Our Chair of Trustees, Helen Smith, is walking up and down her drive 843 times to raise money for two hospitals, Kisiizi and Dreamland Mission Hospital in Kenya. There is a 7 metre height difference between the bottom and the top of the drive, so 843 round trips means that she will have climbed the…
Sitting in Doha airport with a couple of hours to while away before I board for the final leg of my journey home I am reflecting on the last six weeks in Uganda. The maternity department has seen a flow of really difficult obstetric emergencies and I have encountered several situations I have never had…
Anna, the widow I mentioned a few days ago,came to Kisiizi and delivered a baby girl. I found her on the ward on Thursday, the day I had promised her that I would visit her with one of the social workers from our orphan project. She was keen to go home and was waiting in…
Warning: this blog does contain some graphic medical descriptions which you might find upsetting. The day began well with beautiful sunshine as we walked to the Hospital Chapel for the morning service. Half way through the service a midwife came to fetch me for an emergency and we rushed to labour ward, to be met…
I met a sad teenager yesterday. She was married in February and became pregnant immediately. When she came to the antenatal clinic in February she found that she had also become HIV positive. When I asked her how she felt about this she told me she hated herself. She was given the anti-viral drugs that…
I went out on another antenatal outreach clinic yesterday. I was interviewing a lovely pregnant woman called Anna who is expecting her 7th child. I asked her who she lived with and she said her husband “but he is gone”. At first I thought he had gone to find work somewhere but she actually meant…
It has been quite a week, during which I became a seasoned driver in Uganda. I set out on Wednesday afternoon wondering quite what I was doing driving the hospital Landcruiser to Ishaka to see my son Calum and his wife Emily who are research associates at the university there. All went well down the…
I don’t know what the Guiness Book of Records has to say about how many people can fit into a Landrover which then hurtles down dirt roads alongside huge cliffs but I think the Kisiizi outreach clinic crew must come pretty close to setting a new record. There were 18 of us today crammed in.…
After a frantic morning rushing round, touching up the paint on bed frames, realising the door had a gap under it big enough to let in a Cobra and trying to rectify this, pondering the very strange and quirky wiring of the building, discovering that the mosquito nets don’t fit the beds and much more,…
Today was marked by a very auspicious event, we became the owners of a goat! Culturally this is one of the highest honours that can be bestowed upon a person, so it was very special indeed. Boozy was given to us by the mother of a child who we met two years ago in very…