Saturday, April 7,2007 Part 1

Hello from beautiful Uganda!

I promised an account of our excursion to Queen Elizabeth National Park, which is located in the far west of Uganda, on the border with Congo. It is a massive park, hundreds of square kilometres, which incorporates both Lake George, Lake Edward, and the Kazinga Channel that connects them. The park is famous for its wildlife, and we saw a lot, including baboons, many elephants, lions (from a safe distance), mongoose, hyena, crocodiles, hippos, several species of antelope, water buffalo, velvet monkeys and dozens of species of birds. It was an adventure of a lifetime, although all too short. I’ll post lots of pictures of what we saw when I get home, although you can probably see better shots on the Nature Channel. That’s what it was like – the Nature Channel, but in real life.

Now it’s Saturday and threatening to rain. Lots of thunder and lightning, but few drops as yet. We visited two privately owned, for-profit hospitals this morning to see (1) what facilities that wealthier patients are willing to pay for and (2) what the best medical care Uganda has to offer looks like. The facilities were better than those we have seen so far at the not-for-profit sites we have visited. Yet that intangible “certain something” was not there, that feeling that the staff was not as fully committed to the well-being of patients as those at the Church-run facilities, or even the Mbarara public hospital I’ve already written about. Still, seeing the spectrum of Ugandan health are has given us a great perspective on the task facing Mbarara. I hope they will be able to incorporate the best of both kinds of facilities.

And now our official work is over. It’s raining now on our corrugated tin roof but we are safe and dry at Monfort House. We’re catching up on rest, emailing home, reading, doing crossword puzzles, napping, tweaking our final report and preparing this blog. And a few of us are drinking some of the good Ugandan beer, but specific identities have to be protected.

I’ve already said that it has frustrated me no end that I’ve not been able to post photos due to our slow internet connection. So I will sign off now and start a new posting that I hope will paint some verbal pictures of some of our moments here in Mbarara, Uganda.

I’ll be back.

Joanne of the USD-Uganda team