Back in Iganga. We had arranged last week to spend today in a little village about an hour outside of town at a small orphanage / boarding school that was set up by another ELI volunteer. We grabbed some chippotti (our new favorite!) and set out.
The village was pretty crazy. At perhaps 9:30 we were seated in two small rooms in this tiny little school/orphanage, with 200 kids waiting in lines outside to be examined. There were no doctors there, or nurses... only Anne Marie, Jenny and me. None of us had more than 1 year of med school under our belts. And yet, here we were, looking one after one at kids (orphans, no less) that have almost certainly literally never been examined by anyone with any medical training EVER. Anne Marie and Jenny sat in one room, looking at the girls. I sat in another room, looking at the boys. And they filed in, one after another, unendingly, with all kinds of big, crazy open wounds; almost all with malnutrition and distended abdomens, stomach and head pains; almost all with GI worms; in they came with ringworm, eye problems, tooth problems, infected wounds and almost all other kinds of infection. In short, it was unbelievable. I spent the first two hours there pretty unhappy - it was a pain to consult Anne Marie and Jenny in the other room, our supplies were split, and I seriously did not know what I was doing for most of it. But as I fell into it, I realized that what little we could do was better than nothing. We wrote down what we thought all the kids had, and most of it - the infections, the worms, the fungus - will be treated later by people with money that can get the appropriate tablets. But we cleaned dozens of wounds, many obviously infected, and frankly, by the end I was focused more on what we could do than what we couldn't. It was good to actually be helping... we were so much less helpful than if we were qualified doctors with all the drugs we needed, but so much more helpful than no-one, which is who would have seen them if we hadn't come out.
By the time it was all over 8 absolutely unbroken hours later, we were hungry and tired, but happy to have helped. We went to our favorite restaurant in Iganga and got beers and Indian food and even some little cheeseburger sliders, and by the time we got home we were very happy with a hard day's work.
The restaurant reminds me of one last small digression I'd like to make about the food here - it's really, really bland. Almost no flavor. I say this not because I'm picky or unadventurous about my cuisine - in fact, I feel the opposite. My tastes are far too adventurous for Uganda. So when we discovered some time last week that you could get Masala Chips at a restaurant here, we were thrilled. Delicious english potato wedges, smothered in spicy indian masala sauce??? Awesome! Then, once we'd gotten into the tasty food scene in Iganga, we heard about the Sol Cafe, where we went in the evening of this blog post. It offers burgers. They're little, kind of white castle-y, but By God, they're burgers! It's very exciting. Though I realize it's a pretty strange digression from our epic day of healing sick orphans. I guess I'm hungry.
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