Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Ugunda Fulbright Blog
Along the stone retaining wall outside our apartment is a row of snowy white daylilies. That is, I call them daylilies because of their leaf, stem and bud shapes. If not actually a daylily, they must be close kin to the daylily tribe. The flowers start out as a daylily bloom, a suggestion of a white trumpet on a slender stalk. But then the Designer of this flower changed His mind. Instead of the expected trumpet shape, the flower turns into a loose fringe of white, the petals going abruptly from wide to narrow in a graceful drape. I do not know which gives me more pleasure, the recognition of a familiar plant type or an unexpected variation in that type. This daylily illustrates my conviction that our appreciation of diversity needs to be anchored in an appreciation of unity. Otherwise, diversity becomes mere difference and mere difference seems to me to degenerate easily into competitive hostility among differences.

I carried these musings over unity and diversity with me in the experiences of the past couple of weeks. On October 8, Uganda held its annual Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast and the three of us were invited by the university to attend. Our driver was supposed to pick us up at 6:30 to be in time to start the 7:30 event. He showed up at 7:20 and then tried to make up the difference with speed through Kampala’s rush hour. Bob said it was the first time he’d actually felt scared with a Ugandan driver. I don’t know how many pedestrians, bicycles, bodas, or other vehicles we sent to the ditches but, so far as I know, none experienced injury more than the occupants of our van, scared witless by the time we arrived.

It was a large hotel auditorium with banquet tables set up and almost every seat taken. A smiling hostess directed the three of us to a table in the front of the room but by the time we searched and found some leftover breakfast in a hallway, other folks had taken our seats. We sat down at a table with a large “Reserved” sign on it next to the first one we’d be assigned to. I don’t know whose places we usurped but no one said anything and we kept those seats until the event ended. The legendary Ugandan courtesy came through again.

The first speaker, a member of Parliament, brought the audience to tears with his story, built around the hymn, “It is Well with My Soul.” He spoke his grief out over his young wife dying earlier this year, leaving himself and their small children behind, intertwining it with the heartbreaking circumstances of Horatio Spafford’s writing of this hymn. He could not honestly say it was well with his soul, he told the audience, because he could not explain why God had allowed to happen to him what had happened. Rather than “well with my soul,” he identified with an Internet respondent to this hymn that it was, instead, “hell with my soul.” Daylily plant or daylily bloom? The honesty of this man, who will find peace beyond explanation one day, set the tone for the event.

President Museveni, or “M7” as he is often called, got up to speak and we heard a political leader’s speech. He certainly deserves credit for many things working as well as they do in Uganda. The First Lady, Madame Janet, or “Mama Janet,” “the mother of Uganda,” as she was introduced, finished the event with one of her profound prayers. Mama Janet has the reputation for being a saintly woman, working tirelessly on behalf of her people. We felt privileged to have a close-up sight and sound of both of them.
This week finished the four week module for the new group of graduate students. They still have lots of papers to send to me but their class time is done. My load should lighten considerably since I’ve spent the last four weeks most of each day from Monday through Saturday with students. Now I will have class responsibilities on Friday and Saturday only. I baked a pineapple upside-down cake, guessing at the recipe, and invited them all to our apartment for the last set of presentations and to celebrate finishing the module. I won’t see them again until the January module. They will have their final exams for the September courses the first three days of January and then begin their new module. I had purchased a memory stick for each of them and loaded the exam review materials as well as electronic copies of all their course materials on their memory sticks.
Saturday, my second year students and I participated in a nurses’ “journal club” event at the national city hospital, the Mulago Hospital. As far as I know, all my students have had one kind of experience or another with this huge hospital. The hospital has both a nursing school and Makerere Medical School attached to it. A student who has worked as a nurse administrator at this hospital for many years took me on tour. We walked together through clean halls with lofty ceilings. Two men briskly rolled a long cart with a domed lid past us. The patient under that lid was going to a cool ward where none of them moves or will ever move on his own again. One might see such a thing in any hospital on the planet, a place for both arrivals and departures.

Agnes took me to the “casualty ward,” (one of the emergency rooms) and apologetically explained that they often run out of beds. Some patients were on the floor. “The floor is better than the streets,” I said. I was impressed with the quiet dignity of the place. The room was packed with sufferers, men, women, and children, many of them receiving IV fluids or blood. There was almost no sound except soft Ugandan voices here and there in minimal discussion of some issue. “We maximize our outcomes with our limited resources,” a student had told me some weeks ago. An attempt to maximize outcomes was in evidence everywhere. I left my tour feeling admiration for my fellow nurses who continue to give their best in conditions which challenge them beyond anything we can imagine.

A student later on told me an average of 80 babies are born each day in this hospital not counting “Caesars” or those with complications such as hypertension. Four nurse midwives attend these births. Whether it is four because of the shortage of midwives or because of the shortage of funds to hire more, I didn’t ask. Often it is a complex mix of both.
About 30 or so nurses participated in the journal club. After a very well done presentation on qualitative research by a nursing instructor from western Uganda, the group went through a journal article, section by section, critiquing it carefully. Uganda has world-class nurse minds, ready to do masters and doctoral level work as they get the opportunity. In addition to the Ugandan nurses, there was a Kenyan and a Pakistani nurse present who made lively contributions. I brought greetings from my city, Nashville, Tennessee, home of country music, and especially from the nurses in my city. Most especially from their nurse colleagues, the nursing faculty and staff at Belmont University. Those nurses to these.