On Wednesday I got to put my nurse's hat on again as I went with the Hope Clinic team to Sowe island, to vaccinate school children. It has confirmed that I am not really an aid worker type. Call me a wuss, but I am rather attached to my clean, running water and electricity.
I was really looking forward to our trip because I have never seen anything of proper, rural Uganda. It was quite a shock. Sowe island is 45 minutes away from the mainland by boat, and about 1 and a half hours away from Kampala itself. Though hardly convenient to get to, it's not exactly remote - I was back in plenty of time to watch Angelina Ballerina with the girls before dinner at 6.30.
But Sowe is a world away from our cossested, urban life. The village we visited had no running water, no sanitation, no power, just lots of kids running around with distended bellies, alot of them caked in mud and with horrible skin diseases. They drink, wash and defecate into the lake. (It was like sailing on foul green soup, featureless except for the odd plastic bag.) There is a 'health post' - run by an enterprising individual with zero medical training, who picks up 'medicines' from Kampala to sell. There is a school, a 10 minute boat ride away - only the boat is broken. And the school has no teachers, books or other resources. The school is a recent feature, so let's hope the rest will follow. These people deserve better.
Injecting the kids was a nightmare. We were doing the standard infant vaccinations - DTP, polio and measles, which unsurprisingly, none of them had had at birth. It is one thing injecting babies, quite another a school age child who can and will hit you back because, despite careful explanation, the only thing they really register is 'strange white face about to stab me'. One girl was so scared, she peed all over me. (I added 'change of trousers' to my mental list of things I wish I'd brought. Already on it were: sensible shoes, key to the toilet, functioning tin opener. It was the inaccessible lunch, not the pee, that tipped me over the edge.)
The shiney, new school was a reasonable location, but the church hall less so, as every surface was thick with bat droppings. ('Cloth for removing bat droppings' - didn't have that either.) On the way back, our propeller got caught in a discarded fishing net ('pen knife'. Tsk! I would have been a rubbish boy scout), so we had to row into shore. I got home, had a shower, made myself a cup of tea, watched Angelina...and felt a lot better.
PS. By "pregnancy-addled", I was referring to my last three pregnancies. I am not preg, sorry..though I have chuckled hard at the fevered speculation!
2 comments:
You immunise the children against desk-top publishing?
I suspect nobody actively enjoys the aspects of aid work you've just described. It's more like cleaning: a dirty job that needs doing. The point is to do it, not to love it. Congratulations for your efforts.
Sorry to have led the pregnancy speculation, in my defense the meaning was not *entirely* clear... Ah well. The three girls you have are plenty gorgeous by themselves.
Wow , you are such a star doing so much service for the community. I cannot imagine such hardship those poor children love s
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