love from a clinic in Kyabirwa

Soft Power Health came to be in the first rainy season of 2006. An American physician, Dr. Jessie Stone laid the bricks of the clinic herself and worked her tiny frame all day for months till the mosquitoes became too ferocious each dusk. Her vision was a world without malaria. A world without one of the most preventable diseases imaginable; a world without the disease that kills more children under 5 in Uganda than anything else…think death counts in the millions. She began chipping away at this by conducting basic community training with the rural villages; talking about malaria, its transmittance and offering absurdly subsidized insecticidal mosquito nets (about a buck n’ a half each). The program was a success and she now finds her cell phone in the states being blown up with the LC’s (local councilmen) of villages wondering when she’s making the rounds in their neck of the bush.
They do good things here; the facilitation of an extensive rural outreach program in which they discuss, educate and train villages about everything from HIV awareness to prenatal care to proper mosquito net hanging. Soft Power Health also manages a full time primary care clinic operating out of Kyabirwa Village (my home sweet home); we treat mostly malaria cases, the occasional malnourished baby, here an infected open sore, there a hypochondriac suffering from “back pain”. The flat fee is 5,000 Ush… about $2.50, this includes your consult with the physician, any lab work rendered necessary and whatever drugs we can prescribe you from our aforementioned closet pharmacy.
As this is the first real job I’ve had, short of ringing in cocktails for The Man, I was slated for obvious hesitations about what life in a 40 hour work week really entailed… but lucky for me and all future employers, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find it isn’t the black hole of energy and pleasure I’d imagined. In fact, on the contrary I enjoy it…ya might even say its turned me into a morning person *gasp*.
I wake up according to my own free will (which is just weird because my own free will says 8am is cool, opposed to like noon) and then hop out of bed. I pull back the colon trap mosquito net that sets me into claustrophobia induced fits a few times each night, maybe pee in the pit latrine (but only if I know I’m not going anywhere with a flushing toilet before 2pm) and then sit myself down to a breakfast that’s been waiting on a tray for me for a few hours…just how I like my eggs really. I then do some questionable guess work as to how my newly short hair looks and eye myself awkwardly in my pocket-sized “mirror” made out of the tin foil-esque material they use when fashioning the looking glasses for porta-potties, hiking bathrooms and prisons. After my fashion biddings have been tended to I jump on my new mountain bike and cruise through a few kilometers of dense jungle village dirt paths to none other than the Soft Power Health Clinic.
And then begins the real work, the real nitty-gritty… but first and foremost, we take tea. As is the way of their colonial predecessor, Ugandans also agree that any time is a good time for tea time…an thus I’m offered piping hot milk tea (boiled milk with sugar) or water tea (boiling water with loose floating tea leaves and sugar) dozens of times over the course of my sub-tropic equatorial afternoons. Oh, and for clarification, when I say with sugar, it isn’t our delicate few teaspoons…its 3-4 heaping tablespoons of it…literally...ya like cavities?

Tomorrow at dawn Ill head south west, slicing through the countryside to the border with Rwanda…which if I’ll goes as planned, I’ll be able to cross. Ill be taking a 10-hour taxi ride with a few of the other interns into the capital city of Kigali. We plan on doing the tourist thing for a day or so, visiting war memorials, genocide museums ect, but I’m also stoked to go to their volcanic national park and ascend to the top of one of the inactive volcanoes…yeah, crater lakes! We’ll return home on Tuesday, which is Ugandan Independence day. This marks the 45th anniversary of Uganda’s independence from Britain. Their 45th anniversary as a ‘democracy’; although they have yet to see their country bask in the glory of the ‘people’s choice’ as their current ‘president’ Musevini has modified the constitution over a dozen times in order to maintain his rule for the past 21 years. Ah well, such are the scars left by colonialism.

Happy Independence Day Uganda…may we live to see the day when the millions of displaced northerners return to their villages, when you no longer coexist as the most resourceful nation on the planet as well as the poorest and most exploited and when HIV and AIDS no longer claims the lives of 10% of your people. Maybe next year…eh?