First and foremost happy Friday! Today was a big day for us as we met some political figureheads and got to see different parts of Mukono.

We started the day with coffee and marble cake from our favorite café, and talked about education and gender roles. In Uganda, a lot of women get married around 18 and don’t finish school, as marriage tends to be their priority. On the other hand, men tend marry around 28 and focus on establishing themselves. That said, education takes longer to complete here: most people who go to school graduate significantly later than the typical age of 18 in the US, and lot of high school classes have 25-30 year olds in them.

Upon arriving at the District Office of Health, we saw a group of women relatively nearby in all yellow clothes. Devir told us they were prisoners from Kauga prison, and that the women were in the prison yard. We found out that the most common crime in Uganda is robbery, for which the imprisonment time can range from 3 months for stealing a chicken to 1 year for stealing a car. We were surprised to find that a murder crime only results in around 5 years of prison and that life sentences aren’t very common, although there was outlier case of 65 years (who actually ended up escaping!).

The district health officer was very busy so he only met with us for less than 5 minutes, but he was very supportive of our project and was excited to work with us.

We then briefly saw Kenneth (the boda boda Director who we met on our first night here), who is always very happy to see us, before meeting with the presidential representative. We were happy to see a woman in a position of power, especially after learning about Ugandan gender roles earlier this morning. Haleigh pitched our project like a boss and the representative was very receptive to our idea! We also learned that people in the Ugandan military bow as a sign of respect to one another, instead of saluting.

After our meetings, Devir and Timothy decided we should see some animals nearby in their natural habitat; specifically, they wanted to show us monkeys. We did not realize this would entail a six mile hike up a mountain in slightly modified western business attire (luckily we wore our hiking boots!) in 80 degree weather. We now know for the future that Devir’s distance perception is quite different from ours. The outcome was us dripping in sweat and Haleigh not only finishing her bottle of water but also finishing half of Amber’s as well— even after Amber specifically told her we had to ration it. #haleighhydrates #amberdiedrates

See this video for when we finally made it to the monkeys!

The weather here is actually sometimes cooler than northeast summers in the states, although it will be down-pouring and cold* one minute and sticky and hot another (just like living in St. Louis!)

*cold is a relative term, when it dips below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, we have to explain that we’re not cold because it averages around -5 degrees Celsius in US winters!

On the bop to the top we passed by a large, clay colored structure with an indented center, which turned out to be the largest ant hill we’ve ever seen. Haleigh instantly whispered, “Amber go stand next to the ant hill” and as Amber glared at her, Devir exclaimed, “Haleigh, put your head inside the ant hill!” We managed to overcome our fears and stand relatively close to the ant hill, but we couldn’t hide our shock when Timothy grabbed a piece of it and put it in his mouth. “The iron is good for you!” We quickly started walking again to avoid being offered our own pieces. Unfortunately, we did not escape fast enough, but Amber smoothly improvised and replied that we had brought iron pills from the US and that we’re taking them daily.

We soon came upon more foods to politely decline, as Devir cut into a fruit exclaiming the liquid oozing out was poisonous, cracked a nut filled with palm oil (but was surrounded by flies), and tried to hand us a rotting avocado that he found on the ground. It’s the thought that counts.

Upon hearing music and seeing a congregation of people, we learned that we were hiking up “Prayer Mountain”. The views were very pretty as we could see all of Mukono and the nearby Lake Victoria, which was named after Queen Victoria in England. In spite of being not-so-great back home, Amber’s geography skills here are impeccable— she was able to identify almost all the places we’ve been from the top of mountain (check our mini vlog below). Haleigh, on the other hand, should not leave Amber’s side unless she wants to get lost… or run out of water. We’re both getting more used to the town though and happily exclaim whenever we recognize an area.

We walked all the way back to the Mukono access clinic to discuss equipment to put in our advanced and obstetric first aid kits. Initially, we were thinking of making five bags each with a stethoscope, blood pressure cuff and bag valve mask, but for logistical and cost reasons, are hoping to just get pocket masks for all our advanced responders. We also learned about “mama kits,” a prepackaged OB kit that every expectant mother carries around after 7 months of pregnancy. Amber got very excited talking about the obstetrics curriculum she designed— Haleigh is totally not still salty about how Amber invested more time in creating the presentation for that than the latest clinical trial.

During our discussion, Amber showed off her karaoke skills by singing a slightly faster version of the song “Staying Alive” as a way to keep a steady pace during CPR. This came up because she wanted to know if they have a song they sing in Uganda to keep the rate of 100-120 beats per minute. Upon finding out that they don’t, she is now working on convincing Hannington to let her film and launch her first music video at the training.

We learned just exactly how dangerous the roads today when we had to cross a very busy street. No one would stop to let us cross, so Devir stepped in the middle to try and stop a few cars. The scariest thing was that they didn’t stop- he almost got hit and had to run back to the curb. The second attempt was more successful, but Haleigh and Amber were shaking in our boots the whole time.

We then experienced our first power outage in Uganda; luckily it was very brief. We’re going to finish off the night with a meeting to update the VTCA team on our progress and review the basic trauma curriculum to make sure we have adapted it correctly to utilize local resources. In other news, Haleigh continues to get new nicknames, this time we were referred to as “Amber and her colleague”.

Our wifi devices have essentially stopped working except for a random five minutes at a time, so in the future we may be delayed in posting blogs. Sorry, we wanted to get to bed early tonight. Listen to our nightly lullaby here.

*All pictures included with permission of the included parties (and Amber’s explicit consent this time).

Devir wanted us to take a video on the mountain (we wore hats on the rest of our hike, don’t worry Mom)

And Haleigh figured out how to embed videos into squarespace if they’re longer than 30 seconds so expect many more!

Side note: Shoutout to Haleigh for not only contributing to the blog but also handling all the tech stuff! Three cheers for #washuengineering and over an hour of YouTube tutorials and converting file types to make this happen. She will now be trying to teach Amber how to use Squarespace in the near future.