Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
Emily Dickinson’s (1830-1886) poetry is for me a gradual dazzle. This one came to mind as I’ve taken retrospective tours of the Ugandan nursing graduate students and my experiences with philosophy and theory over four weeks in January. Do and should nursing theories give priority to a received philosophy of science or a perceived philosophy of science? Which one fits best with a Christian worldview? What exactly is a worldview and what could be especially Christian about it? What are the logical parameters of differing worldviews? Is logic a valid criterion by which we should evaluate any worldview or theory and on what grounds do we recognize the validity of logic itself?
This past Friday night, I dreamed I was a pizza box. My consciousness resided in part of the box lid; I felt the air move as my cardboard face fell downwards. Mefloquine can do that. I had forgotten to take it in the morning and rather than skip another dose as I inadvertently had the week before, I took it just before bedtime with consequences among those the inserts predict: vividly bizarre dreams.
We hope you had a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, family and friends!
“I would teach for free but they have to pay me to grade papers.” This comment from a teacher friend was naturalized long ago into my habitual outlook on things and without any difficulty whatsoever. I have been and continue to be grading, or “marking” as they call it here, papers, what seems like hundreds of them, weeks on end now. I know that “hundreds” is a hallucination of a paper-fevered brain but there have been and are being lots. Grading graduate nursing papers, all of which have been written by students for whom English is not their first language, has turned out to be not that different from grading nursing papers by students in the U.S. for whom English is their mother tongue. Having to grade the papers turns out to be our students’ revenge for us assigning so many of them.
What did I expect the most trusted and skilled exorcist in the Mukono area to look like? Perhaps a fierce intensity out of the eyes? Perhaps either wildly careless or flamboyant clothing? In any case, his speech should be full of emotionally charged religious utterances, something befitting regular contact with the world of demons and evil spirits. That world, which few Westerners are likely to take seriously, the world relegated to a tiny minority of secretive devotees in the West, is taken very seriously in Uganda and by the vast majority of Ugandans. When it is taken that seriously by the locals, expatriates do well to attend seriously to it as well. Here is a not unusual bit in another of Uganda’s English newspapers, the 9 November, 2009, issue of The Daily Monitor:
The non-verbal expression, “eh,” is most consistently noticeable in North America among English speakers dwelling near and around the U.S.-Canadian border. It shares company with such verbal expressions as “you bet!” a response so characteristic of the area that when an agricultural expert from Minnesota answered a question with it recently, I couldn’t help but smile with memories of miles of northern forests and lakes riding in on the coattails of “you bet!”
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.
As Dad and I walk down to the track most mornings around 6:30 AM for exercise, we meet many elementary school children in neat uniforms headed for school. They walk purposefully and soberly but their faces break out into smiles as we greet them. “Good morning,” Dad says, “God bless you. God loves you. Have a good day at school.” And they beam with pleasure, receiving the gift as Dad intended to give it.
“Does the U.S. have a big problem with culture?” asked Eva, her small face full of concern. We had just finished reading and discussing Wellman’s chapter on “The Diverse Learning Needs of Students” in the 2009 Billings’ textbook on Teaching in Nursing. The “problem” in this chapter (pp. 21-22) is expressed partly as a catalogue of failures, failure to recruit sufficient minority nursing students and nursing faculty, failure to adequately support the minority student, etc. “Well, children in the U.S. go to similar schools,” I said, “and almost all of us speak the same language. We do have some cultural issues but I don’t think we have a ‘big problem’ with culture. What about Uganda?”
Members who could from UCU’s health sciences department spent the weekend in a retreat at Sipi Falls near the Kenya border. That I survived this experience is testament to a God in heaven. It all began innocently enough with Faith, one of those splendidly capable young women such as Belmont’s school of nursing has in Karen and Heather, telling me “we would do a little walking.” Faith had organized the whole thing, all the meals and the stay at the Crow’s Nest at Sipi Falls. Why that name didn’t make me suspicious I’ll never know.
Edward, a physician, who is the administrator of a MBA in healthcare. Francis, one of the instructors for their BS in community health, an important non-nursing health profession in developing countries. Clarissa and Selah (pronounced Sell-ah) from the MPH in maternal-infant health. Mike told me it’s actually an MPHL (MPHLeader) degree, open to anyone with a previous bachelor’s degree and very popular; it has UCU’s largest enrollment for a health profession. Tom was our driver. And finally, Grace and the other Faith, two of my MNS students and also faculty for the RN-BNS program. Here’s a photo of our first meal stop, lunch on Friday. I had beans and rice with greens, all delicious.
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.
The hour of reckoning, the day of doom, must elicit a look on the human face which is among those things transcending place or time. We arrived at Uganda Christian University at the end of the first week of final exams and just before the beginning of the second week when pen to paper or mouse to screen stand in as prototypes for that Apocalyptic opening of books.
That Ireland has no snakes is hardly more remarkable than that Germany has few enough flies and mosquitoes to make the leaving open of windows and doors during pleasant weather a practical option. The meeting of wind with curtain, the outdoor garden with indoor polished wood unimpeded by inelegant mesh screens, is one of the pleasures of being in Germany, ranking behind German bread but, for me anyhow, considerably before the autobahn.
Dr. Ruby Dunlap, associate professor in the School of Nursing, was recently selected as a 2009-10 U.S. Fulbright Scholar for Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically Uganda. Dunlap will be a guest lecturer in nursing at Uganda Christian University which is located 23 kilometers outside of Kampala, Uganda. She will also be conducting research on how standards of nursing are adapted to austere conditions.
Cambodia meant many things; a new land, a new culture, and a new people. The part I will miss most deeply is the relationships formed with the many people with whom we had the chance to become acquainted and even build meaningful friendships. Sunday was our last real chance to say goodbye to those who helped make the trip a memorable one. At church on Sunday morning the congregation honoured the Belmont group by presenting us with beautiful Cambodian silk scarves not only to commemorate our time in Cambodia but also to commend the work we’d performed. The irony of the situation was that the exchange occurred inversely; those truly deserved of commendation were the ones who accepted us into their lives whole heartedly and showed us an unforgettable time.