece of broken consumer electronics they can find and sell the working parts. Sadly, 10 amp fuses are pretty heavy duty, and are not found in VCRs.
But on Friday, after scouring for a few hours, I found a bona-fide electronics parts shop on the other end of town, run by this awesome Indian dude. He gave us some free 5 and 6 amp fuses to try, but we ended up just buying another voltage stabilizer from him. It was amazing how refreshing it was to feel like he wasn't a pushy salesman or trying to take advantage of us. It's definitely why we decided to buy this pretty expensive machine from him. That, plus the hospital does have two concentrators, so two voltage stabilizers makes sense.
But alas, it wasn't meant to be. The concentrators powered up but didn't work, and when I took them apart to see why, I found that both were missing the circuit board that controls them. I can only guess why this would be, but probably someone had plugged them directly into the 240V power here and they'd fried, and when a technician saw this took out the boards but couldn't replace them, as the manufacturer is somewhere in Idaho or something. I was very disheartened by this, but don't really know what I can do about it in the remaining two weeks we're working in the hospital.
Jenny also left Friday- sad.
We're going back to Sipi Falls this weekend, and are all super excited!
Monday was very exciting, as they often are here- the surgeries that have kind of piled up over the weekend all got done, so I saw several C-sections, got to really assist one, we saw the craziest appendectomy ever (the appendix had grown to be literally about 8 or 10 inches long!), but none compared to this guy with horrible peritonitis. Peritonitis is basically when you have a generalized puss-y infection of your abdominal cavity. They cut him open and this incredibly foul smelling liquid puss just squirted out, having been building up pressure for who knows how long. They took out his guts, which were all lined in this yellow, bacteria-laden puss stuff, and basically just had to scrub his intestines clean bit by bit. They then, and this is absolutely terrible and tragic, washed his whole abdominal cavity out with tap water. Tap water which we don't even drink, it's so incredibly not sterile. I suppose they had no choice- they certainly don't have gallons of sterile saline sitting around- but it was tough to watch. He died on Tuesday.
We also met Johnny, another new volunteer (there have been quite a few recently!). He too is a med student, and will also be helping out at the hospital. We got to see Amy (the respiratory therapist) at work too, especially because the hospital got an oxygen tank over the weekend (WOOOO!)!! She really has saved some lives this week, it's been great to see.
In addition to all this, on Monday Anne Marie was patient advocate extraordinaire. Apparently exploding out of "getting acquainted with the hospital" mode and kicking into "get stuff done" mode, she got a found a patient with appendicitis who had been here for 2 days and got him actually scheduled for surgery (this was the crazy one you've just read about, in fact!); she found a little kid who had re-broken his leg which had been in traction for a month, and got an ortho consult, Xray, and got it re-set for him in three hours; in short, she made things happen. The patients really need someone who cares to come around, basically just doing rounds, and pushing things through hat have fallen through the cracks. It was great.
Wednesday, dear readers, your hero's health took a turn for the worse. As I lay in bed, all achy and sad, making the most of being sick and getting a day off to read, I realized that this could be Malaria - after all, two of our roommates had already contracted the super-easy-to-cure-but-only-if-you-get-treated disease. I got tested, but no, I was only milking a cold or something, so I happily went back to reading. Anne Marie stayed home to take care of me. Frankly, I kind of think we both just needed a day off.
Thursday and Friday I threw myself into a project - getting two oxygen concentrators they apparently have in a back corner of the maternity ward to work. Oxygen concentrators, as I'm sure my worthy readers have pieced together, are amazing machines that concentrate oxygen out of the air in real time, as a patient breathes- to about 95%, even, which would be outrageously useful for babies who've been in fetal distress. I was told that the machines, which were donated by the US, work but require a transformer to get the 240V here down to 120V (plus an adapter to get the plug to fit). In the operating theater, I found an old voltage stabilizer that did both of these things! But no fuse. So I began an epic search, all around Iganga, for a 10 amp fuse- a nothing part. But here in Uganda, there are no Home Depots or Lowes. There are tons of shacks, however, with "technicians" who have taken apart every piece of broken consumer electronics they can find and sell the working parts. Sadly, 10 amp fuses are pretty heavy duty, and are not found in VCRs.
But on Friday, after scouring for a few hours, I found a bona-fide electronics parts shop on the other end of town, run by this awesome Indian dude. He gave us some free 5 and 6 amp fuses to try, but we ended up just buying another voltage stabilizer from him. It was amazing how refreshing it was to feel like he wasn't a pushy salesman or trying to take advantage of us. It's definitely why we decided to buy this pretty expensive machine from him. That, plus the hospital does have two concentrators, so two voltage stabilizers makes sense.
But alas, it wasn't meant to be. The concentrators powered up but didn't work, and when I took them apart to see why, I found that both were missing the circuit board that controls them. I can only guess why this would be, but probably someone had plugged them directly into the 240V power here and they'd fried, and when a technician saw this took out the boards but couldn't replace them, as the manufacturer is somewhere in Idaho or something. I was very disheartened by this, but don't really know what I can do about it in the remaining two weeks we're working in the hospital.
Jenny also left Friday- sad.
We're going back to Sipi Falls this weekend, and are all super excited!
7/10/11
I had a bad day on Sunday. One of the guys we know in Jinja, Chris, is a pretty cool English guy who's living here indefinitely to help start and run an orphanage. He's pretty tech savvy too, and offered for me to come over in the morning for an hour or so, so he could help me jailbreak and unlock my iPhone. I wanted to do this because then it could work on MTN's local network here, so we could make calls on it and stuff, which sounded cool. Plus, data usage through MTN is very cheap, and we'd then. Be able to check our email and the news from home- very convenient, right? It was the perfect plan.
But alas, four hours later, my hoped had gone from "turn my iPhone into something better than it is" to "get my iPhone working again" to "get the hell out of here, bricked iPhone be damned, I am so frustrated right now." So without going into the boring technical reasons it didn't work, alas, my beloved iPhone now doesn't turn on. I'll be able to fix it when I get back to the US, but for now it is dead. RIP for now, beloved friend.
My mood further deteriorated when I learned that bungee jumping over the Nile costed $95, not $60, because they'd raised the price 5 days ago and no, they couldn't give a discount because I'd heard the old price... so no bungee jump. Sigh.
However, Anne Marie and the girls had a great morning shopping and seeing the sights of Jinja-town, and after a tasty lunch together we headed back to Iganga, spirits high again and enjoying the company of our new friends!
But alas, four hours later, my hoped had gone from "turn my iPhone into something better than it is" to "get my iPhone working again" to "get the hell out of here, bricked iPhone be damned, I am so frustrated right now." So without going into the boring technical reasons it didn't work, alas, my beloved iPhone now doesn't turn on. I'll be able to fix it when I get back to the US, but for now it is dead. RIP for now, beloved friend.
My mood further deteriorated when I learned that bungee jumping over the Nile costed $95, not $60, because they'd raised the price 5 days ago and no, they couldn't give a discount because I'd heard the old price... so no bungee jump. Sigh.
However, Anne Marie and the girls had a great morning shopping and seeing the sights of Jinja-town, and after a tasty lunch together we headed back to Iganga, spirits high again and enjoying the company of our new friends!
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