By the time you read this, Kate will be back in Kampala, Uganda, in Eastern Africa. She flew back last week after a three and one-half week vacation at home, visiting family and friends. Her parents managed to get their whole family together for a weekend of camping in Northeast Ohio. It will be another year till Kate returns home.
Thank goodness for the Internet, e-mail and blog sites. It’s a wonderful way to keep in touch, despite all the bad things you hear about the internet and web sites.
This year Kate is again back with Case Western, CWRU - Uganda Research Collaboration, working on TB Research at the Mulago Hospital TB Clinic in Kampala, the country’s capital. This year she is funded by a Howard Hughes fellowship.
TB and HIV are prevalent in Uganda. Many of the TB patients also have HIV so the aim is to bring down the occurrence of both health problems. Since the 1990s, Uganda has brought down the incidence of HIV from 30 percent of the population to approximately 6 percent. Kate has found purpose in her work.
She noted that doctors in the Third World have to be mechanics and technicians also. She wrote: “My team put in a lot of chest tubes, and each time it involved rigging up tubing and buckets and tape and everything around that  might  work  to  drain fluid out of someone’s sick chest.”
Uganda has a population of 28,816,000. It’s a land of contrasts … the very rich and the very poor. As stated before, the rich build high fences around their homes. Life expectancy at birth is m/f: 48/51. Healthy life expectancy is m/f: 42/44.
Every country in the world has its favorite foods or foods for survival. In Uganda, bananas are important in almost everything. One staple, Matooke, is made of green bananas, steamed and mashed. Kate’s favorite Uganda food is beans with the ground nut sauce. They call them “g-nuts”, which are kind of like peanuts. They are ground up to make a paste or purple sauce, which is poured over the beans.
Kate enjoys going to the “pork joints,” where they serve chunks of pork on skewers. She said you can buy colorful fruits and vegetables at the outdoor markets. The tomatoes, mangoes and pineapple are very good and the avocados are big and nice and ripe and cheap. They have lots of “greens”. She doesn’t know what they are called but she eats them. They have rice and a root vegetable called Cassava. Their sweet potatoes are white and not as good as Ohio sweet potatoes. They are dryer. She eats at the canteens or lunch places, where you can eat for 50-75 cents. There they also serve a stew, which is quite starchy with a little bit of fish, beef, goat or chicken. The regular Kampala restaurants have food priced about the same as here.
Some other observations Kate has made about life in Uganda are: They celebrate Valentines Day in a big way … they really dig it. It’s very romantic, with lots of red and flowers.
They do celebrate Halloween by going dancing, etc. Some dress in costumes.
As far as their daily clothing … the professionals downtown mostly wear western dress. Other than that they wear native dress or a combination, which is anything they can afford to put together. The traditional African dress is the gomesas, made of bright African prints of flowers, etc. and a headdress, which might consist of a wrapped scarf.
Their taxis in Kampala are bicycles, mopeds or cars. Kate does have a car to drive back and forth to work but driving is kind of crazy.
Electronics and appliances are high priced because they have to be imported.
Groceries that have to be imported are high also.
Another thing … some people engage in goat fighting.
They did have an uprising in Kampala this spring. Kate was at work and managed to go home via a route to keep her out of the area. Kate’s Dad read about it in the newspaper and sent her an e-mail. The protesters stoned to death two people of Asian origin during the demonstration against a Ugandan-Asian company that wants to grow sugar cane in the country’s largest national forest. Two others were also killed in the rioting and they vandalized a Hindu temple. They cried out “We are tired of Asians … They should go back to their land.”
Uganda is mostly Christian with Islam being the next popular religion. The Christians and Muslims get along OK.
Christmas is celebrated with big family parties and attending church, where the music is very beautiful. Kate and her friends went to Tanzania and the island of Mafia for Christmas. They spent much time on the beach, where she read at least three books. Her parents had sent her a small, decorated Christmas tree for her apartment and they opened their gifts on the island of Mafia.

Look for more of Kate’s African Adventure next week, when they take a trip to Greece and Turkey.