Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
Karen Drake is a tall, strong woman whose primary home is now Minneapolis but who has spent most of her life on foreign missions of one kind or another. She lived with her parents in Japan until she was 17 years old, becoming fluent in all things Japanese.

After finishing nursing school in the U.S., however, she ended up as a mission nurse in what was first Rhodesia which became Zimbabwe. Karen directed and taught in a nursing school in Zimbabwe. She and a missionary physician, Dave, 20 years her senior, fell in love, surprising and delighting the missionary community in Zimbabwe with their engagement and wedding. Their two children, now young adults, were born and raised there.

It was Karen who had the original vision for a school of nursing at Uganda Christian University through a trail of connections following Karen and Dave’s return to the U.S. where Karen ultimately found work as nursing educator and director of the simulation lab at Bethel University in Minneapolis. Through several grants from Fulbright, Karen did the original work of exploring options for UCU’s nursing program. She visited all the major nursing schools in Uganda as well as meeting with government and university officers to determine the feasibility of a new BSN or BNS (Bachelor of Nursing Science), as they like to call it, in Uganda.

During one of those meetings, she met Jemimah Mutabaazi, at that time the only nurse in Uganda with an MSN which Jeminmah had earned from Case Western Reserve University some years prior. Jemimah was and is Uganda’s highest ranking nurse, head of its nursing board and nursing association. Karen asked Jemimah for ideas about finding faculty.

“You just advertise and then people like me will respond,” said Jemimah, smiling. And promptly joined the new school of nursing as its director. The two of them planned an RN-BNS program, viewing that as the most feasible strategy for elevating nursing in Uganda. Nurses and midwives are educated separately although most nurses add midwifery to their credentials. Almost all nurses in Uganda are educated in programs similar to the diploma programs.

Karen says nursing in Uganda is similar to the practice of nursing in the U.S. in the 1950s with few nurses doing assessments of any kind, the nursing process virtually unknown, and nursing record keeping absent from the rudimentary patient “file” as it is called here. Nurses basically hand out medications and keep order in the hospitals and clinics. Any vital signs they take gets recorded in the physicians’ or “clinical officer’s” (similar to a PA) records.

As the new RN-BNS program saw its first graduation approach, Karen and Jemimah became even more daring in their vision: they saw Uganda’s premier and one of its only MNS programs at UCU. They admitted their first MNS class in May, 2008. Their second MNS class starts this September.

Karen has come to UCU several times a year the past several years and keeps in close contact with Jemimah, the graduate students, and the UCU administration through email and phone when she is in the States. She was here for the past 10 days to orient me and to meet with students to help them get an independent study completed. I do not know how I would have done the work they are giving me without that orientation because most of Jemimah’s time is spent with the RN-BNS students. The MNS program is largely dependent on doctorally prepared visiting instructors which puts them at some risk.

“I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t come,” said Karen. “You are just what we needed at this time. I had no idea how we were going to find faculty for this year.” Their MNS is nursing education and leadership focused. I’ll be teaching a course on “Teaching and Learning Processes for Adults” to the new MNS group just starting and “Role Development for Nursing Leadership” for the second year students. I’ll also be teaching their research seminar course, and assisting them in finishing their independent study.

Classes start the second week of September so I have until then to prepare courses I’ve never taught before in a British type system about which I have yet much to learn. For example, in their grading system, 80-100 is an A. I find this utterly incomprehensible and will need some time to force my brain to accept this. It is certainly not something I’ll bring back to the U.S. with me! A score of 50 is passing. But I’ve experienced instant rapport with both Jemimah and Karen and expect their mentoring to continue, Karen from Minneapolis, Jemimah here. And I’ve met the second-year students twice now and bonded instantly with them, too: Faith, Elizabeth, Mercy, Grace, Agnes, Keren, and Moses, the only male and a dedicated mental health nurse who is father to two single birth children and two sets of twins.

“What will make it possible,” I said to my father over breakfast this morning, “is that the classes are so small. There are only 7 students in the second year class and only 6 in the new class.”

“That will mean you can pay them lots of individual attention,” said my father, a veteran teacher. We had just come back from walking the track at the university. Yesterday on the return trip from our track visit, we saw, perched high in a tree, our first monkey with a long red tail and red whiskers who pointedly seemed to turn his face away from us when we stopped to stare at him.

I am really enjoying getting to spend time with my father. His presence also seems to delight the Ugandans for whom older parents are persons due profound respect. Dad may pose some challenges, however. When I asked him if he had any laundry for me to do, he said, “Just a few small things.”

“Don’t you have any trousers?” I asked, surprised, knowing he’s worn the same pair for nearly two weeks now.

“I don’t wash my pants for months,” he said. I was appalled.
“Dad, I’m shocked. Mom would never have put up with that,” I said.
“Your mother complicated life unnecessarily,” he said, smiling. “My clothes were worn out from her washing, not from my wearing.” And we both laughed and then fell silent, remembering her.

I remembered that strong, beautiful woman who regularly wiped her door handles with bleach and whose ashes lie slumbering on that gentle hillside in southeastern Ohio awaiting that last trumpet. I believe in the resurrection of the body. I believe in the communion of the saints.