Update for the week

So we haven't had internet all week, so here's a post for the whole week...
Monday afternoon we went to Sanyu Babies Home, an orphanage for abandoned babies up to 4 years old.  There were 47 children there, and they can take up to 50. The home attempts to have the children adopted, but in the meantime takes very good care of them with very little resources.  We brought some things to donate, but they need so much more!  Feel free to check out there website, it is http://www.sanyubabies.com/

Tuesday was a very eye-opening day at the Cancer Institute. Kelly and I were attending rounds as usual with our attending physician and about 5 Ugandan medical students when the women who we would have rounded on next, died.  Her two daughters that were with her started wailing.  I of course expected my attending to stop what he was doing, to say something to the family, to "pronounce" the woman as we would have in the states, but instead he and the Ugandan students just went on discussing the previous patient as if nothing was going on. Eventually a nurse came over and assisted the family, putting up a divider to give them a small amount of privacy.  Kelly and I both just stood with our jaws hanging open saying to each other, "did that just really happen?"  We've both lost patients, but we've certainly never seen anything handled like that.  We later wondered if the reactions of the other students was somehow due to the fact that death is so common here.  Life expectancy is 53 years old, more than 30 years less than the US, so are they just desensitized to it??

Tuesday evening we met Matt from Nairobi who was in Kampala for a few days, and he took us out for a wonderful meal at his beautiful hotel.  It really made our accommodations look less than favorable...

Wednesday the streets of Kampala were crazy!! We are still not quite sure what was going on... but we were told some famous evangelist was here, but either way the streets were out of control! You couldn't drive anywhere! People were blowing horns, blasting music through huge loud speakers, large buses or trucks carrying speakers would have someone proselytizing at top volume, and large pick-ups would have 30 people standing up in the back, crammed together, with hats and horns, dancing! At night there were fireworks. I attempted to take pictures or video, but it was so outrageous you had to be careful you didn't get trampled, so I didn't end up getting any. Things have quieted down a bit.

Today we were in the outpatient cancer clinic.  Between patients I decided to look something up on my Iphone, and the other med students were so amazed at my phone and what it could do! They had a good time looking things up in the medical dictionaries I have downloaded to it. It's funny, things we take for granted, they were amazed by.  Tonight we had a group dinner with our MUYU family here, which has become a nice tradition. We went to an Italian restaurant and it was really good.

Tomorrow after the hospital we are going to a traditional healer, which is very popular here in Uganda. Then this weekend (our last weekend here) we are headed to Bwindi National Park, a rainforest, to track a family of mountain gorillas :-)