Blog 2 Jinja, Uganda

Blog 2-Jinja, Uganda

February 15, 2019

Hello to all!

Here we are after almost a month in Jinja, Uganda.  We are slowly melting with the temperature, every day, in the high 80’s. As we told you before, we are lucky to live on the shores of Lake Victoria since the afternoon breezes start blowing around 3 in the afternoon and we can cool off. We have gotten used to the Muezzin singing 5 times a day although at night the stray dogs howl with the Muezzin as he sings the night prayers, waking everyone in the neighborhood.

This week we went out in the field with Rays of Hope to see how the community nurses treat patients in their homes.  The ride was long and dusty arriving in villages where there is no electricity, no running water and mostly mud or brick one room huts.  People are extremely poor and the sick and dying have little hope. Rays of Hope provides some hope; they provide palliative care to those that would otherwise just suffer and die. We witnessed the incredible work of two RN’s, Joanita and Allan.  They are well qualified, sensitive, caring and kind to patients.  They listen attentively and consult with one another on each case.  Getting from place to place is difficult, the roads are bad, and far.  The patients are mostly quite sick, on this day we saw about 8 patients, a couple were really sick, one older woman with HIV who has now developed stomach ulcers so she could not eat, which meant she could not take her ARV’s because they made her nauseous.  The other was a young (30) woman with cervical cancer, she had been diagnosed late and now was complaining of pain in her stomach and back, she was extremely weak, in constant pain and unable to walk or eat. She is too weak to go to the hospital for treatment, so they gave her additional morphine and prayer for now.  At this point I noticed the male nurse was not around. I went to look for him and found him at the car with his head down.  We talked and it turned out that sometimes he is just overwhelmed by all the suffering and must take a little break. He can’t show the patient how he feels so he must go to the care to hide his feelings and recover. On the other hand, there were a couple of patients who were really doing well, one was a woman who had her eye and tumors removed a while back and although she had been really sick, she appeared fine and was really beautiful. The other was an elderly man who had severe back and leg pain, nothing could be done so he is kept comfortable with drugs and well taken care of by his wife.

People have a hard time believing how old Peter and I are, no one here lives as long as we, even those that seem healthy. Life is hard and medical care is difficult to get. Life expectancy is much lower than in western developed countries. And in many cases people have never seen anyone our age.

As we told you before we have rented a car, Peter is a great driver but driving here is unbelievably difficult.  You must have eyes in the front, back and sides of your head.  With the motorbikes, cars, trucks, bicycles and buses big and small coming at you from all directions.  The only rule of the road is there are no rules of the road.

Peter is doing lots of photographing.  Many of his photos will be used on the websites of both organizations we are working with.  He just keeps moving a mile a minute, teaching photography and writing classes, mentoring staff, setting up Skype for the St. Francis staff, etc. And on top of all that he drums at the morning prayer at Rays of Hope, he loves it.  I on the other hand do not move quite as fast and take my time with reviews of areas of both organizations as well as chart organization.

We continue to enjoy our work and find the people easy to work with and assist.  We have made many friends and continue to see the old friends as well. We get bagels at the Saturday market and put them in the freezer, we have a small fridge but bagels are important, so they get the whole freezer, Priorities! We continue to enjoy the wonderful fresh pineapple, watermelon, mangos and many other fresh vegetables. We have a young 24 year old woman who cleans our house and the other day we gave her some chocolate for her children, she told us they never had chocolate before and when they tasted it her 6 year old said with a big grin on his face, “Mommy is this what chocolate tastes like?” He loved it.  We also met a beggar on the street who asked us to buy him bread, we did but when we came out of the store he had disappeared.  A couple of days later, this same man approached us but he was not begging, he was selling dust pans and brushes, so of course we bought one of each. Jinja is a small town and you meet people on the street everyday that you have seen before.

OK for now  Hope you enjoy this blog and accompanying photos.

Love to all,

Mr. Katende and Madam

(P&H)