Grasshoppers and Hospitals

The grasshoppers have come. The first one I found in my apartment I thought to be a rarity but now I am used to their occasional company, although they make a lot of noise and have a tendency to die on my floor. Maureen and Jared are very very pleased with this seasonal appearance. They bought a special lamp that attracts grasshoppers, makes them go mad and then kills them and they have hoisted it high above the grounds of the organization on a bamboo pole. Why? They love to eat grasshoppers. I have yet to give them a go but I am curious. But enough about this delicacy.

No matter how obscure the place, whenever I travel my parents find someone they have some kind of connection to. So last weekend I spent with the nephew of a German pastor based in Toronto. While he does not live far from Entebbe, he does live in the bush with his Ugandan wife and two sons. So much so that the coworker who dropped me was convinced I was visiting someone who was hiding from the law. Once you turn off of Entebbe Airport Road, you need a motorcycle or four wheel drive vehicle if you hope to arrive, as parts of the road resemble a dried out river bed.

It was interesting talking to a mzungu who has been here almost three years. He was cynical about life in Uganda but I don’t blame him – if my boss tried to poison me, I too would be cynical. At around 11pm, we discovered that the three year-old son was very ill with an infection and fever. The mother was distraught and helplessly sat in the kitchen with her son draped across her knees. It was soon decided that mother and son should go to a hospital in Kampala while the father, baby and ML should stay home. I wanted to be useful and thought the mother could use support (plus I wanted to see the hospital), so insisted on accompanying the mother. At the hospital the child was promptly admitted for two nights – yet the car needed to be returned home so that the father could come the next day. Understandably the mother did not want to leave her son, so that left one option – ML should drive…

In Africa you have to be flexible and confident if you are going to achieve anything. So, despite having vowed to never drive in Kampala, it being 1am and therefore not ideal for a woman (especially a white one) to be driving alone (although I did have some pepper spray handy), despite not really knowing where I was going (signage is few and far between here and there is no lighting on the road) and driving for the first time in Uganda (and hence on the left-hand side of the road, not to mention the fact that half the journey took place on a bad road in the bush), I agreed. But I did cheat – although the wife vowed I could not get lost in the maze of country roads, we ordered a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) to meet me where the main road meets the dirt road to lead me to the home. Which was good, as he had to chase me down the main road since I missed the turn off. Here everything works through connections and this boda boda knows the family and hence recognized the car. Needless to say, I made it, although there were moments of panic when I thought I would run out of gas and that I had taken a wrong turn on a one-way street in Kampala which refused to end.

The next day I spent in the hospital. For the most part I was admiring the pink dresses of the nurses (especially the little white hats they have perched [literally] on their heads) and was scheming up ways of how I could get a picture (I finally asked them). But it was also interesting to observe hospital culture. In the children’s ward, where we were, mothers were sitting on the straw mats they had brought, attending their children. In Uganda, at least in public hospitals, it is your family and/or friends that provide your food and bathes you. I really don’t know how those with no one cope. And this lack of service is not due to a shortage in nurses – there are actually very many unemployed nurses here. But such is Uganda.

As for the sick child, I am happy to say that he is doing much better and has since been released.