Survival of the fittest or the ones with the most connections.

This week I'm still waiting to hear about my final approval to come from the President's office. I can't start the research project until then, so it's a bit painful to be waiting, but that's the way things go here! You have to make sure that "patience and flexibility" are your middle names! I think I'm not too bad in the patience department, but I'm nothing compared to the people we saw yesterday at the regional hospital waiting to be seen. There you can wait days and days before someone will see you. I was at the hospital with Carol and David and a little boy we found at one of the homes they help support who had fallen out of a tree while fetching wood for the fire, and had broken his arm. So we loaded him up in the van and set out for the hospital. It was a Saturday, and sometimes that can be even more problematic, because a lot of staff may not be around on a Saturday at the hospital. But luckily Carol knew one of the medical assistants and he was able to get the young lad into the xray within a few hours wait. There was another man waiting for x-ray and an abdominal scan, and he was in rough shape - really bad abdominal pain. You could tell that he and his family had come in from deep in the village. He had an IV started, but no pole, so we all took turns holding the IV solution up for him. After our young boy had his arm x-rayed, we asked the medical assistant to help this man. It looked like they could do an x-ray, but not his ultrasound, because they had run out of ultra sound jelly. I'm not sure what happened to the poor man, but the medical assistant reassured us that if nothing showed up on x-ray, they may just open him up surgically and take a look. If you had seen the operating room, you may have prayed for more ultra sound jelly for this man. But that's life over here. You have to hope that "survival of the fittest" means you, or hope that you have friends in high places.

So we had an x-ray of the boy's broken arm, but the swelling was still a bit too much for a cast they said... they told us to bring him back on Monday. So back to his home he went, and on Monday he waited all day to get a cast. There wasn't much progress, so his aunt called Carol again, and she stopped by the hospital to see what the problem was. The problem was that the casting man needed help, as he was the only one there. So she went over to another part of the hospital to talk to a physiotherapist that helps her with her back, and asked him if he could help with the cast. He could. So after an entire day's wait, the boy got his arm casted in 15 minutes and off we went.

So other than that, I've been keeping myself busy with doing some prep work for the research, reading, and course planning. I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will get an email soon from the approval office in Kampala, and then I can get down to the research business!