Reentry

Washing machines are amazing. No, really. Washing machines may be one of the best inventions of modern society. This is my third time coming back from east or southern Africa and each time I amazed by how effective washing machines are at getting clothes really clean with minimal human labor required. During most of our time in Uganda this summer we paid a local Ugandan woman to wash our clothes. However, towards the end of the summer she went to a different part of the country and I decided to tough it out and wash my clothes myself. I tried various techniques all of which left my clothes remarkably still dirty and still smelly. My increasing desperation to get my clothes clean climaxed in me trying to perfectly simulate the actions of a washing machine. I pre-soaked my clothes in a large bucket of cold water. Then I boiled water on the stove and agitated my clothes with hand washing soap in a bucket of hot to warm water. I rubbed the soap into each garment paying particular attention to any stained or smelly areas (wash cycle). Then I drained the water and wrung out each garment (spin cycle). Then I actually repeated the warm wash cycle again as well as the ringing out of the clothes. Then I rinsed my clothes with warm water and then once again with cold water (ringing the clothes out in between rinses). I hung the clothes on the line and once they dried I was dismayed to find that they were still dirty. The orange hue of Ugandan dirt stubbornly remained and none of the stains had been removed. It seemed like a physical impossibility. I left about ½ of my clothes in Uganda. However, I decided to bring back some of my particular favorites. The day after I came back to the States I put my (still dirty and stained) Ugandan clothes in our washing machine, put in an appropriate about of laundry detergent, pressed start and 40 minutes later my clothes came out vibrantly clean and stain free. It is amazing.

Of course, washing my clothes might be a stupid thing to write a huge paragraph about, however, it does illustrate how insanely easy so many things are here in the United States. It took me all day and probably about 500 Calories to try to get by clothes “less dirty” in Uganda. However, in the States “doing laundry” is something you do on a whim while talking to your mom on the phone and takes very little energy. Just getting water piped into your house is a huge luxury that many of us take for granted here in the States. In Kumi it would take women all morning to pump water from the local well and carry it back to their homes 20 liters at a time for cooking, drinking, washing dishes, bathing, laundry, etc. Reliable electricity? Hot running water? These are privileges reserved for only the wealthiest of the upper class in Uganda. Here they are just expected like people expect the sky to be blue and the grass in their manicured lawns to be green. We really do live in a privileged society.

The day after I came back from Uganda I opened internet explorer on my computer and opened a book to read while I waited for the gmail page to load. I only read a sentence or two before I realized that I was back in the land of technology and highspeed internet! Oh, the bliss of typing in a webpage and having it pop up suddenly! Think of how much time you save with the instant, virtually free, communication and access to information through the internet. It is spectacular. However, there are disadvantages that come with our technology and internet information age. When was the last time you just sat down with a stranger and talked to them for 3 hours? In Uganda, I was able to spend a lot of time getting to know people and hearing their stories because technology, electricity, and internet were so inaccessible. When we were in rural Kumi I got to spend a lot of time with a physician and his wife learning about how they met, the courtship and marriage traditions from their ethnic group, what they thought about Ugandan and US politics, how the Catholic Church was run in Uganda and corruption in the Ugandan medical system. These are conversations and information I might not have gleaned if the internet, electricity and other forms of entertainment had been readily available.

I think my re-entry shock hit a high last week when I was at my pediatric infectious preceptorship in Children’s Hospital. I will be doing this preceptorship all of fall quarter and I think it will be very fun and interesting to compare the infectious diseases we deal with here in the States compared to those I saw in Uganda. Anyway, during the first preceptorship session at Children’s, the physician had to do a lumbar puncture on an infant who was only a couple months old. They placed a path of gel on the baby’s back, there was a whole sterile lumbar puncture kit that had been laid out by the staff, there was a little pacifier with sugar water for the baby to suck on during the lumbar puncture, there was a pack of three iodine swabs to sterilize the area, 3 clean collection tubes, various extra (sterile) equipment, a sterile paper sheet to put the baby on and a clean blanket to wrap the baby in after the lumbar puncture was over. It was such a contrast to the lumbar punctures I had witnessed or helped with in Uganda where frequently there weren’t even materials to sterilize the baby’s back, needs of the correct size or collection tubes available for the cerebral spinal fluid. The Children’s lumbar puncture experience made me marvel all day at the resources we have in the US medical system and how it compares to the needs of so much of the rest of the world. How unjust is it that a child treated in Uganda for meningitis is some much more likely to suffer and die than a child born in the States? It isn’t because of anything the child did or any other reason than that the child was born to parents who happened to be poor and happened to be living in a poor country in East Africa which happens to be at a huge economic and medical disadvantage compared to the United States and Europe. It is not fair, but what can be done?