Sight Savers

Hello friendly friends and my fabulous fam. Last week was by far the busiest week I’ve had thus far. I spent four of the five days assisting with the screenings at the eye camp. The HELP volunteers and I would do the initial eye test and then the patient would go see an OCO (hired by sight savers) who would make the diagnosis and administer the medication if needed. They would also determine if the patient was a candidate for a free surgery in the following weeks. The first day we went to a hospital in a rural village and when we arrived there were over a hundred patients waiting to be seen. We’d then spend the entire day screening the patients and wouldn’t stop until we had seen them all. On Thursday, we left at eight in the morning and we didn’t return until ten thirty at night. It was a great week, but was also rather exhausting. We still have this week to complete the screenings and next week the patients will be picked up from the rural villages and taken to the Kawolo hospital where the surgeries will be performed. In the picture of me administering the eye test there was a rather large family of bats living in a whole in the ceiling directly over my head. I moved a little more quickly that day so we could be out of there before dark in order to avoid the bats flying our of their hole in the ceiling while I was still standing there.
Last week, we also got to have a little dance lesson by Luta and his dance crew. Luta runs a dance team that performs at weddings and other celebrations. We got to see some of them perform and them we were taught how to do some of the moves. In the picture, we’re all wearing the traditional fur on our bums that they wear in their performances. I filmed most of the performance so I’ll definitely have to show it to you when I get back because they’re absolutely amazing.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit the Gandhi memorial at the source of the Nile. Gandhi’s ashes were spread in some of the rivers in Africa, including the Nile, where they have a small monument in honor of him. We were invited to a Fourth of July party at the US Embassy this weekend. There’s going to be fireworks and a barbeque! I’m exited to celebrate our national holiday in a different country; I think it’ll be an awesome experience.
Sorry this is a short one but I’ve got to run! I hope you all have a blessed week!

Hand Washing or Bust

Hello to all the loves in my life. Things are continually super duper fab here. This week marks the start of a new project that I’m really excited about! We have teamed up with another NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) called Sight Savers International. They donated eight million shillings ($4,000.00 US dollars) and supplied us with ophthalmologists and eye surgeons. For the next week and a half we will be going to rural villages and doing eye tests and screenings. Those with conditions that could be cured with prescriptions were given the drugs free of charge. I assisted with the eye tests yesterday and we saw 267 patients! We have seven more days of these outreaches then three days where the eye surgeons will be performing surgeries on those who were in need and were prescreened at the outreaches. The only bummer to this program is we didn’t get funding for glasses, but almost all other eye conditions will be treated. It’s a great program and I’m so excited to be apart of it.
Last week we had our unveiling of our very first hand station in the Lugazi Central Marketplace. We set up a booth in the marketplace, luckily it was near the produce and the not near he hanging raw meat. We first presented the hand washing station to the management and then had them sign a contract saying that the hand washing stations will always be fully stocked with water and soap. I will be checking in on the station throughout the summer and if I find that it is not stocked with water and soap three times then we will have a meeting with the management to discuss their relocation. The management agreed and the station has been well stocked since the grand opening. We then certified 167 market vendors in small groups. I gave a lesson on how germs are spread and then I discussed the importance of hand washing and how if done correctly, it can decrease diarrheal diseases by 42-45%. I then asked them questions to verify they understood the material. When they answered them all correctly we had them line up and wash their hands. As soon as they washed their hands they were presented with a hand washing certificate and a hygiene kit (Thank you again Sister Morton!). It was a wonderful day and many of the vendors have proudly displayed their hand-washing certificate at their stand. We are still waiting for four more hand washing stations to be built and I’m hoping they will be finished by the end of the week and then we can install the remaining four. The picture was taken at the end of one of my lessons and the woman I’m handing the hygiene kit to has just washed her hands in the newly constructed hand washing station.
Our next stop for hand washing stations is the local hospital where we will be installing four. We’ll have to do something a bit different as far as promotion and sanitation education, so more to come on that.
Now I must tell you about the most beautiful and magical place on earth, Sipi
Falls. Sipi is just a mere thirty minutes from Kenya and is probably the most the gorgeous place on the planet. We stayed at this resort with little cottages with only enough accommodations for 16 people. So the resort is tiny tiny and half of our group filled the place. The adorable cottage I stayed in is not far at all from where we we’re standing in the picture and you can see the waterfall from the window above my bed. One of the coolest things is that there’s really nothing around you except for a few huts and some locals. So you’re pretty secluded and besides the sound of the waterfalls, its soooo quiet. We got there around seven at night and they fed us the most fabulous meal I’ve had in over a month. I then got to take a long hot shower, first one in over a month. We spent Saturday hiking around and eating three fabulous meals they fed us. Oh and you must know that I only paid forty-five US dollars for accommodations and three fabulous meals. If you’re ever vacationing in Uganda this is the place to go. The two girls in the picture standing next to me are our two country directors. The one to my left is Melissa and she just graduated from BYU with her Masters in Public Health and has been such a great help to me. The girl on the far left is Becca, one of the other volunteers that I flew all the way from Salt Lake to Uganda with.
Thanks for all the love and support! I wish you all a wonderful week!
XOXO-Hill

A Little Love From Lugazi

Hello to my fellow fans and readers (aka my supportive friends and family) I would like to start off this blog with a little public health plug. While I’m in Africa I’m taking ten credits of coursework in order to complete my undergraduate degree by August. One of the classes I’m taking is International Health. I was just doing some reading for my courses when I found a statistic that I found interesting. “An international cancer study found that 35% of cancer deaths are caused by nine lifestyle and environmental factors: overweight and obesity, low fruit and vegetable intake, physical inactivity, smoking, alcohol use, unsafe sex, urban air pollution, indoor smoke and air pollution, indoor smoke from household use of solid fuels, and contaminated injections in healthcare settings.” (Jacobsen, 2008) Notice that six of the nine lifestyle factors we as individuals have complete control over. I know that we can all do a little better, myself included, in at least a few of those six areas. So cheers to cancer prevention.
The sun is still shinning and will always shine as the HELP International volunteers continue to thrive just miles from the earth’s equator. We have a big week ahead of us as we prepare to install and promote our very first hand washing station in the local market place on Thursday. We will only have one hand washing station constructed in time so the following four will be installed early next week. We are going to have a booth for two hours after the installation where we will teach and certify the local vendors in proper hand washing and hygiene. After they complete the short lesson and pass off that they understand the importance of hand washing before preparing or cutting food, before eating, and after using the latrine they will be rewarded with a certificate and a hygiene kit! Props to Carol Morton for donating the kits! Thank you! One thing you must know about Uganda is that they absolutely love and cherish certificates. Why, I don’t know. You give them a certificate for something and they’ll save it forever. So we are going to laminate them so they can display them on their fruit stand. If all goes as planned and the hand washing stations are utilized correctly, we can expect a decrease of diarrheal diseases among vendors and customers by 42-45%.
Tomorrow I have a meeting with one of the administrators at the local hospital to discuss installing hand washing stations there as well as promoting and educating the staff on the importance of hand washing. It sounds like their running water is a lot like ours, it comes and goes. However, it looks like we won’t ever have running water again. Anyways, so the hand washing stations would be used when there is no running water as well as a few out by the latrines.
If I get a picture up it’ll be one of Leslie and I teaching a sanitation lesson to the local street kids after a soccer match. Sugar cane, one of Uganda’s main crops, surround the soccer field. The man standing next to me is Robert, the co-founder of The Youth Outreach Mission, translating for us. The street kids don’t have the money to pay the school fees and therefore don’t speak English, hence the translator.
Well dinner is almost ready and I’ve got to finish up some homework. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for future blog posts. XOXO -Hill

The Muzungu House

I have had several requests for a picture of our humble abode and here it is. I tried to get a shot so you can see it in its entirety. To the left of the photo you will see a cement wall that has glued broken bottles on the top. That wall surrounds the entire house to keep the Muzungus in and the Ugandans out. We then have a large gate in the front with two doors to get in and out. Behind the house are our guard’s quarters and where our married couple team members will move in tomorrow. The latrines are also in the back of the house, but I figured you probably didn’t want to see a picture of that.  My room is the room behind the balcony that’s covered in mosquito nets. Six boys are in the garages (with the green doors) and then two of the boys sleep on the balcony. There are five rooms upstairs which house twenty girls. I share a room with five other girls. We all sleep in bunk buds with mattresses made of three-inch foam. They’re actually more comfortable then you’d think because at night I sleep like a little lamb. In the right bottom corner of the picture is our well. This is where we shower, do our dishes, wash our clothes, and sometimes just hang out. The water isn’t clean enough to drink and whether or not it’s clean enough to bathe in or do our dishes in is debatable. Most of the time we use it when it’s dark outside and you can’t tell that the true color of the water is brown. The blue plastic chair in the picture is one of our few pieces of furniture. Besides the bunk beds in our house our only other furniture consists of plastic chairs and stools. The buckets sitting in front of the garage are our drinking water, which we get delivered from a plant. The bricks in the center were being used to rebuild part of the outer wall that fell down during a recent rainstorm, but the wall is completed and the bricks are still there.
The house is basically constructed of cement, which is great for fire retardation, but terrible for hanging anything on the walls. Most of our mosquito nets are held up in very creative ways since we can’t really use nails. The floor is mainly painted cement but a few of the rooms have linoleum. Upstairs there are two bathrooms. One of them has a normal toilet, which flushes when we have water, and we’ve had running water maybe 20% of the time we’ve been here. The other upstairs bathroom is the same as the only restroom downstairs and consists of what we most affectionately call a squatter. Enough said on that subject. If there’s no running water and you have to go number two then you have to use the outdoor latrines. Our house is pretty mosquito and bug proofed with mosquito nets on every outside door and window we can leave them open to keep the house cool (no A/C or fans). We still get our fair share of bugs in our little home and if we’re lucky we’ll get a rhino bug, that’s about the size of your hand. There are actually not as many bugs here as I thought there’d be.
The other picture is of me administering an oral polio vaccine at one of the vaccination clinics in Jinja. The government provided measles and polio vaccines to all children under five in Uganda during a three day period. Some of the vaccination posts were in hospitals, but most of them were just under some random tree. I got to wear one of the infamous Mormon helping hands vests! LDS members all around the world wear these vests while giving aid to those in need. It was such a good experience to be apart of the country-wide vaccinations.
Per my dear Tia Lisa’s request I’ll do my absolute best to describe how Uganda smells. The latrines and all surrounding areas smell terrible. The market where we buy all our produce smells like fish. One time we shared a taxi with thirty-three live chickens and that didn’t smell so good. I have also shared a taxi with a ton of dead fish, not such a good smell either. The taxis themselves smell damp and mildewy. They don’t have any means of disposing their garbage and they pile it in huge piles, and that smells like the dump. When they burn their trash it kind of smells a bit like weed, or so I’ve been told. We pass a lot of livestock just wondering around on our way in to town and so I always get a whiff of pure animal smell. Ugandans don’t have money for deodorant, so most of them smell like B.O. Their staple food item here is called matoke, and the women here are cooking outside over their fires all day everyday and it smells a lot like potatoes. Just minutes after it rains, Uganda smells fresh, alive, and cleansed. The rain lingers in the humidity and the smell of dew fills the air. The farther you get away from the center of the village and into the more rural parts of town the more you can smell the surrounding vegetation. Sometimes you can smell the jackfruit, pineapple, mango, or passion fruit growing in nearby fields topped off with faint scent of sugar cane. I wish I could bottle it up and take it with me wherever I go. I love you all! XOXO!

I'm going to Amsterdam and Paris!

Hey friends and family!

I don’t have much time but I just wanted to share some super exciting news with you. Me, along with one other girl and two guys from our team, were able to switch our return flight home (free of charge) so that we have a week long layover in Amsterdam! Which means I think we’re going to try and go to Paris as well! Wahooo! So the four of us will be planning specifics for the next few months. The other girl I’ll be traveling with is a seasoned travel and we’re going with two guys, so we will be safe. Oh and not to worry Mom, my return flight from Amsterdam to LAX has not been switched so I'll still arrive the same day and time.

A little health update. There's currently five volunteers with Malaria and a few with Typhoid. Our country directors suggested that we all get tested, just in case. I had a blood test done this morning and my results came back negative for Typhoid, Malaria, and Salmonella. I'm doing every thing I can to keep it that way and I'm putting Purell on my hands more often now than ever before. The sick volunteers are all doing pretty well and have all received medication for their illnesses.

If I get a picture up it’s of me and two of the other volunteers with some of the women at a rural village in Luganga. I taught a lesson on the importance of sanitation and hand washing. Things are still as fabulous as ever here and this weekend is immunization weekend! I’m praying that we’ll have an incredible turn out and I’m so excited for the difference these immunizations will make in the lives of so many Ugandan children. Well I’ve got to go and prepare the health lesson I will be teaching the street children before there soccer game this afternoon. I love you all! XOXO!

My Ugandan Name is Nantume

My goal is to get two pictures up today while I’m online, so we’ll see how this goes. This first picture is of our very first soccer game and public health lesson with some of the street children of Lugazi. The street children are all of the kids who don’t get to go to school because they don’t have the money to pay the school fees. Andrew, the guy in the picture with the dreads, got his hometown to donate soccer equipment and uniforms to the cause. We plan to make these soccer games a weekly event and are coupled with a brief lesson on health. I give the lesson and Andrew and some of the other guys from the team take care of the soccer part. Our first game went really well and thanks to our translator, I think they got the jist of my lesson on how germs are spread and the importance of proper hand washing in infectious disease prevention.
I began making a prototype of the hand washing stations we are going to build for the local market place, but unfortunately ran into a little problem. We haven’t been able to locate one of the materials we need locally to build the hand washing stations. Part of the sustainability of the project relies on the supplies being inexpensive and accessible so that the members of The Youth Outreach Mission, along with others I train, can continue to build them in Lugazi after we leave this summer. Luckily, just days after I encountered this issue one of our country directors found out that one of the senior missionary couples in Kampala have built hand washing stations using a different model and have had a lot of success. I have an appointment to meet up with them in Jinja on Wednesday to see the hand washing stations and learn how they build them. Jinja is also one of the very few places in this country with American food, so Wednesday will be an absolutely splendid day.
This upcoming week some of the other interns will be pulling out some teachers from their classes to do some teacher training while I get to entertain their classes with a public health lesson. So part of this week I’ll spend creating lesson plans and visuals. This upcoming weekend is the countrywide distribution of polio and measles vaccines and I’m excited to spend three days with some of the senior couples in assisting with the vaccinations.
The other picture that I hopefully get loaded is of Becca, Wilson, and me at Szebwa Falls. Becca is one of the other interns and Wilson is the president of The Youth Outreach Mission, which we have done a lot of work with. About twelve of us interns and seven Ugandans from the Youth Outreach Mission hiked around Szebwa Falls Saturday morning and then we went and spent the day in the capital, Kampala. We went to a mall there called Garden City and for six hours I felt like I was no longer in Uganda. We ate at this fabulous Indian restaurant while sitting cross-legged on couches. We don’t have couches at our house and it a nice change from sitting on the floor or in plastic chairs. The food was amazing and the restaurant sits at the top of the mall and is completely open. It was a beautiful sunny day with a slight breeze and we got to enjoy it all as we ate Indian food. We then went and saw Angels and Demons and for two and half hours I felt like I was at home in the U.S. We then got ice cream in the mall, which was okay. The ice cream they have here isn’t as creamy and sweet as it is in the US and they haven’t quite gotten their chocolate flavoring down. After ice cream we went to an American super market at the mall where they have a lot of American brand food that’s way overpriced. I bought a few Ugandan brand things that you can’t find in Lugazi and avoided the American cereal that cost ten US dollars.
Today I taught Young Womens at church and it was way fun. It rained so hard that one of the walls that surround our house fell down, but it is currently being fixed. I’m off to go locate the phone my family will call on in approximately twenty-five minutes. I love you all and I love Uganda!