Right then, one last post about this last trip north before I move on to new topics. A random assortment of things I want to talk about:

A picture of the kitchen so as not put any wrong ideas in your head.

• A few interesting critters joined us this time. A little black snake was found slithering around our “kitchen” at breakfast time the first morning. I’m proud to say I was part of the killing of the snake. (If being a spectator counts as being part.  At least I didn’t run out like a few of the others.) It was determined postmortem that it was a venomous type and beaten a few more times for good measure. There was also found a venomous (with fangs possibly!) centipede in our sleeping quarters. It was not successfully killed so we are still on the lookout for it. This cat was trapped just a few days ago not too far from Nakayot.

• I just like this picture of Lowoke sitting with these kids in our camp.  He is one of the CLIDE guys. He is maintenance man, translator, driver and anything else that needs doing. Like loading and unloading hundreds of pounds of stuff and people into and out of vehicles, getting us unstuck on really muddy roads. Speaking of roads here are just a few pictures to give you just a little glimpse of trying to drive out to the villages during the rainy season.

I think this is Val stuck in the mud. I'm not sure because I don't really believe my eyes. I'm still not convinced it is possible. 

We are headed into that?!

• Want to write a minute about the hospital in Matany too. It is an Italian Catholic run hospital. It is easily the best in Karamoja (in most of Uganda I think) but it is out in the middle of nowhere- which is the middle of where the people who need it most are, I guess. At 5 in the morning we headed straight to pediatrics and were directed to a big room situated right between the two large wards. The room had a long table running the length of the room with 3 nurses working with about 10 babies (and their mothers) at the table. We added our baby to the table where the nurses put in her line and drew blood. As we tied up two nurses for several minutes the number of mothers and babies waiting kept increasing. I suspect it was morning meds and all of these babies were getting IV meds.  There were maybe 40 multidose vials on the tables and the 3^rd nurse keep drawing from various ones, mixing and diluting as she tried to keep up with all those who kept handing her their charts. While we were waiting for the doctor to arrive I took a quick walk through the wards. One was clearly new. There were 20 stainless steel metal cribs (all but one was occupied) and 14 beds (all full). Mothers and grandmothers were sleeping on the floor on mats.  The room was very clean but all cement. The cribs and beds were broken up into sections divided by chest high walls. So you could look across the whole big ward and see everything but if you were laying down there was a little privacy. The older ward was almost exactly the same but more kids per bed. Many  had  two children in each bed and most had blood or fluids hanging. Two beds had big old oxygen concentrators next to them. I counted about 6 nurses (or medical staff of some sort) and more than 70 pediatric patients in the two wards. But it was clean. The staff was quick and took us seriously. The doctor arrived shortly after the nurses called him. I really think his diagnosis is crap (oh yeah, the reason I was at Matany is here) but he didn’t know what was wrong with the child and needed to save face with us and his staff. But I pray as labs come back and as time passes the real cause will become clear or not and she'll recover without any known cause.

•  We stopped at a road side accident on the way back to Soroti somewhere between Iriri and Katakwi. I think everyone was speaking Ateso so we most likely were on this side of the border. I’d considered stopping at accidents several times in the past, however I usually had a good reason not to.  But this time I offered to help as I had lots of folks in the car that could assist and I knew right where my medical bag was. A woman was kneeling on the side of the road blood running off her head and face and dripping on the ground. She still had her crying baby tied on and was looking dazed and mumbling incoherently.  While the other CLIDE members joined the large crowd forming, trying to figure out what had happened, I started to clear away the blood to figure out that I was looking at. We took the baby off (who seemed fine thankfully!) and decided she just had a couple of superficial scalp lacs and some facial abrasions that we all bleeding quite a bit. However, she was as drunk as a skunk. Made it hard to rule out head injury but did make me feel much better about the altered mental status. I guess an oncoming car had forced the bike off the road. The woman was sitting on the back. The car was long gone and the driver of the bike was almost as drunk as the woman but only had minor abrasions on his hands. We helped the woman clean up her head and face, scrubbing dirt out and cutting off some hair but there was nothing so deep that it needed suturing and with a little pressure the bleeding stopped. I considered encouraging them to head to a clinic but to what ends? There would be no one there who could do anything about a potential head injury, no more complete assessment that what I could do and certainly no radiology.  I chuckled a little to myself as the thought of a c-collar then passed out some Motrin and prayed for the best.

I have to see how my week is going to pan out but there is a slim chance I’ll head back up to Karamoja this coming weekend. I’d love to go but I feel like I have a few things on my plate and I don’t want to neglect other responsibilities. Speaking of neglecting other responsibilities, that was far more writing than I was going to do today. Signing off….