This past week has found us continually busy. Ann has been perfecting her role as study coordinator while Grant has been doing some grunt work - the always exciting data entry. Honestly, I am just happy to be useful. Tomorrow I will start sitting in with a group that does neuro-cognitive exams so that I might learn how to perform them on the patients enrolled in our study. Once I figure them out I'll be tasked with figuring out the specifics including time, place and interpretation. Nice to finally get things moving though.
Wednesday night we attended another basketball game at the YMCA. It is now the playoffs and the top 4 teams have advanced into two best of 5 series. Our team is the Falcons as a friend of ours at the IDI plays for them. It was an exciting game involving two free throws to put the Falcons up by one with about 10 seconds left. The other team got the ball down the court pretty quickly and one of their players nailed a somewhat ill-advised pull up three to win the game. We believe there was time left on the clock, but fans rushed the court and the refs just kind of said "game over". The clock is only visible to the half of the court that we weren't sitting on, so I guess we'll never know the truth. That has left the Falcons down 0-2 in the series, although they picked up a victory on Saturday night. I love going to basketball games here, although it's too bad they don't have a nice gym (like nearly all high schools in our country) to play in. The outdoor court leaves something to be desired. Anyone ever witnessed a rain delay during a basketball game before? Hopefully we won't have to. Next game is Wednesday night, so hopefully they can pull out another W.
Thursday night Ann and I had a relaxing evening with our friend Miriam, a medical student from Tufts (in Boston) who is here on a Fogerty fellowship. We went over to Miriam's (really nice) apartment and made breakfast for dinner, which included french toast, fresh fruit and omelettes (avocado, tomato and onion). Following that we watched Sunshine Cleaning, which was a pretty good movie. It was nice to have a simple evening where we could just enjoy each others company. Miriam's washing machine was nice too...
Friday I traveled to Murchison Falls National Park while Ann stayed back in Kampala as she had been there previously. The Nile River flows through the park emptying into Lake Albert, which forms a border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), before continuing on through Uganda to Sudan and Egypt. Friday mainly consisted of traveling North from Kampala with a stop in Masindi for lunch. Once we reached the gates to the park we had to travel quite a ways, which allowed for some enjoyable baboon watching. Their butts are hilarious. Once we reached the camp site we had the rest of the evening to ourselves. So we hung out and had some drinks at the bar/dining area overlooking the river. The next day we had to get up quite early, so it was pretty early to bed.
Saturday morning involved safari through the Nile delta region of the part. We saw all kinds of beautiful scenery and animals. Some of the highlights were giraffes, elephants, baboons, various monkeys, hartebeest, african buffalo, kob, bushbuck, duiker, dik dik, many birds and a lioness. I couldn't believe how many giraffes there were! It is also somewhat difficult to spot big cats, so it was pretty exciting to see the lioness. Unfortunately the leopards were too shy to say hello. After about 4 hours of driving around we headed back to camp and had lunch. The afternoon involved approximately 4 hours of safari via boat as we traveled up the Nile to the actual falls for which the park is named. Basically the entire length of the Nile (at this point) is full of hippos, so we got lots of time with them. Also saw some of the other animals grazing and drinking from the river. The crocodiles were harder to spot as they like to hide in the water, however near the falls we were treated to some very close up crocs lounging under the tree. A couple got into the water right near the boat, which elicited a few gasps from the boat.
Giraffes. I got nothing.
Awwwww, look at the little baby elephants.
Mama says crocodiles are ornery cause they got all them teeth and no toothbrush.
Hungry Hungry Hippos
Sunday involved a hike up to the top of the falls for some amazing views. After a bit we took off back to Masindi for lunch and eventually arrived in Kampala around 4:30pm. It was a long weekend. If the mosquitos (malaria) or tse tse flies (sleeping sickness) don't get you, the african sun will. I am now a certified tse tse fly killer as we had quite the experience riding through the park. If we slowed down the flies caught up so we were constantly opening and closing windows in order to balance the chances of sleeping sickness vs. heat exhaustion. So this was more of an art than a science and some people were very shitty artists. Lucky I was there to terminate the flies.
Murchison Falls from the Nile River.
Ann thought we should include a few pictures of our place...
I am commenting, because I, too, was an awesome tse tse fly killer. I got at least 4 on the way back.
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