We went to work with the Army again this morning. Val worked with the cattle, sheep and goats mostly and Liz was called over to help with a dog that had been castrated by a Ugandan using no anesthesia or suture! It was hemorrhaging profusely. By the time she got there a Ugandan vet student working with the US Army had found a suture kit and had the bleeding fairly well controlled. Liz did a spay and a neuter on the tailgate of the army pickup with the vet student watching then helped the student perform 2 fairly bloodless castrations complete with anesthesia! The student was pleasant and bright and she did a great job after Liz showed her how to do it properly. She joked she was sent to Karamoja to work as penance for bad behavior in school!
Next we went the village of Matany where CLIDE has a number of street children in boarding schools that they are sponsoring. They were children who were originally from this area but had ended up in Kampala begging on the streets. A church in Portland, Oregon, has provided a sum of money to provide for very basic needs until individual sponsors are found for each child. Of the ~150 children about 90 now have sponsors. Julia wanted to sponsor a girl in primary school and we got to meet her. We had trouble finding her at first as there was no one there by the name we were given. Here when one is baptized in church one takes on a Christian name if they don’t already have one. Julia’s sponsor child had been baptized and took the name Esther, which is also Julia’s middle name. That was very cool. Esther got to meet Esther. Nikiru Esther is 13 and is in 4th grade. Ages are often mixed in grades here as school is not mandatory and not all children have the opportunity to start school at the same time, if at all.
If anyone is interested in sponsoring a child please let us know and we can put you in contact with the appropriate people. It varies from $150 to $500 a year depending on the grade level of the child (primary to university). Generally if you start sponsoring a child at a certain level you continue with the same child as they move up the grades and possibly into university. The money pays for school fees, room and board, uniform, shoes, supplies and whatever else the child needs.
In the afternoon we returned to Val’s village of Kangole and did 6 more surgeries, including 1 of Val’s dogs. Liz got to do another dental extraction, this time with rudimentary dental tools, and take off a skin tumor. Julia and Heidi also go to perform their first IV catheters and both did very well.
We decided to stay with Val and Heidi in one of the concrete walled, round huts here. When I asked Val why hers were concrete, not mud or all thatch like most of the others we saw, she replied “bullets don’t penetrate concrete as well as the other building materials around”. We felt much safer with that explanation.
No comments:
Post a Comment