Time flies in Masindi

This week began with a meeting on HIV at a local hotel. It was an important meeting with national facilitation but called at 2 days notice which is often the way in Uganda. I received a phone call from Chris the clinic lead on Saturday afternoon saying that we had been asked to provide a 30 minute power point presentation on HIV treatmen for monday morning. So we spent 3 hours on saturday preparing a presntation.
I arrived for the nine oclock start at 8.45 as the hotel is just down the road from our house.There was no power , no computer and no projector so no hope of power point. The rest of the delegates arrived over the next hour and the meeting began at 10.45. This is a fairly typical Ugandan arrangeent. Time is very flexible here and you have to adjust or you will go mad.Meetings and workshops are very popular here. Attendees receive a lunch and a travel fee. Sometimes there is an actual attendance fee as well. With salaries being so low people rely on these fees to top up their take home pay. Unfortunately it means that people will attend almost anything wheter it is relevant or not.Their is another workshop this week on palliative care in HIV which I want to attend to meet people from the nearest hospice which is in HOima. Palliative care is a neglectd discipline here.
The child with a cleft palate turned up this week looking very frail. The mother who has 5 other children had obviously been unable to feed the child. I admitted him to the paedriatic ward for naso gastric feeding. Unfortunately the ward had nothing to feed the child with so we had to give a little bit of money to buy milk.Hopefully the child will pull through and the father will agree to let it go to Kampala. By coincidence a nurse missionary passed through Masindi this week and stopped at Court VIew for lunch. She offered to come back to Masindi and transport the child to Kampala if they agree. Networks and chance meetings are important here.
Maggie as flown off to Zanzibar with Sallie and Denise two friends from Masindi.When you are this far from home you might as well make the most of it.
We were reminded of home this week when the Hull Journal arrived complete with articles about friends we have left behind.The journal is about as far away from life here as you can imagine but it looks great on the coffee table!