That’s what the last couple of weeks have been, a breather. As with any travel experience there have been high’s and low’s but I think a good way to describe the time as a whole is as a breather. Being in Bundi is kind of like swimming – not bad, in fact quite fun but definitely requires work and effort and has it’s fair share of challenges…and leaving the district for an extended period of time is like coming up for air – still requires work and effort, but also involves rest and life giving oxygen that enables you to continue on when you put your head back under and continue with your stroke…kind of a good analogy if I do say so myself, but maybe I stole it from somewhere…surely I didn’t come up with it on my own.
In any case the photos below are a few of the noteable images from the last 2 weeks. Let’s see if I can describe a little more about all we’ve done.
• “We” really refers to Sarah and Pat and I.
• Right after I posted last (“R&R”) Pat and I went up to see Mukidi. A little history: John Mukidi was a bed ridden, elderly neighbor of the Myhre’s who was dearly loved by their family, Pat, and many others throughout the history of the mission. Two weeks previously I’d attempted to replace a suprapubic catheter by lantern light at 9pm that had “come out” earlier in the day. Scott had placed it a few days before in the theatre at the Health Center. Needless to say I was unsuccessful, despite the valiant effort of my fearless assistants Pat and Sarah, and Pat took him to Bundibugyo hospital the next day to have it surgically replaced. Then a week later I returned to his bedside to remove the stitches in his abdominal incision and change the dressing around the tube. Friday, I’d stopped by to see him around mid-day, but he was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him. When Pat and I went to see him together, later in the afternoon, he was still asleep, and it was clear he was spending most of his time this way as the week had gone by. He was no longer talking much at all, barely opening his eyes at all. Pat and I talked about the cultural issues surrounding end of life care and choices families make and about the use/side effects of Morphine and so forth, and then when Pat asked, the older of his two wives made it very clear she did not want to give him any of the liquid morphine they’d been given from a previous hospital stay. Pat stayed the night with the family and we left the next morning.
• We took off around 10 or 11am on Saturday May 10. I drove to Fort Portal (he he he) since Pat hadn’t slept much, and we continued on after Fort to Kingfisher West, a hotel in Queen Elizabeth National Park where we spent a glorious first night of R&R. We arrived just in time for sunset, a gin & tonic, and a lovely dinner with Katy and her mom who were staying in the banda next to ours much to our surprise. Just before bed I took the most glorious piping hot shower – I had to force myself to get out in case I was cheating some other guest out of their gloriously hot shower. But it was the kind of hot shower where you get into bed and your body is still retaining the warmth of the hot water…sooooo nice since it was considerably cooler than Bundi already at this point in our travels.
• The next morning after a leisurely breakfast as we looked out over the park, we left and drove south to Lake Bunyonyi near the border of Rwanda, in the Kabale district. We took a small motor boat to Bushara Island. The Island holds a camp with cabins and tents, a restaurant which prepares all of your meals, canoes and a walking trail around the island, lots of birds and the highlight of the week was the rope swing (see photos below!) which we all did on Thursday, our last full day on the Island. Otherwise I did a lot of sleeping, reading and writing and a little card playing…but not a whole lot else! It was a very relaxing 5 days! I read a book while we were there called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by a guy whose name I can’t remember, but is a writer for the New Yorker and it’s a great book about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. I would highly recommend it.
...I’m going to go ahead and post this and write more tomorrow hopefully…but pretty much there you have week 1…
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