Exploration

This morning, Derek and I decided to go see the hospital that I'll be based in for most of my stay here in Uganda. We walked out to the main street, and we hired a taxi-minivan (they seem to be run by 2 man teams- one driver, and one man who sits by the sliding door, opening and waving to people to jump in). The general charge is 500 Ugandan Shillings (USH) to get to most places in town, and we got in and took a ride to the hospital (500 USH is roughly 25 cents). The hospital is a very nice looking facility, and there were many people all around the hospital. Apparently there are very few nurses, and the majority of patients are attended to by their relatives/family. Beds in the hospital are free, as are medications (paid for by the government) but food and dressing changes and all other needs have to be taken care of by the family- which Derek pointed out can be pretty taxing on the family, since they have to literally live in the hospital, on the landings, and do their laundry and other chores in open areas around the hospital. Also, on Sunday, most to all businesses close down, and the hospital isn't much of an exception. There were definitely a few medical staff on hand, but Derek indicated that it was more of a skeleton crew, and that there were also far fewer patients, whereas during the week, the place was extremely busy. The emergency room is often so packed that patients with less severe injuries wait outside and even sleep there till the next day, waiting for treatment.

After visiting the hospital, we walked down to garden city mall, which supposedly was built just like a western mall- and it pretty much was. Large parking structures (under construction), movie theater, cell phone companies, banks, clothes, the equivalent of Wal-Mart, all of it was there. They had playgrounds and those inflatable houses- astrojumps I think they're called. A lot of foreigners were there, many of them in fancy cars- once again, the discrepancy in wealth. I took the opportunity to get draw some money out of my bank account, and apparently, back at home, my parents got called by the fraud division re: my debit card, so I'll have to let them know that it's not a stolen card (yet).

After buying some juice from the Wal-Mart equivalent, we walked back along a different path back to our house. Along the way, there were country clubs and embassies all over- it was actually a really rather posh looking place, if you ignored the dirt roads. Everything was really green, and the buildings were all well kept and quite nice looking. It was, however, really hot to walk uphill carrying supplies in the hot sun. The sun is rather warm, but apparently, there are often flash rain events- it will pour for half and hour to an hour on some days, according to Derek. I thought that it was the "dry" season in Uganda for the next 2 months, but apparently dry still can get very very wet- so I bought an umbrella for 4.8k USH, which translates to roughly $2.50 US.

We finally got back, and bought 1 liter bottles of coke for about a dollar each- apparently, they're cheaper if you bring back the empty bottles of coke for new bottles of coke. I imagine that they must submit them to a recycle area (I hope they don't just refill the bottles themselves... just seems a bit unsterile). We took a break, and then went across the street to a place called the Blue Mango (if you happen to be visiting soon, apparently you can tell most taxi drivers in Kampala to take you to the Blue Mango and they'll know what you're talking about). The Blue Mango is a restaurant/hostel, and after walking into the restaurant area, I saw Ben Bellows sitting in the corner of the restaurant! Ben is one of my classmates from Berkeley- he TA'ed one of my first epi classes, and we took another class together in a different semester. I had planned on meeting up with him at some point in the trip, but since I wasn't able to get my cell phone activated, I didn't think I'd see him till about a few weeks into my trip at least. We were both really surprised, and sat down and talked for a good while over dinner. He's travelling back and forth between Uganda and Kenya, and after hearing all the stuff he has planned, I'm looking forward to work tomorrow, and getting some work done myself.