Notes from Stephen, Wan, Kweilin, and Li

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Jinja, Kampala, Reach Out Mbuya

We had breakfast in our peaceful Jinja campground overlooking the Nile, said goodbye to Ethan, and set out for Kampala.

Along the way we stopped to buy grilled chicken at a roadside stand that many people have recommended to us. Young men wielding 5-10 sticks of chicken in each hand swarmed around the car as soon as we stopped. We bought a skewer each for 75 cents each. It was the tastiest, most tender chicken we've had on this trip.

In Kampala, we visited the Reach Out Mbuya program. Daddy and Mommy visited it last March and Jay raised $6000 for the program from her HBS section. We met Dr. Margaret, the European doctor who founded the program 3.5 years ago. Annette, a 24-year-old local, led us on a tour of the place.

Reach Out takes a holistic, community-based approach to HIV/AIDS care. Annette showed Jay and me several departments: ARV pharmacy, ARV education, HIV counseling, primary and secondary school scholarships, primary/secondary school HIV education, microfinance, work training and income generation, adult literacy education, World Food Programme, and medical clinic.

An innovative aspect of the program is CATTS: Community ARV and Tuberculosis Treatment Support. A CATTS volunteer is an HIV-positive client who has gotten healthy via Reach Out and helps about 10 fellow clients get healthy. The volunteer visits each client once a week to make sure the client is taking ARVs and has enough food.

Frederick explained HIV counseling to us. People come in to get tested, usually with the suspicion that they're positive. Frederick takes them five at a time through pre-test group counseling, where they discuss ARVs and what's available at Reach Out. Then they take a blood sample and continue counseling while the tests are pending. Ten minutes later, the test results are ready. Frederick takes each client individually and reviews the group counseling before disclosing the test result. He said that the individual review is important because clients are often too anxious about their test result to absorb anything from the group counseling. If the client turns out positive, Frederick enrolls the client in Reach Out, prescribes ARVs, and assigns a CATTS volunteer.

The work training is focused on women because 79% of Reach Out clients are female. Clients attend a 1-year sewing course and graduate with a certificate and a sewing machine.

We visited Dr. Margaret's family--husband, four sons, 1 daughter--in her house at night. Noah, her husband, runs the World Food Programme in Uganda. I spoke with her oldest son (16), Benjamin, about applying to US colleges. The family has lived all over the world: Sudan, Cambodia, Thailand, Swaziland, India, and Uganda.

On the way home we evaded the Uganda Highway Patrol! We accidentally drove the wrong way down a one-way street. As they came up behind us, we accidentally cut them off. They pulled in front of us and motioned us to pull over but we turned up the road to our house instead. They turned on their siren lights so Daddy veered into an alley and turned off his lights and waited for them to pass. After 10 minutes of waiting, whispering, and looking over our shoulders, we continued home. Exciting!

posted by Li at 11:44 AM