Talk at the Nurses Station

Friday 15 August

So the trend on most wards at Rubaga is that everything gets done in the morning and nothing really happens in the afternoon unless an admission comes. Nursing here is really task oriented. There’s not really much assessment going on, certainly no checking iv’s or fluids every 2 hours. Meds get given once during the day, dressings get done once/day. If you’ve done all of the things that the doctor has ordered (or at least most of them) then you sit and twiddle your thumbs until your time is up, or you go and wander the halls of the hospital and chat with friends (even if there’s no other staff on the ward). It takes a bit of getting used to, and I’m not sure I want to get used to it.

Friday afternoon, Sister Claris had gone off to talk to someone on another unit so it was me and a handful of nursing students from a variety of schools. One of the guys says to me “so muzungu, where are you from?” I took a deep breath and smiled and chuckled and said “my NAME is Heidi.” Everyone laughed and he repeated my name. Then he tries again, “but really, muzungu, where are you from?” “Really, my name is Heidi. How about if I asked you ‘baganda, how are you?” He repeats my name. “There you go. Now what was it that you asked?”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from America.”
“Ah, America. Now, do you have these tropical diseases in America?”
We discussed that no, we don’t have malaria in America but we do have infectious diseases. They were surprised to hear that we have TB and HIV “in our place.”
“Now, do you have this malnutrition?”
“We don’t have it like you have it here. We don’t have malnutrition from lack of food, but we do have it in people that choose not to eat because they want to be thin.”
They kind of laughed and then said, “we have some of that too.”

Then we moved to politics…the same student asked, “Have you rebuilt that building that Saddam Hussein bombed?”…I smiled and said, “well, no, no we haven’t. I think there are plans for a new building but I’m not sure if they have started building it.” I didn’t really want to get into the minor details that it was planes not a bomb and that it wasn’t really Saddam Hussein. We moved on to something else not nearly as interesting.

Earlier in the afternoon, one of the nurses asked me what clan I was…
“You mean here in Uganda?”
“No, in your place.”
“In America, we don’t really have clans like you do here.”
“So you eat everything?”
“Um, there isn’t anything I’m not allowed to eat really…” slightly confused I replied.
“Here, if you’re the clan of the goat, you don’t eat goat.” She informed me. I’d never heard anything like this before. Since I’ve wondered if she was just pulling my leg.
“So, what clan are you?” I asked.
“Small monkey” she replied.
“So you and your clan don’t eat small monkeys?”
She shook her head no. Then the phone rang and she actually answered it.