Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
Kampala is a city of unknown millions who, from a distance and from a height, has a lush look to it with many red tiled roofs nestled among trees and rolling hills. Marabou storks are its biggest birds, tall, gaunt, bald-headed carnivorous birds that prefer their meat well-aged. When one sees many of them circling, a ballet of exquisite grace for one of the world’s ugliest birds, one can be sure of a butcher shop close by.
Getting into Kampala from Mukono is a laborious drive of around an hour if one is lucky, the vehicle lurching either to avoid or try to beat other occupants of the road to a coveted spot. Lurching, I might add, in a mix of oily black diesel fumes, red Ugandan dust, and the smell of garbage which litters the roadsides. I had to make this trip four times this week. I have decided the experience gives me sensory data with which the better to enter imaginatively into Dante’s Inferno.
The first trip was on Monday for groceries, a weekly hire of driver and vehicle which has become necessarily routine. The next two trips were for a two day meeting of a Duke University sponsored “partnership to improve the Ugandan health system.” Mike Smith, the chair of health sciences at UCU, had been invited and, in turn, invited Jean Chamberlain, a Canadian OB/GYN who has made it her personal life’s mission to reduce maternal mortality in Uganda, and Edward, the Ugandan physician who heads an undergraduate program in health administration which is funded by another Canadian organization. As it turned out, I was the only nurse invited to the group.