Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
This is the story before the story. The story will begin when a door opens and I take my first breath of African air after a 43 year absence. I imagine I will be too tired to process much at that moment but that will be the real beginning. The beginning of what? We shall see. This blog exists so I can share the “what” with you as it unfolds. This first story is a chance for you to take a look at the program before the curtain opens.
As a child, I could hardly imagine a life outside Africa. Normal for me varied between the hot, scrubby bush of Somalia and the lush, green, high country of Tanzania where I went to school for awhile.

These normals were spiked with yearly visits to Nairobi. The Nairobi of my memory was a city of well-tended gardens, double-decker buses, fragrant open-air markets, and crisply uniformed officers directing traffic with white gloved efficiency. As a bush child, Nairobi was the closest thing to paradise I knew. As that child all grown up, Nairobi’s sad decline has been reported to me by people different enough for me to believe it. I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want any of the tragic stories out of Africa to be true.

Growing up in Africa meant experiencing a short public transit between a goat chewing on grass and me chewing on the goat. The things which help us avoid thinking about where our food comes from and ultimately where we come from and to what we will return were absent from the African life I knew. The shield against starvation for the African people I lived with was a few inches of rain each year. If the rains came, the grass and corn grew, the goats grew fat and multiplied, and the cooking pots sang joyously over their charcoal fires. If.

The first nurse I remember seeing was the mission nurse. I would watch her walk from her house to the clinic, both part of a campus which included our house. I knew she also made regular visits to homes in the village which bordered our mission station. Sometimes I would help her clean syringes and needles (they were not disposable in those days) and watch her put them in a pressure cooker placed on a charcoal fire to sterilize them. The nurse was the only clinician; she made the diagnosis and decided on the treatment. I was not aware of hospital nursing until much later. That first encounter with nursing surely contributed something to my love of community health nursing today although I’ve enjoyed many years of intensive care hospital nursing as well.

That the service of nursing and education flowed out of commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ was a given among the adults who nurtured me as a child. This is one reason I am particularly looking forward to serving as a nursing educator at Uganda Christian University. The faith-witness at UCU has unusual strength and clarity. I’m looking forward to learning more about how the Christian faith functions as sail, rudder, and anchor for this institution.

I never expected to have an opportunity to go back to Africa just as once I never expected to live anywhere else. I certainly didn’t expect Africa to come to me in Nashville, Tennessee. One must stay open to surprise and surprise was what I felt one afternoon walking along a stretch of public housing. I heard the Somali language coming out of one of the apartments. In that apartment was a man listening to Radio Mogadiscio on the Internet. After that surprise, I became acquainted with many other expatriate Africans living in the Nashville area, most of them refugees. Those connections have enabled me to put a clinical finger on the pulse, so to speak, of modern Africa in all its complexity, mystery, and liveliness. A lively pulse communicates at least one thing: hope.

So this is a bit of the story before the story which I am carrying with me to that first breath of Ugandan air, structures enough for stable footholds and surprises enough to stay curious. If all goes as planned, I, with husband and father, will arrive at Entebbe, Uganda, on Friday evening, August 14, 2009. Look for my next blog entry soon after that.