A good life in Kampala

Wednesday 27th January.
Well, after the excitement of Christmas things have settled down and we are both hard at work for Reachout. We are feeling very settled in Uganda and a lot of our earlier fears have diminished. We find the Ugandans to be a gentle and friendly people although some of the behaviour on the roads seems out of character. We are more comfortable with the routine but there are constant reminders that life in Uganda is harsher than back home –a member of the Reachout staff died over the weekend after a boda boda accident last Friday.

Last Thursday I enjoyed a trip out into the country. Reach Out Mbuya has four bases where they run clinics. Three are relatively close on the east side of Kampala (Mbuya, Kinawataka, Banda). The  fourth, Kasaala, is about an hour and a half north of Kampala just beyond Luwero. I hadn’t been before but a visit was required to understand what data recording was in place. Kasaala appeared quite idyllic compared with the busle of the city. Kasaala village, I think, has a population of about 1000.

There is a bore hole water pump in front of the clinic. This was in constant use filling up the stack of yellow jerry cans. 

The land is lush and green and I became aware of the abundance of fruit and vegetables as the pickup was loaded for the journey home.

Last Friday evening we enjoyed the monthly gathering of Kampala volunteers. This time we met for a drink and a meal at the Centenary Park next to Garden City.

Our Sunday routine, when there are no other commitments, is to spend the morning at the gym and swimming pool at Kabira Country Club. Last Sunday we were a little more adventurous and we visited the Speke Resort on the shores of Lake Victoria for the first time. The centre was built for the CHOGM conference a few years back. Apart from extensive hotel and conference facilities, there is an Olympic size swimming pool and a modern gym. The setting is very attractive with the view out to the lake.

On Monday night we were at the Caledonian Society's Burns Supper which was very enjoyable. It started at 7.30 and was attended by around 80 people. We left at 12.30 although the dancing was not near finished. It was a first for me to pipe (or bow) in the haggis on my fiddle. Conveniently, for Kapalian  Burns Supper goers the 26th is a national holiday - NRM Liberation Day.
The last few days have been very hot with temparatures in the low thirties. On Friday we are looking forward to welcoming our next visitors and showing them how we live when they are not watching the gorillas.

Back to auld claes an' matooke

Sunday 10th January 2010

After a great Christmas break, we are back to focusing on what we came to do here. It was good seeing everyone at Reach Out again. Most had gone back to “the village” for Christmas. Everyone seems to have a village of origin, no-one admits to being from Kampala, but while most people still have some relatives there, with the move to urbanisation, there is a gradual loss of connection with their roots and it may be that the next generation will seen themselves as city born and bred with no relatives to visit up-country. Kampala is still quite quiet and the traffic in the morning is very light, it may be because the schools are on holiday until 2nd February. Reach Out cut down its services more over Christmas than before, although there were still clinics for the acutely ill and very sick clients. Surprisingly, the clinics have been quiet this week, the nurses think some people may have travelled to their villages for Christmas and not have the money to travel back.
Bobby is back to being busy working with the IT consultant and the Monitoring and Evaluation Team to get the new HMIS completed and has started generating reports from the considerable volume of data that has been entered over the last six months. He is enjoying exploring and learning about SQL Server while depending on his MS Access to provide users with a more familiar front end to the data.I have been working on analysing data for a study evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention for discordant couples (one HIV+ve the other –ve)  so that I can work with clinical staff to submit an abstract for a big HIV/AIDS conference in July in Vienna. I am also working with another member of staff on another abstract for the same conference about the Prevention of Transmission from Mother to Child Programme. It would be great if they can go. They are all very good and confident at talking and have a charm and grace that I can only admire but writing is more difficult.
My main goal is to set up a collaboration between Reach Out, a local university and a Scottish University, which would provide the long-tern academic support needed to allow Reach Out to take a lead in setting the research agenda. The staff are very keen to use and do research to be able to show the effectiveness of their nurse-led model of care and all the other aspects which makes Reach Out so special. From an academic perspective, Reach Out is very dynamic and ready for change and innovation.
We are also making the research governance more streamlined, and this is particularly important because of the constant stream of students, some local and other from overseas (overseas from Uganda!)  who want to come to Reach Out to carry out research for their dissertations. I am preparing guidance for prospective researchers which we will put on the website to make it easier for them to understand the process involved before they can have access to staff and clients.
We also now have weekly meetings of the Research Capacity Group, and overall there is a lot of research being done, mainly by using data which is collected routinely for the reports which donors require quarterly. With the new Health Management System which Bobby is helping to design and implement, extracting this data should be easier than before.  Given the problems we have had in extracting and interpreting routine data in two recent community nursing studies I think Bobby could maybe show NHS boards how to do things the Reach Out way when he comes back to Scotland.
At the end of the week three members of staff left and we had a very African send-off - they just do these things so nicely. 

One was a long-serving nurse, and the nurses are a great team who recently won a Best Practice Award, so it was a very emotional send-off for Lynn. Towards the end of the ceremony, we were each served a soda (Coke, Fanta etc are collectively referred to as soda here) and a brown paper bag with a vegetable samosa and a bun, to finish off the party in style.
We have had lots of e-mails over Christmas, which we have appreciated, and some have included photos of the snow at home. We realise that the UK is having the worst winter for 50 years and  that the cold spell is far more prolonged than usual. We also read that the UK is importing salt from Africa for the roads - we certainly don’t need it here except for our rehydration therapy. By way of contrast I decided on Friday morning to work outside to get some space to spread out some questionnaires which needed checking before the data was entered. I started out on the bench outside the office but soon became too hot and had to move under the shade of a  large tree in the compound. I did think about the photos and reports in the Scotsman online as I worked – and I know we will dream of this climate next winter. 
It also seems strange sitting on our verandah in the evening with a waragi (gin at £4 a bottle and very acceptable) and tonic watching the birds as the sun goes down and knowing that we will not be doing that next January.

Our first African Christmas

31st December  -
We have just seen off our son Hamish and his partner Morven after a really magical Christmas, mainly due to just having Hamish and Morven with us and helped by having  a wonderful safari to Murchison National Park in the north of Uganda.
We met HandM at the Shell Garage up the road from our house on 22nd December as they were coming from Jinja just an hour and a half east of Kampala. They had set out for Africa from Aberdeen on 2nd December and had spent some time travelling around in Kenya with our niece who is based in Nairobi. It was great to have them staying with us in Kampala for two nights before we set off on our safari very early on Christmas Eve. We were picked up by our driver Emmy (Emanuel), who was excellent, and set off north to Murchison. The north is much less populated than the west and on Christmas Eve the roads west were very congested with people going back to their villages for Christmas. The road north was surprisingly quiet although we passed the scene of 4 or 5 accidents. 

The first three hours to Masindi was on good roads and then we had two and a half hours of “African Massage” on very rough unsurfaced roads with lots of potholes.

Just before Masindi we stopped at the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary and were very lucky to get very close to the White Rhinos because it had been raining and was still quite overcast, so they were feeding in the open. We travelled on to stop for lunch at a very nice hotel in Masindi.
 

After lunch we entered Murchison Falls National Park and travelled up to the banks of the Nile. We stayed at the Nile Safari Lodge west of Paraa which had very good accommodation and great food.

Each room/tent was on its own with a verandah overlooking the River Nile with hippos in abundance.
On  Christmas Day we went for a game drive in the north side of the Nile. We crossed the Nile at Paraa on the ten-car ferry and were joined by a park ranger who could guide us to the  likely places to see the animals. 

We saw lions, giraffes, elephants, buffalo, warthogs, Ugandan kobs, hartebeest, and lots of amazing birds, and Morven used her fancy new camera to take lots of photos. 

 

Northern Carmine Bee-Eater (above not below)

In the afternoon we had a drive to the top of the Murchison Falls a truly awesome sight as all the water of the 50 metre wide Victoria Nile is forced through a 6 metre cleft to fall 43 metres.

Unexpectedly we had a wet Christmas day but no snow! This created tricky driving conditions and  some vehicles could not cope with the muddy inclines.

 
On the morning of Boxing Day we went on a boat trip up the Nile to the foot of Murchison Falls to view from another angle. There was lots of wildlife to see – plenty of hippos, and crocodiles waiting at the foot of the falls for anything pounded unconscious on the trip through the falls.

 

 
 

In the afternoon another game drive on the north side revealed enormous numbers of hartebeest and three hunting lions.

 
 












On Sunday 27th  we departed before sunrise to travel home. However we still had one more adventure – chimp tracking in the Budongo Forest. The trek can be as short as 2 or 3 hours but nobody told the chimps we were coming and  they decided to have an “away day” outside the forest where they normally stay. 

However our guide,  armed with his machete,  led us out into the wilderness and tracked down the  chimps. 


We returned to base four and a half hours later tired but very happy with  our encounter.

 

The whole four days were really great and it was just nice to be together for Christmas. We had two more days in Kampala, exploring the local market, the craft village and central Kampala which is very busy and noisy. (We achieved another first during this period. When stopped at the junction at Garden City we have always declined to buy from the many vendors who approach the car. However when approached by one selling Scrabble Rhona could not resist.  In her best bartering mode and aided by the changing traffic lights she acquired Scrabble for 15,000 shillings)
Yesterday we spent the day in Entebbe before Hamish and Morven left on a late flight back to the UK via Amsterdam. Entebbe was incredibly quiet. We went for lunch to one of the big resort hotels which was deserted, went swimming in another big hotel which was also full of staff but no customers and then Bobby and I were the only guests in a small hotel (Sophie’s Motel) we found which is ideal (cheap, clean and friendly) for an overnight stay to avoid driving back to Kampala at night.