Picture Me Walkin'

Healthcare in Africa An essay by Luke Healthcare in Africa is no joke. Of everything we've seen here it's the hardest to make funny, because really, it just isn't. I got malaria a couple weeks ago (allegedly, though doctor number two said doctor number one was a crackerjack). It sucked. It really sucked. It felt like I imagine you'd feel if you ran a marathon then drank cheap whiskey till you passed out, then got woken up two hours later. It sucked. Then things went wrong somewhere and I got a lung infection or pneumonia or something. So I couldn't breathe. That sucked more, because then the locals were worried. Tell an African you have Malaria, his response will be along the order of "That's a bummer. The last time I got malaria was a few years ago. It sucked." So when they got worried I got really worried. I went to the hospital a few days later in a very much second- or even third- tier Ugandan city. It was scary. Not because there were human bo...

We are now back in Lira after a busy extended weekend. After a brief stint of homelessness, we are at the house where we will, god willing, be living for a while. I'm at the point where it takes faith in a higher power to believe that what works today will work tomorrow. It would be so nice if just this one time there were no hitch that meant taking two steps backward for every step forward. I can now say that I've been homeless in rural East Africa, which I guess is a notch on my belt. Not that it was much of a big deal, since accommodation for two runs from $6 a night at a sketchy place to $20 at the upperend place we actually stayed in. You'd think that given there were no dogs (NGO house), roosters (Sipi), boda accidents (Mbale downtown), ghosts (Mbale nicer place), or lizards, that I'd have slept like death. As it turned out, for some reason I couldn't sleep at all, so instead I fell asleep sitting in the dirt this afternoon. I'm not sure that I don't h...

[Luke, Thursday night] Nothing terribly exciting to post right now, mostly I'm just bored. I did not, for example, get attacked by any reptlls. We're still at the NGO house, still haven't gotten a hold of our guy. I think the beds we have been given have an experation date, I think that date is soon. The anxiety level creeps a little higher. So Pat and I were talking about this whole drive one hour and they speak a different language thing, and he brought up an interesting point. What with the lack of highway and the generally bumpy state of the roads here, driving an hour is not very far. We drove for like seven hours to get from Kampala to Lira, which is about 200 kilometers give or take 500. Thats like the distance from Eugene to Portland plus a bit, For anyone who doesn't live in the Willamette valley, I don't know what to tell you, 1.7K= 1Mile. Which by the way, I figured out all by myself using my stallar mental math skills. Like a two hour drive on a USA high...

Well, it's time. We're both all packed and ready to go, now we're just kinda hanging out at the house waiting for the signal. It feels like just another day to me, probably at some point here I'm going to completely flip out. Or maybe I'm just ice. I averted my first small-major crisis. I called my bank to tell them I'd be in Africa so don't freak out if there are weird charges. Imagine my surprise when they then told me that my one and only piece of plastic was set to expire the next day because some visa holding house had been hacked. "So do you want to come by and pick up a new card at your convenience?" Probably that's not an option. My bank is local, local to another time zone. So thanks to some helpful people at the bank, my dear old dad, and the good people at FedEx ; crisis averted. No big deal. Next up on the menu is getting from Heathrow to Gatwick without completely screwing the whole thing up.