30 July 2022
Friends, family, colleagues, and students from around the world, greetings from New York!
It has been more than 2.5 years since I have written this blog and traveled to Uganda and much has happened while I’ve been away. Namely, COVID-19 and subsequent variants have interrupted our lives at the least and taken many lives at its worse. The USA has lost more than 1 million and the World more than 6.4 million people to COVID. We have all come to be familiar with mask-wearing and social distancing. Where available, we’ve been vaccinated and boosted multiple times. COVID is becoming the new normal and we’ve grown tired of the COVID talk, masking, distancing from others, and some now are even refusing vaccines because COVID seems like it is never going away and thus, erroneously, believing that we are no longer prone to serious death and illness. However, COVID is still wreaking havoc. As of July 28, 2022 there were > 2000 daily deaths to COVID and > 977,000 daily cases. This data comes from Worldometer which is a cool database collecting all kinds of information so we can have access to statistics like this. We shouldn’t forget, though, there are other awful situations that affect many people of the world such as >14,000 deaths from hunger TODAY and > 780million people without access to safe water.
I’m excited to let you know that I am traveling back to Uganda today to work with faculty colleagues from the Pharmacy School at Makerere University. I have been helping them build capacity to teach pharmaceutical care skills to provide patient centered care since 2014. I initially received a Fulbright Specialist Grant to cover 3 trips to Uganda in 2014 which resulted in the development of a Pharmaceutical Care Skills Lab (PCSL). They are still teaching it but now they are interested in enhancing this curriculum for their Bachelor’s of Pharmacy, which is the entry level degree for pharmacists in Uganda. We aim to develop some demonstration and training videos to augment the skills lab. Since I first started working with Makerere their enrollment has grown without a corresponding growth in clinical faculty (35-40 students per class year in 2014 to 70-85 students now per class year). Although the interest in clinical Pharmacy practice has grown in Uganda, there are still few pharmacists around to model these skills for the undergraduate students. Soon, though, Makerere will offer a Master’s of Clinical Pharmacy The ultimate goal is to help develop advanced pharmacy practitioners who can work with other healthcare providers and directly with and for patients to improve safe medication use and patient health outcomes. For more information about my prior trips both with and without U.S. pharmacy students, you can scan my past 11 years of blog posts. This trip is 2 weeks long so much more to come regarding my adventures! Please feel free to post questions for me.
Out of the Pharmacy Classroom and Into Africa 
Love you lots!! Have a great trip renewing relationships!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Safe travels and a successful two weeks. I was just commenting on this this week that you haven’t traveled to Uganda. Last night at Mike’s humdinger someone asked if I ever heard from you. Miss our times together and I hope you know how proud I am to call you my friend. Best wishes and can’t wait to hear more in your blogs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Beth! It’s so good to hear from you! Thank you for the message. I remember the fun of Mike’s humdingers! Miss you, my friend. Thanks for reading the blog. I arrived safely last night and will post more later.
LikeLike
Hello, I found your blog and need to ask you some questions. I know you might answer but we don’t know what to do. My husband and I have been sponsoring a young man at MUST university and he just graduated. However, we have a missionary friend in Uganda Kampala and she believes we are being scammed. We sponsored this young man since he was 7 yrs old through Compassion international but once they age out they no longer provide for their schooling. And we wanted him to finish college. The first blog I read from you was about the difficulty of getting such a degree and the cost. It has cost us thousands of dollars. We now don’t know if we are being scammed he has had cancer, he has been attacked twice beaten badly, and has had to have a few surgeries…but he is unable to provide very good details or documents. His phone broke in the first attack and so he cannot provide pictures. This has raised our suspicions. We care about this young man and hope it is not true…the hostel is 60 a month USD…for 2 rooms. We are paying for his food 7.00 USD a day…the gas…too. We have paid for surgery for his grandmother and we told him to go get her since there were some machete killings where she lived and that was in the paper. Regardless it has cost us thousands of dollars like 30000 over the past 4 years due to cancer surgery, back surgy twice, and grannies brain surgery YIKES But also he has said he sent us documents but the wifi is terrible in Mbarara and we rarely get proofs at least after the election. prior he sent me all receipts for medical bills for his cancer treatment and TB treatment. I dont know if you can give us advice. Thank you we dont know what to do.
LikeLike
Hi Sharon, I’m sorry to say but it does sound like you are being scammed. The Wi-Fi is not terrible in Mbarara. Cell service is pretty good all over the country. They do have to pay for airtime/data but he should easily be able to communicate with you through WhatsApp for low cost and send you documents. However, those documents are very easily forged. Can’t you contact compassion international and ask them to check it out? Or your missionary friend in Kampala could reach out to people in Mbarara to find him. He could also go to a cafe where there is free Wi-Fi and even video chat or at least talk with you on WhatsApp. regards, KarenBeth
LikeLike
Thank you for responding we are very sad if it is true…we have sent him so much money for school and he has had cancer etc. Thank you again I contacted you since the first blog I saw you had said the cost of schooling is very expensive. So I was thinking it was okay but now it has been yrs we have written him since he was 7yrs old…and it is heartbreaking to think he might be scamming us. we have pictures of him at the university and we watched his graduation ceremony and heard his name. But he keeps failing to provide documentation. Thank you again for responding.
LikeLike