Week Three

June 8th – Though I was exhausted from my travels and staying out til late (ish... definitely late compared to Amara and my bedtimes!), I still woke up at eight, settled back in, boiled some water, journaled, read, and went to the gym.  After showering and having a little to eat, I headed to the farmer's market up the street with Connor, where we got a delicious cinnamon pretzel and some produce.  We decided we'd have to come earlier the following Saturday so that we could get the TORTILLAS that one woman makes—Johanna, Lily, and I seriously miss Mexican food—and have our pick of all the goods.  Later, the whole crew went over to Nakasero market to get a lot more produce, then we set to making a yummy salad and cooking some carrots, green veggies, and mashed potatoes for dinner.  We headed to Big Al's, a fairly upscale bar on Acacia Ave (about five minutes away, in Kololo, the neighborhood where we live), to meet up with Omar's birthday party.  Omar is Saga and Macey's supervisor at African Prisons Project (APP).  We got there about half an hour before they said they'd arrive, but we were just hanging out there for a good two hours until they showed up, by which time I was ready to go to bed, but instead I stayed for another hour and a half or so and then went home around 12:30.

So many white people in one place!

June 9th – We were out the door by 7:45 on Sunday morning to go rafting on the Nile with Adrift Adventures.  It was a blast, including the two times we flipped—the right amount of fear of drowning and exhilarating fun because we trusted we'd be fine anyway.  Writing this from three weeks later, only one of us has show signs of schistosomiasis, but I should still probably get the preventative meds before I actually need treatment...  Schisto seems like no fun.  Though the rafting was fun, the highlight was probably the INCREDIBLE Mexican food we had for lunch, including guacamole and accompanied by delicious juice and fruit kebabs.  There were also meat kebabs at the take-out.  The breaded and fried hard-boiled egg in the morning wasn't as great though...  After we got home, we cooked and ate, then I skyped with the fam, which was really nice.

June 10th – Basically, the day was a struggle to make myself productive and respond to the many emails that required responses.  I (somewhat productively) procrastinated by rearranging the kitchen then actually sent some emails.  I read another chapter of A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, went to the gym, journaled, and then hung out with people when they got home from work.

June 11th – I did a little gym action, a lot of email action, a negligible amount of blog action, and read and journaled some more.  It was really life-giving to get in touch with several friends, many of whom are doing missions, and to think of the ways in which the Lord will use them.  A member of the Yale faculty who was checking in on the Bulldogs International programs treated us to our weekly "family dinner" (which Yale sponsors and takes place with our in-country contact, Carole, who, by the way, happens to work for MAF, who flew the Myhres when they lived in Bundibugyo – what fun connections!).  It happened at a place called Fang Fang, but apparently there's a restaurant and a hotel that has a restaurant.  I didn't know beforehand, so I didn't tell Elijah which one to go to, and I also chose to leave my phone at home, so basically my first African impression on my "boss" (He insists on being called my partner, but let's be real - he's Walimu's Executive Director as a rising junior.) was that I was totally out of communication and leaving him to wait for us alone outside a restaurant for 45 minutes.  I actually felt horrible about it and struggled to focus on our conversation around the table.  I called him later that night though and he was very gracious.

All day, every day, for two weeks.

June 12th – My first day of work was good, but fairly uneventful.  Elijah and I spent the morning in our shared office space at Hive Colab, trying to finish up entering the content for the chapter with which we're piloting the app.  As a recap, it’s called the mIMAI, or mobile Integrated Management of Adult and Adolescent Illness, and it takes the WHO’s guidelines for clinical care in resource constrained settings (the IMAI District Clinician Manual) and turns it into a mobile app that will work on phones and computers so that all the vital information in the IMAI is easily accessible at a clinician’s fingertips.  Basically what that means for the content entry phase for me is that I get to copy and paste things from the pdf of the manual into documents in Agile Diagnosis' online software and then reformat it, which sometimes means actually looking at the html and channeling my hacker little brother.  But if you're in Africa and the internet isn't all that awesome, you spend a lot of time looking at error messages and not as much actually programming...


In the afternoon, we went to Mulago, the national referral and teaching hospital, and set up in the MU-UCSF Mind Study Office, from which we sold the diagnostic kits to excited SHOs (residents) and interns.  Makerere University and UC San Francisco have had a partnership for several years, and Walimu is kind of a child of that.  These diagnostic kits, which cost $75, are subsidized by American donors to be available to SHOs and interns for about $20.  They're super excited about this not only because of the amazing price but also because somehow these tools aren't readily available in Uganda for reasonable prices. Each kit contains a blood pressure cuff, a portable pulse oximeter (to measure heart rate and blood oxygen saturation), a thermometer, an exam light, and extra batteries, all packaged in a nice small bag from eBags. The pulse ox seems to be the really exciting thing for everyone. It's very rewarding for us to see the energy and gratitude these kits are stirring up.

Just me, chillin' with the kits...

When I got home, we had dinner at Nawab, a fairly classy Indian restaurant, and were joined by Nikki, a girl who interns at the Infectious Disease Institute at Mulago with Connor.  We then went over to the Boda Boda Bar, which had salsa night, except that a few songs after we arrived, the music totally changed.  The emcee (yeah, they had an emcee in addition to the DJ...) started talking a lot and then they did this weird goodbye to some muzungu girl who was really good at dancing salsa, in which she switched off dancing every few seconds with fifteen different men, who pretty aggressively cut in. It was impressive but I couldn't help thinking that I'd feel assaulted if I were in her place.  We soon left and stopped by the Nakumatt grocery store, where I bought some milk in a bag...


 June 13th – My second day looked the same as the first, and I listened to some sermons as I entered content, which was nice.  I made a pretty good salad for dinner, made a brief appearance at our pool party with Titi and Lily, and then went with them to the gym.  Afterward, we hopped in the pool and hung out with the others in the hot tub.  Gregor, a German guy who also works at APP, brought some Haribo gummies that we ate while in the hot tub, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.  I showered, had some leftover Indian, read Galatians, and went to bed.

June 14th – I did a lot more coding, this time listening to Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Elijah and I waited a while to get picked up.  He came to the Chinese place with us at Centenary Park, and we later met up with Omar, Aimee, Matt, and DK, at the Centenary BBQ Lounge for a drink.  Dancing was failsauce because the stupid DJ talked literally every five seconds, so it wasn't really like music was happening, but at least we got the Ugandans dancing and provided them with some entertainment.  We relocated to the Kyoto Lounge, where I said I’d stay for ten minutes before leaving because I was tired, but it was really chill and people were just sitting around with sheesha and talking, so I hung out.  We eventually hit the dance floor and the DJ played a bunch of American top 40 songs for us.  Again, we were kind of a spectacle, but I think the locals enjoyed it and we definitely did.  The [very young] owner even got Lily’s number so he could give us the details on his house party the following night.  We never did get the deets, but it was a funny exchange.

June 15th – I slept til 8:30, wrote some emails, went to the gym with Connor, and then went to the farmer’s market (TORTILLAS!).  We sat in Prunes, the very muzungu restaurant/café in whose yard the farmer's market takes place, and had smoothies while failing to access their wifi.  They whole crew went to the Uganda-Angola football (soccer) game in the afternoon, which was quite the scene and a lot of fun.  We got some kebabs on our way out, showered when we got home, and ate the guacamole I made.  Watching Game of Thrones was fairly uncomfortable for me, so I left halfway through and journaled about holiness.  People started pregaming and I didn't think I'd go out, but since Elijah said he'd go out if I did, I agreed.  We went to Gattomatto to meet the old and new APP interns, several of whom were from London School of Economics, and and it was really chill.  Somewhat embarrassingly, I got a cappuccino, but it was really good and exactly what I wanted.  Most people left because they were getting up early for a hike, but the seven of us who stuck around played "never have I ever."  Obviously there were very few things mentioned that I had actually done, but it was a relaxed way to get people to open up.  We all took boda bodas home – our first time!  Lily and I ended up getting a night tour of Kampala because our boda driver didn't know where we were going.  It was more funny than annoying, actually, and beautiful to see parts of the city at night.  We convinced Elijah to sleep on our couch because it was past 3am, and we all fell asleep pretty fast.

Connor and Saga had way too much fun with the noisemakers...

The cranes won!!!  It was a nail-biter—they scored twice in the last few minutes.