More Sweet Birds!

We continue to keep our eyes (and ears) peeled for interesting birds -- which around here means just about all of them.

a stork-ish pair in a big stand of trees in the center of town

hey, we saw you in Kigali too!

an adorable little fellow on our laundry

a Crane perched way up high

the Pied Crow: basically the pigeon of Kisoro

Our Walk to Work

Kisoro District Hospital is just around the corner from our house. It's a very easy walk and one that we've done almost everyday since arriving. Here is a glimpse of that journey:

The view from our little porch

down the driveway...

past the bean-patch (which was just sprouting when we arrived)

take this little dirt road...

...to the main road in town

past a pretty typical Kisoro scene (sugar cane by bike, boda drivers {motorcycles} waiting for customers)

and through the hospital's front gate

our little office on a neater day

The hospital itself is spread among many one-story buildings on a fenced in campus. Pediatrics has its own building as does surgery, the outpatient department, and the male and female inpatient wards. I'm often working in our little DGH office in the pediatrics building and Katrina has gotten pretty familiar with the inpatient wards through the different clinics she has helped run.

Open-air paths (mostly covered because of the frequent rain!) connect all of the buildings. Alongside the paths and spread out on the grass are the families who have brought their sick loved-ones here. The nursing staff at KDH is notoriously overworked and underpaid (if they're paid at all!) and so much of the patient's care is left to the family. While medicines are nominally free (though frequently in short supply), families are responsible for bringing the patient's food, bedding, and sometimes even the mattress they'll sleep on.

Outside, women wash clothes and spread them in the sun to dry. Babies are rocked to sleep. Young girls make trips to the standing faucet to fill up big yellow plastic cans. Somehow, steaming pots of potatoes and beans get cooked and shared among groups seated in the grass or up against a building. Life outside the hospital buildings is a stark contrast to the dark, fetid hallways of the interior and the crowds of pensive, waiting people.

The next crop

The beanstalks are slowly crawling from the ground up along their deftly placed bean poles. And five medical students have arrived by air and 9 hours of overland van to Kisoro! "Professor Jerry," as he is called here, is the man who started it all and holds it together. He'd landed just a few days ago but yesterday was our first sit down meeting with him at Traveler's Rest hotel. As we were waiting for him to wrap up the meeting with our colleague Moses, we watched the rap video being filmed under the veranda. We also played with Lucky, the new puppy at Traveler's and also with Moses's 5 year old sister Elizabeth, who told me she wanted to be a doctor when she grows up! Jerry, Andrew, Andrea, and I mostly talked about the many meetings to come -- whenever Jerry is in Kisoro there are meetings upon meetings upon meetings. I've heard it called a marathon meeting, but it seems more like a relay race to me. It will be very helpful to getting us up to speed with all of the various projects that are currently at varying levels of active. It was great to see him. Andrew snapped these great vistas on our way back. You can see volcanoes! (We saw four at once but it was hard to capture in the photo.)

As we were walking back a van filled with 5 mzungus and headed to our compound passed us by. We helped the new arrivals settle in and then took them to Sawa Sawa Guesthouse for dinner. While there was a good amount of moonlight to go by, the new recruits managed to pull their flashlights and headlamps from their suitcase to further illuminate the way. No one fell into any big puddles and we even caught our first glimpse of a big frog/toad who along with his sisters and brothers has been croaking an impressive night soundscape for the last 2 weeks. 

Training Day

Esther and I reviewing answers to last week's test with the VHWs

One of our most interesting jobs with Doctors for Global Health is coordinating and teaching day-long training sessions for cohorts of Village Health Workers.

Nurse Spe teaching about immunizations

The VHWs travel from their villages (by foot or on the back of a hired motorbike) to attend three morning and two afternoon sessions designed to strengthen their healthcare knowledge. This week was the first of many training days that we are responsible for and, all things considered, it went pretty well.

We are very lucky to work with a team of Ugandan medical professionals who are also naturally-gifted teachers. They're all very good at connecting with the VHWs, asking good questions, and eliciting interesting conversations. This Friday was all about childhood immunization, respiratory illness, and a review of HIV data collected from neighboring villages.

Nurse Immaculate role-playing how to talk to parents who
haven't gotten their children immunized

Today, after a well-earned late wake up, we've repaired to a cafe on Kisoro's main drag to revise the lesson plans based on what we saw. This cafe's Americano -- the standard by which I judge any espresso-serving establishment -- is wonderfully good. The cafe has also turned out to be an excellent spot to weather today's torrential downpour.

Sam reviewing the latest HIV data

My Americano the next day

Sunrise on Crater Hill

In addition to the colossal volcanoes that loom on the near horizon, there are steep green hills, patchy with terraced fields, all around the town. We climbed one of them -- Crater Hill -- yesterday at the break of dawn with two other doctors who live near us.

We left our compound in darkness. It was the clearest night the rainy season has given us and some stars and planets were still out. The walk to the hill and up its surprisingly sheer slope only took about 40 minutes. We were comfortably seated at the top, at the edge of the crater after which the hill is named in fact, when the sun broke over the horizon.

Our new home was spread out in front of us: the mist, pooled in the valleys slowing burnt off and the chickens and children started waking up.

As we walked down a few women passed us, heading up with bundles balanced on their heads and hoes over their shoulders. Reaching the top of the hill had felt like an achievement for me -- a day's work. Reaching the top only to begin a day's work tending the fields was unfathomable. Clearly, what I can fathom does not account for even a modest fraction of what is accepted as normal and necessary and fine around the world. I'm glad for the chance to see that.

The volcanoes Muhavura, Magahinga, and Sabyinyo

Some Rainy Season

Sunday was our first real "day off" since getting here. We certainly haven't been swamped by any means but there have been visits out into the community and health worker training to observe nearly every day. So sleeping in today was pretty special.

After a late start we walked down the road to the Travelers Rest Guesthouse, an oasis of gardens and plush furniture and incredible pancakes. One of us ordered banana pancakes, the other got bacon pancakes. Not bacon AND pancakes. Bacon pancakes. We've heard that all the meals here are pretty fantastic and the dining room is cool and well-appointed, so it might become a "treat yourself" locale when we're in dire need.

After breakfast, we finished our coffee on the back patio and worked on updating lesson plans for an upcoming Village Health Worker training session. The sun was shining and a Hadada Ibis (which we would identify as such in the pages of Birds of East Africa) was rooting around in the wet grass. The ibis and we got a lot done that morning and around 1 o'clock Katrina and I walked back down the homeward road. The ibis found other soils for rooting.

The rainy season is no joke. In other words, when we saw great swirls of grey clouds overhead on our walk we knew there was no question of what was to come. The day before, we had raced a dark and terrible storm from the corner store all the way back to our house, reaching the porch only seconds before the skies opened wide. This Sunday afternoon was shaping up similarly.

We hustled up the driveway and dropped our bags inside just as all the corrugated tin roofs in our compound began to come alive with the drumming of raindrops. Soon hail, half-an-inch or more in diameter, was bouncing up to our front door. The sloped awning that protected our porch from lighter, more-or-less vertical downpours was of no use against this omni-directional onslaught. Water -- liquid and solid -- was assaulting us from its gaseous state miles above. But it's not a storm; it's a season, and it's no joke.

Rain was off and on (but mostly on) for the rest of the day and power was on and off (but mostly off). Both of these might end up being fairly common features of the rainy season. But being housebound on a Sunday was just what we needed to rearrange our living room a little and make Katrina's famous sweet potato stew (prepared with the local-est ingredients we've ever had).

Evening was peaceful. The sky had settled down and the setting sun was peeking through one small corner. Mt. Muhavura had never looked clearer or more prominent and we stood on the porch admiring it with our neighbour Amit, an attending doctor at the hospital. Every few minutes we heard the cheers of a far-off crowd of people. Maybe two soccer teams and their fans releasing the nervous energy pent up from an afternoon of rain delays.

Backyard Volcano

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Kisoro is nestled into the Virunga mountain range. These (mostly) inactive volcanos straddle the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. We can see the third tallest one (Muhavura) from our front porch.

There are probably very few outdoor places in Kisoro district that don't offer an impressive view of Muhavura. At 4,127 meters above sea level, this thing is taller than Mt. Fuji! It's mythically big. Around it are smaller cousins Mt. Sabyinyo and Mt. Gahinga. All together, these volcanoes make the skyline spectacular.

I took a picture this evening of Muhavura from our backyard. Normally the peak is shrouded in clouds but as dusk approached the sky cleared a little and only a few wisps remained. You can see a worker laying bricks on a house next to ours.