Our clothes were not dry this morning.

That’s all we have to say for today. We are very disappointed.

Kidding! Kind of… at least about the former part. Unfortunately it did indeed rain again last night, but we managed to pull together outfits for the day to continue sourcing local first aid supplies.

After a brief meeting with Hannington, we walked around Mukono to get towels, roller gauze, gloves, and surgical blades (used to cut gauze and are cheaper than scissors).

Our bartering skills continue to be top-tier, in our humble opinion. Haleigh was crunching numbers faster than ever before (Amber thinks the cereal box activity really helped sharpen her skills) while Amber did the smiling and (sometimes not so) sweet talking. Through visits to a few vendors and our negotiation prowess, we managed to get towels that were initially 15,000 UGX all the way down to 7,000 UGX— less than half the starting price!

In total, the 100 towels we bought cost $187 (we still need to buy 160 more, but the stand we were at had run out!) The gloves cost $164, the roller gauze cost $84 and the surgical blades cost $10, for a total of $445 dollars spent today. Haleigh will admit we still do need her handy conversion app to convert from Ugandan shillings to US dollars, but our intuition is getting better!

Devir and Timothy helped us get the towels back to Mukono Access Clinic, with Devir taking a boda boda and Timothy helping us carry them. Haleigh pitched in too, but only for long enough to pose for a picture.

We ate posho and beans at Bell again for lunch (See? Told you we’d be back there). Amber was curious if Hannington had ever seen a patient with sickle cell anemia before, since we learned in our biology classes that the shape of the sickled red blood cells makes an individual less susceptible to malaria. Hannington said, “Yes of course I have!” He then proceeded to tell us that he could identify someone with the disease just by looking at the palm of their hands, the soles of their feet, and their eyes- jaundice (yellowing) is a common sign and symptom of sickle cell disease! This led to Amber rattling off a list of diseases that we could potentially contract while in Africa- thankfully most of them are not common Mukono! We also learned that the schools here don’t require any sort of vaccinations except for the covid vaccine (maybe they can get the US on board for that one?)

After lunch, we debriefed the day and discussed how we would fit in the rest of our to do list before trainings start this week. Amber and Haleigh were ecstatic to get home by 4 pm without another night meeting to attend. We did some tasks to prep for trainings for about 30 minutes before our wifi cut out, and then worked on the blog of course. We also took in our (mostly) dry laundry!

We had relatively few issues throughout the night, other than the typical wifi issues, exhaustion, and Haleigh dropping a pack of precious M&Ms on the floor. Amber managed to cook us pasta with actual pasta sauce for dinner, and we’re doing more work to prepare for this training before our 6:30am wake up tomorrow :)

All images posted with permission of the included parties