Fellows Blog: Day 1

Hi everyone!! Amber and Haleigh here. Here being Uganda in case you haven’t heard! After 28 long hours of travel (plus an extra 3 hours for Amber) we made it to Africa! For those of you who don’t know us or what LFR is, peruse the website for the latter, and continue reading to learn more about what we’re doing here.

My name is Amber, and I’m a senior very recent alum of WashU. I majored in cognitive neuroscience and currently am trying to figure out my life after college. What better way than to leave the country?And I’m Haleigh, I’m a rising junior majoring in biomedical engineering at WashU and the director of research and undergraduate fellows with LFR, which is how I met Amber :)

The two of us are nationally certified EMTs, and through LFR, we have the opportunity to train first responders in resource-limited settings. Many of these areas experience a large number of accidents and injuries on their roadways, yet don’t have any sort of “911” emergency system. LFR’s goal is to create sustainable prehospital infrastructure in these regions, utilizing the network of motorcycle taxi drivers that can already transport injured patients. In Mukono, Uganda, we will be partnering with Vision for Trauma Care in Africa (VTCA) to teach our basic 5.5 hour trauma management course as well as our brand new level 2 advanced training curriculum! Shoutout to Amber for prioritizing obstetrics over helping Haleigh with her clinical trial last semester but we’re working on being cordial to each other now.

We’ve already had quite a few adventures! From Amber’s visa dubbing her “Amber Amber” to Haleigh’s newfound love of passionfruit juice, we can already tell we’re going to be using our critical thinking skills as we embrace new experiences. Starting with the shower in our hotel tonight: Haleigh couldn’t figure out how to get the overhead shower on, and Amber managed to have both the tub and overhead running simultaneously at two drastically different temperatures. See below for a picture of the knobs we were working with… and a few other pictures from our journey here. Stay tuned to hear how it goes!



The night before this was taken Amber realized her two suitcases were 65 pounds each. Guess what happened next… (and Haleigh didn’t bother weighing hers)

Haleigh: “mine were just fine thank you very much.” See? Working on being cordial :)



Flight 1/3: JFK to Togo! Photobombed by Amber’s malfunctioning overhead light that took four hours and a trip to the circuit box with the flight attendant to turn off… hello jetlag!



Our first glimpse of Uganda! Based on the map you can see reflected we believe we were flying over Kampala, Uganda’s capital.



The shower. Yes, those are four knobs. No, we still don’t know what each one does.