Relaxation

 

After a busy week we headed off to Mutanda Lake Resort for a couple of nights. It is only an hours journey from us and would take much less time to get there if the roads were not so bad and so bumpy. Like Lake Bunyoni, it is a huge lake dotted with small islands.

Instead of bamboo domes, this time it is tents on stilts.

 

 

 

View from our room with the nearest 3 volcanoes in the background.

 

The small peak on the left is our favourite walk to the view of Lake Mutanda. Kisoro is over the other side of the hill.

 

 

 

 

It may not look like it but the photo below is one of a pair of otters in the water just below our room.

It has been good to have a break. Jackie left on Thursday and just before her leaving 'do' began, I had a message to say that the new person appointed to help with finances had got herself another job. Praise the Lord, she said......nope, it didn't seem too praiseworthy to me! The following day the guy who does our purchasing went AWOL. Apparently he does this occasionally....great!

Still, when all is said and done, things are going fine. It is important to keep local norms of behaviour at the forefront and not have western expectations of work ethic or reliability. Some people do have a strong work ethic etc and they are real gems.

The new washing machine arrived from Kampala but the buttons do not do what they say in the manual. For instance, it fills with water for the rinse cycle, comes up with an error saying there is no water in the machine, empties the water and beeps until you turn it off and manually put it on spin. A Samsung engineer in Uganda? No, the nearest is in South Africa and the Supermarket in Kampala are not interested. At least it works after a fashion!

Mike has been using the new medical equipment he bought in Kampala. He began by testing the iron levels of some of our children. Even the lad he picked as his control example turned out to be mildly anaemic. This reflects the poor diet here. This is sad and rather concerning. It is the problem of lack of protein - and our children get tuna and mince every week, whereas most community children get neither. We are also feeding them broccoli and spinach from our garden but maybe vegetables that grow so quickly here lack the essential minerals? Mike sees children as outpatients who are incredibly malnourished. He is thinking and discussing if there is some intervention we can offer that is practical and effective without making people dependent on us. If anyone reading this has ideas, they would be most welcome.

 

Highs and Lows

 

No power for 2 1/2 weeks then it came back.....for nearly 48 hours! Actually it is far less frustrating knowing you won't have power at all than having it coming and going at random times. For several days we had no water as well and that was hard. Still it puts it into perspective when you know that most people here don't have water or electricity ever. We have watched people toil up and down the steep hill to the lake with jerry cans on their heads. What right have we to complain if water doesn't come out of our taps for a while but complain, we do.

The night the power came back will stick in our minds. We were sitting in the candle light when a police car arrived. The power came back as Nurse Emily was walking towards the Medical Centre. It was a newborn baby found naked and abandoned in a banana plantation. He was still covered with grit and soil. He fought magnificently for several hours but his temperature was unrecordable when he arrived and even in the incubator, they couldn't get his temperature to rise very far. Eventually his lungs bled and we lost him. He had been outside for too long. We took him as one of ours and arranged his funeral. Festo, the carpenter made a coffin, Social Worker Annet got the paperwork done, Jackie went with the town clerk to find a burial spot, Leonard and James dug the grave, Mike led a short service at the grave. All very intimate and special but ultimately so very sad.

On a brighter note, Rosie returned from the UK but Emily leaves for good on Thursday. On Wednesday morning she and I will try and climb the hill for her to have one last look at the view of Lake Mutanda then in the afternoon we will have fun and games with the children. She will be sadly missed.

 

 

 

At the end of the month we say farewell to our Administrator Jackie. In traditional style for a big celebration we will kill and eat a pig. Meat is a rare luxury for most of our staff so it will be a treat for them. After the customary speeches the staff will perform traditional dances to drummed music.

 

 

Here are a selection of vegetables that have grown from seed since we arrived back in July. We have enough tomatoes to last 3 months.

 

The children are eating their first courgettes.

 

 

 

There will soon be carrots, broccoli, cabbage, cucumber,

leeks and there are a vast array of herbs. The speed of growth

is phenomenal. Strangely the rhubarb is not doing so well but

it is going to transplanted onto a mound of manure - of what

variety I am not sure, nor will I ask!

 

Powerless

 

Yet again we are without power but this time we know we are in for a long haul. Over a week ago the transformer was seen heading very slowly out of Kisoro for Kampala. We were informed it would take a week for them to decide if it was possible to fix it. The last time this happened there was no power for a month!!!! It is only our line that is affected so I am sitting in the Hotel with our equipment plugged into the wall. The problem with that is that there is now a power cut here also. Grrrr!

Coping without electricity is a nuisance but feasible. We were without water also for several days and that was harder. We got to the point we had to buy in bottled water to make up the baby feeds as it was deemed unsafe to give them boiled green water from the tanks. So we count our blessings that we have water and keep reminding ourselves that most others live permanently without electricity.

So we apologise that we cannot answer emails etc as well as we should.

Jackie, the Administrator, leaves at the end of the month. We announced a vacancy for a secretary at the English Service on Sunday. The Board this end was happy for me to have a Junior post to help in the office - I need someone who speaks Rufumbira as much as anything. One applicant has a post grad diploma in finance....wow! She has also worked in the Probation Office which is ideal. We are now debating whether to swap roles and appoint her to do the finance and I will run the office. She will be a more expensive option but very useful.

Moses, our new Uganda Nurse, also announced he was leaving in order to work with an American NGO at the Refugee camp. They can offer twice the salary so it is no surprise he wants to take up the offer. We have had a lot of interest for his post so that should not be hard to fill.

Apart from that, things are going well. Ivan has found his appetite but has now bloated with air and looks like Humpty Dumpty. Talk about one extreme to another! He also had an x-Ray last week as he was unable to lift his arm and was clearly in great pain. Mike was worried he had had his shoulder dislocated by someone lifting him up by his arm alone. He hadn't but the arm is still very sore. He certainly goes from one trauma to another.

Mike is in Kampala trying to get his Medical registration and the registration for the Medical Centre - both of which he was informed were ready to collect. He got the Postbus at 5.30 am on Thursday and arrived in Kampala at 4.30 pm. Not a journey I want to take. Sadly he has achieved nothing. Neither were ready so he has to stay until Monday and hope to get them then. To cap it all, he had his phone stolen on the way back to the Guest House. He is not a happy chappy!

I am now very low on power so will move to the Gorilla Junction cafe and see if they have electricity there.

It's all part of the African experience I keep saying to myself!

 

Lots of play

 

We now have a team of 6 with us and they are doing a wonderful job. John has been digging, making fences and attempting to bring sense to the finances. Carol is stationed in the medical centre as she has taken over from Rosie for a month while Rosie is in the UK. Karen and Andrea are doing great stuff in training the Carers in interaction and play.

 

 

The staff training sessions mean that Debbie, Beth and Sue are left literally holding the babies!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here the staff are putting their training into practice with hilarious results.

 

 

 

Sunday afternoon ended with a sing-a-long. We will now endlessly have to endure Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes sung to the tune of London's Bridge is Falling Down! It doesn't matter how often you sing it with them the right way, they revert back. It has the potential for being very irritating!!

 

 

 

We were concerned we might have had one of our children developing mumps this week. This could have been dreadful as none of the babies are immunised against it. As a precaution, Eva was isolated immediately and although she has big swellings on either side of her neck, they have not developed further.

Ivan is still very ill. His skin is peeling off and although he is taking milk he is refusing food. Yesterday I smeared some marmite on his lips which he did eventually lick off. At least a few vitamins went in. He is tolerating the goat's milk which is a relief but the goat is not really producing enough milk. Ivan's face and limbs are still very swollen so he has a long way to go before being on the road to recovery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Giving Away.

 

 

Two particularly interesting things happened this week. Firstly, on Wednesday we met Alfred at the border with Rwanda and Samuel tried his standing frame. It provoked such a lot of interest from people there that I don't know how we've got a photo without interested bystanders. Samuel was very excited and very happy. I have to say...it was a perfect fit and enables him to stand without collapsing which should help strengthen his legs. The VSO person who found funding for his Dad Alfred to come and help make it, has found funding for him to continue to come and work with us for a while. If he only lived our side of the border he would have made a great permanent member of the team.

 

 

The second thing was our invitation to the Giving Away Ceremony for the Bishop's daughter. This is when the Groom's family comes to ask for the girl and she then goes with them and gets married in their community.

It starts with a meal. Under the pineapple is matoke - boiled green bananas. I am still the only foreigner we know who likes it. Then clockwise it is pineapple, rice, potato, watermelon, cabbage, chicken and a chunk of beef. This comes with a bottle of coke or sprite.

 

 

After the meal we sit in the tents....for a few hours!!....waiting for the groom's side to arrive and then eat. I was wondering what they had put in the icing to stop it melting in the hot sun. Maybe they are not real?

 

 

 

 

Every half hour we were entertained with an energetic burst of colourful dancing accompanied by drums and singing.

 

 

After the two family sides have talked across the compound and the Bride Price agreed upon, the girl eventually arrives with her attendants. She is dressed according the culture of her father's tribe. She has to stay looking sad as she is leaving her family. When gifts are exchanged she leaves to get changed again.

 

 

She comes back dressed for her future family's cultural traditions. She then serves her new family and leaves with them. The actual wedding was to take place 2 days later further north in Uganda.

In all it took 7 hours!!!

Young Ivan spent a night with us again. He had become seriously dehydrated as he wasn't able to keep anything down so we had to spend the night with a syringe trying to get water in, 1 ml at a time. He kept it all down which was good. He had further blood tests and a chest x-ray which showed nothing conclusive. However it has been decided to start him on TB treatment as that most closely fits his symptoms and lack of ability to put on weight.

The new CPAP machine has come in great use and Mike finds it very reassuring to have it for those babies who struggle with breathing. Power cuts still come and go as does the water but we do have more rain now. So next is the problem of drying the washing. John, your big ball of string has been temporarily utilised as washing line in the carpentry workshop - a big timber shed. The ball of string is the size of a football so goes a long way.

On Tuesday a team of 4 join another 2 volunteers already here. We will then start stimulation and play training in earnest.

 

 

 

 

Oh, what a night.......!

We are now at the beginning of the wet season which is marked by ferocious thunder storms which will last for about 2 weeks and then the rains will begin in earnest. This last week we had an extremely scary night. We had never heard thunder so loud and so continuous and the lightening was non-stop and overhead for some time. At one point there was an horrendous bang followed by the fizzing of live electricity. Each of us on site thought our house was hit. We were already in a power cut but I could hear the generator and there were no screams or shouts so I presumed - thankfully - that all were safe. In the morning the lights in half of the medical centre were not working and the only other damage was the collapse of the play dome. The metal stakes at the edges and corners were completely bent. The Gateman thought a flash had hit the ground near there and then arched over his small hut.

We have often been warned about being out in thunder storms. I am told that people here get struck by lightening and killed on an almost daily basis at this time. The deaths are reported on the morning radio. A lad was struck and killed on the field behind us last week. I felt sorry for anyone who needed to be out in the storm this night. We will not be blasé about storms in the future.

 

 

 

 

Water cuts continue too and we, like the locals, will welcome the rain. Not very British, I know.

On another note, we have welcomed two new ones into the village. Benson arrived aged 4 months after his mother died from TB, we think. Mujewamana, (I am calling her Moogee for short) arrived yesterday from across the border in the Congo. Her mother was eating porridge two hours after delivery and suddenly died. An embolis? Muji is very pretty and doing well so far.

The little lad that came to the medical centre in an extreme state of malnutrition and dehydration, survived and is doing well. It will be a while before he will be strong enough to leave then we will support him and his mother in the community for a further six months before reviewing their future. We have to ensure we don't increase their vulnerability by giving hand-outs with no long term survival solution of their own.

It's evening and another power cut. Mike has a temperature and feels very sick. It could be anything or nothing so we hope it passes before morning.

 

Mike attempts to save the day for Kisoro!

 

Power cuts continue on an almost daily basis. Worse than that are the water cuts. After two days without water, Mike was not amused. He spent half of his day off going between the water and power companies. Power co. said the water co. had not paid their bill so they had cut them off. Water said they had paid it that day. Power said they wanted to see the receipt. Water said power should send someone to see it. Power said water should bring it to them. Water eventually agreed. Mike witnessed power seeing the bank receipt. Power agreed to turn the pumps back on to bring the water through. We then had a power cut for several hours but the water came back on during the night. Phew!

Staff are bedding into their new roles and mostly adapting very well. We have had one today who refused to help bring in clothes when it was thought it was going to rain - because 'it's not on my job description'. We shall obviously have to specify in writing they need to be flexible and help others when necessary!

Last night Mike was up 3 times with a 2 week old with pneumonia. Tonight we have another very sick arrival. He is 2 months old and very severely malnourished and dehydrated. It will be touch-and-go whether he survives or not. As our only driver, Mike then has to take Doreen (one of our cerebral palsy girls) to see a visiting eye specialist very early in the morning. She has a severe squint. The Surgeon is arriving this afternoon with the hopes of starting performing surgery tomorrow.....no waiting list problems here!

I had thought I was coming here to work with children not goats! I have had to read up about them because our female is not producing much milk and we need to know what to do. I now know all sorts of interesting facts.....15 pawpaw seeds in a small bottle of water is a natural deworming medicine. Don't know if it works on humans though!

I haven't had much chance of taking photos lately. Take pity on these three girls who have to hand wash all these clothes and repeat it every day. We are all agreed we need two good washing machines. We have a machine but it is very old and sounds horrendous on a spin cycle. We do one load of medical centre washing per day and one load of bibs. They used to hand wash them also - there can be at least 90 per day.

 

Although you may not need to wait to see the eye surgeon, the same cannot be said about getting money out of the ATM. The queues have been awful. Apparently the Government had not paid employees for 3 months and now can pay them. The result was that the ATM would run out of money in no time. At times we have stood in queues of 30+ in front, only to find the numbers expanding in front of us as others joined their friends. We would then leave despondently. Mike waited yesterday and got to be second in line....only to find the machine then ran out of money. Frustrating! He returned late at night and was successful.

I am writing this by candle light again. The weather is beginning to change and we should be in the wet season by next week. Once the water table in Rwanda is higher then the power should be better....or so I'm told. I hope so.