First day back in Uganda

Hey all, looks like I’m back in Uganda again. After a long series of flights, I got into Uganda’s Entebbe airport at 10:30, and then passed through immigration and customs without any problem. One thing of note is that the visa entry fee is almost twice as much now, at $50 as opposed to $30 the last time I came through. Thank goodness they didn’t look through my luggage- not that I had anything illicit, but I did pack a whole lot of food so that I wouldn’t have to rely only on Ugandan food for the whole trip. If they took that away, I’d probably be on Pepto-Bismol for most of the trip and pretty uncomfortable (I never really adjusted to Ugandan food the last time I came out, and GI distress for the most part of 2-3 months was a bit much.

I was picked up at the airport by a driver from the hostel that I’m staying at currently, the Red Chilli Hideaway. The UCSF house that I stayed at last time has closed down, as has the Blue Mango, which was the great hostel that was right across the street. It’s a shame, especially since it turns out that the Red Chilli Hideaway is really really far away from Mulago hospital, all the way on the other side of the city (I left at 8 am, and between walking, riding a matatu, and exchanging money, it took me 1.5 hrs to get to Mulago). I’m considering moving to a place in Makerere University called the “Edge House,” where I know that Troy stayed at last time I was in Uganda. That’d cut down a lot on transport time and costs, and it would make me feel more comfortable about commuting later in the day. I was bitten a lot by mosquitoes last night at Red Chilli despite them having screens on the windows, but it was midnight by the time I checked in, so I couldn’t even get a bednet. Good thing I’m on antimalarials, and also that Kampala has a low level of malaria compared to the rest of the country. It’s just a bit annoying to be itchy and sticky when you wake up in the morning.

In other news, my cell phone is on the fritz, and refuses to stay on/work except under very specific conditions, namely me not moving or touching it too much. My SIM card from last time doesn’t work anymore, and I have to buy a new one, so hopefully someone can run errands with me at lunch or so (and maybe I can move into the Edge house too, depending on if I can contact anyone/arrange that to happen).

In terms of work, there is a lot to be done. The head of the surveillance project here, Hasifa, has a database that needs cleaning (I did most of that work on the plane) and after it’s clean, a paper needs to come out of it. This means that I/we can start on the intro, and then do the methods at least. However, it’s up to me to figure out the time series analysis part of the paper- I have some rainfall data that needs to be factored in, and since rainfall is a continuous time series thing just like number of malaria cases, it seems like some time series analysis of some sort needs to be done. I think I’ll try to predict malaria cases with rainfall, and use the residuals as the outcome variable for an analysis that looks at certain interventions that they did during the calendar year (spraying, etc.). That way, the residuals will represent all the malaria cases that can’t be accounted for by rainfall patterns and malaria seasonality. I’ll have to run this by Tim (a graduate from UCB who does a lot of time series work) and hopefully that will be the right thing to do.

Other work that needs to be done also includes taking all the old databases that they used to use and merging them into one big comprehensive clean database- I don’t know how hard/easy that will be, since I don’t have a long history with these databases. I also have to do probably 2-3 lit searches, one for Hasifa’s paper and the introduction, a second one on time series analysis and surveillance data (to get ideas for what I might get a first author paper out of) and then a third one for just surveillance data and malaria/other infectious disease papers (to get an idea of what other people have done with surveillance data, and see if that will be interesting to apply to the data that I’ll have). Hopefully I’ll come up with some good ideas (I already feel like controlling for climate/rain factors is a good thing to be able to do).

That’s it for now, time to see if I can arrange for some transport around town to do errands.