28 September 2016

A Blog Post by Mike

A Fond Farewell to our new friends in Mbarara (Pictured left to right: Jennie, Dr. Bohan, Derrick, Mike, Emily, Nick, Noah)

It has been another busy few days. Yesterday we finished up our time Mbarara. We were only there for two days but we had a great time interacting with the students at Mbarara University. All of the students we spoke with were very eager to learn and had lots of great questions as we rounded together in the morning. Our afternoon session was a presentation by Dr. Bohan that focused on improving medication safety. Judging by the reaction of the audience, many of them had seen some of the issues that were discussed and were able to more fully appreciate the need for improvement in this area.

Our evening session was a great opportunity for us and some of the pharmacy students to meet in non-clinical, non-academic setting, relax and get to know each other a better. We talked, played games, and laughed often. There was one rule for the evening- NO pharmacy talk! This was a great rule which I think we could benefit from should we enact it at get-togethers back home. It really helped us avoid focusing on the one thing we all knew we had in common and to find other topics for us to bond over.

This morning was bittersweet as Noah and Derrick came by to see us off. I was happy to have the chance to see them and thank them again for inviting us down to work with them and the other students at Mbarara University. Our drive back to Kampala was lovely and punctuated by one stop off for a couple of quick photos as we had one foot in spring and one in fall at the equator.

A visit to the Equator

We checked back into the Mulago Guest House near the hospital where we will rounding and working with students for the next couple of weeks. As nice as it has been to travel and see lots of Uganda, it is nice to know that we will be staying in once place for a while. We had a nice little greeting committee all set up on my balcony. This playful troop decided to hang out on my balcony. I quickly realized that some of the smaller ones would be able to climb through the metal grate and I shut the glass doors as soon as I could. It was fun to watch the monkeys wrestle and play from only a few inches away. They seemed as interested in us as we were in them.