Goin' to the IDP Camp for 2 Weeks Again

Hi Everybody,

Thank you for your prayers and thoughts. I am feeling better and am now no longer taking the painkillers. That just leaves me with the antibiotics and the hunger inducers. Drew has returned to Canada where he starts his summer research job this week. Logan, Alex (our translator) and I are leaving to run a 2 week HIV/AIDS education and prevention project in the Potika IDP camp. Potika is even more rural and less developed than Agoro (the Potika IDP camp doesn't even have a town associated with it). I will be very careful with my health and try not to overdo it. Anyway, I won't be able to respond to emails or update the blog for 2 weeks.

Are you big on table manners? You should skip this entry.

What are your comfort activities when you are sick? When I am at home (in the United States) I cuddle under a blanket, drink hot herbal tea, eat chicken noodle soup, and read a good book or watch a mindless kids movie with my little brothers and sisters.

So the day after I was diagnosed with typhoid, I realized that I really missed home. At first I looked for chicken noodle soup - no luck. Then herbal tea - nope. All the others? No luck. (Too hot for a blanket and no power).

So then I was like, "What can I do that will remind me of home?" So I went to grocery store and found a box of copycat brad 'Corn Flakes' and a box of warm sterilized milk that had probably been on the shelf for a year or two. I went back to house and realized that I didn't have a spoon. So I had to eat the stale cold cereal and warm milk with my fingers. It was good though. A little taste of home - it just had a bunny on the box instead of a chicken.

Meanwhile, when Logan got home a couple days later he tried burning and cutting on his hand to treat his aliments as a home cure. And for cutting he used a 6 inch switch blade [Illegal in Canada] that he bought in Uganda for $2.00. Uh, seems to work, but we will see. More to come on the results of this [crazy] treatment later. [Sorry Logan's family, but it was just too funny/strange]. P.S. It was treatment for a wart, so it was a relatively minor 'surgery'.

Bad Luck Christy

Sometimes life isn't fair:

For example, when I was in Tanzania:

- I put on mosquito repellent on 2 times a day

- I slept under a mosquito net every night (I even used dental floss and a needle to repair the tears in my mosquito net.

- I took my malaria prophylaxis every day at the same time.

And after that what happened? I got malaria.

Logan on the other hand:

- Never uses mosquito repellent.

- Stopped taking his malaria prophylaxis pills after his first two weeks in Africa.

- He has been in Africa for 2 years and has stayed in extremely malaria prevalent areas.

- Sometimes he does not even use a mosquito net.

And yet, Logan has never had malaria in his two year stay in Africa.

In Uganda:

Logan, Drew and I ate ALL the same food. We slept in the same house/stayed in the same locations. We used the same filthy outhouse. We did all the same things and what happened?

I got typhoid and Drew and Logan didn't. Go figure.

AND apparently, " US travelers abroad have about a 1 in 10,000 risk of contracting typhoid fever, but this risk increases several fold when visiting countries with endemic typhoid. "( http://www.emedicine.com/OPH/topic686.htm).

Yeah, so I have really bad luck.

Take an HIV/AIDS Knowledge Quiz

Since I don't have much energy to run all over the city and do errands, I have been catching up on some of my blog ideas. We have been teaching for 2 weeks in IDP camps about HIV, I was wondering how much people back home know about HIV/AIDS. If you take this quiz and send me your answers I can tell you how your HIV/AIDS knowledge level is. Or you can grade your self (using the internet) and just respond with your thoughts about the quiz and your knowledge level. After a while I will post what some of the people in the IDP camps said to some of these same questions.

Take an HIV/AIDS Knowledge Quiz:


1) How is HIV transmitted from one person to another? (There should be 3 answers)

2) How can people protect themselves from HIV infection? (There are MANY answers to this question)

3) Can you get HIV by eating with an infected person?

4) Can you get HIV from mosquitoes?

5) Do you know a famous person living with HIV?

6) Have you had an HIV test? If no, would you be willing to take a test in the future?

7) If your neighbor was sick with AIDS would you help take care of him/her?

8) A female teacher has HIV but is not sick, should she be allowed to teach?

9) How is HIV different from AIDS?

10) About how many people are living with HIV in the world today?

Good Luck!

Professor Christy (Just kidding)

Some Pictures from Kitgum Town

Here are some pictures I took around Kitgum Town before the whole Typhoid thing happened. Kitgum is the biggest town in the district and has about 200,000 people. It has a very slow internet connect and power in some shops.

Pineapples anyone? Here is a picture of the pineapple stand outside of the market. The big pineapples in front are about $0.60 US. The ones in the back are slightly smaller and about $0.45 US. After you make your selection the pineapple sales guy will cut it up for you and put it in a plastic bag. The pineapples taste really good. It makes up for eating rice and beans everyday.



Here is an onion stand outside of the market. OK, so maybe it is not the most exciting picture ever.


This little kid was following us all over the market. He kept saying, "Buy my chicken, buy my chicken, buy my chicken." The boy just wouldn't stop. It was getting quite irritating. He wanted more than double the normal price for a chicken. We kept saying, "No, we don't want to buy a chicken that we don't need for 13,000 shillings that we could buy for 5,000 shillings down the road." But the boy just wouldn't leave. Finally we asked if it was alright if we took a picture of his chicken. After this, the boy seemed happy and left.

More Pictures from the Agoro IDP Camp

I have so many pictures from Agoro that I want to share with all of you! I decided to add a few more since the internet was relatively fast today and because I don't have energy to do much else.


This is a me with a bunch of children from the Agoro IDP camp. There were so many children. Most of them weren't clothed well and were hungry, but they love to follow around the white person and shout, "Munu! Munu!" ("White person, white person") where ever you go.

This isn't the best picture ever, but it was one of my few successful from-the-hip shots. (You normally cause an uproar if you hold the camera to your face, so it is generally better to take pictures without looking so people don't know you are taking them. It is surprisingly difficult to take a good picture without looking).

While we were in Agoro the government sprayers came from the "Control Malaria" campaign. They didn't use DDT, because it is hazardous to humans and the environment, so they used a less effective substitute. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to get rid of any mosquitoes or any other bugs. Hmmmm. Does the term, "Waste of millions of dollars" come to mind?

This is a picture of Logan and Drew playing soccer with the teenage boys in the camp. (At half time they brought the ball to the center of the field and talked about HIV/AIDS). Behind the field is what I call "Agoro Hill." Logan and Drew insisted on calling it "Agoro Mountain." It only took us an hour and a half to climb up and down the Hill/Mountain. After my experience of a 6 hour climb up the mountain in Tanzania, I said that the mound of dirt was only classified as a hill. The people in the Agoro Camp said that they don't like the hill because that is how the LRA would come to attack the town and the camp.

Logan, Drew and I climbed Agoro Hill/Mountain and took pictures of the camp and surrounding area. This is a picture of Agoro town. (There are buildings made of brick which is the "town").

Here is a picture of Agoro Camp from Agoro Hill/Mountain. The little mud huts seemed to go on forever.

The World Food Programme Trucks distributing food aid. The World Food Programme comes the each IDP camp once a month and distributes food. Everyone in the camp (about 10,000 people) comes and registers and then they are organized in groups of 6 or 7 families and given bags to divide among themselves. A World Food Programme Officer came up and asked me why I was taking pictures. I guess he was worried that I might write something and make WFP look bad. However, making WFP look bad isn't that hard to do since they have cut food rations by 40% this month due to budget constraints and people are starving.




Here is a picture of people dividing their food aid and carrying it away. I got in trouble for taking this picture too, but no one asked me to delete the photo so I decided it was OK to put on the blog. There were so many people. Apparently the WFP beans come from Uganda, the WFP oil comes from the United States, the maize comes from some country in Europe, and I don't remember which country the rice comes from. We ate World Food Programme rice and beans for almost every meal during our stay in Agoro.

Typhoid, not the best of times...

A quick note for travelers: the Live Oral Typhoid Vaccine is only 60-80% effective. This is important to keep in mind.

Yesterday I woke up with a really bad headache and general body-aches. I drank lots of water, took extra strength Tylenol and Advil, but the headache didn't leave. This morning I woke up and I felt even worse. I actually thought, "I really hope I don't have to use my emergency medical evacuation issuance." My head and body/muscles/joints hurt so bad I could barely get up off my foam mattress. I also had a fever even though I had taken extra strength Tylenol a couple hours before. I decided this was a good time to seek some medical advice. I went to the clinic and told them I thought that I had a somewhat severe case of malaria. However, the lab technician said he thought I should be tested for typhoid as well. I came back 3 hours later to get my results and discovered I didn't have malaria, but I did have typhoid fever. I guess it is another disease to add to my list.

Required course in Ugandan Pharmacy School = origami. This is a picture of the 3 medicines I was prescribed for typhoid. The folded paper triangles hold some of my pills. An interesting drug-hold mechanism.

Here is a picture of the pharmacist counting out some of my pills. The shelves behind her house the drug selection - perhaps not as varied as in a western pharmacy.

I appreciate your prayers, but I think I will be OK. They told me my case is "not very serious" so I am sure I will recover soon.

The Future Doctors

Drew (the other Working To Empower intern) is applying to medical school right now and he reminds me of myself 1 year ago. He is very nervous about the application process and frequently says things like, "I probably won't even get an interview the first year I apply." Or, "I probably won't get in to medical school." (These are all things I said last year). He is also studying for the MCAT right now. He divides his free time between writing in a journal he will give to his girlfriend when he gets back to Canada and madly going his Kaplan MCAT study book.

Anyway, Drew suggested that we should try to shadow some doctors at the government hospital for a day. So, we dropped by the surgery ward and asked if we could watch for a day. The only physician in the surgery department was so nice. We dressed up in scrubs and watched some pretty serious surgeries.


A picture of Drew and I in our scrubs. We were a little dizzy/feeling unwell during the first surgery, but by the end of the day we were totally into watching the doctor using a hammer and chisel to dig out infected bone on a patient that only had local anesthetic (the hospital was out of the drugs to put people totally out, crazy). It was good medical experience.

You Might be Living in an African IDP/Refugee Camp if...

In the spirit of the "You might be a red neck if..." jokes, I have developed some of my own "You might be living in an African IDP/Refugee Camp if..." line of jokes. If it really takes off I might abandon humanitarian /medical work and go on a stand up comedy tour. Actually, I probably won't because I think that the jokes are much funnier if you are here and actually had the IDP/Refugee camp experience.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... the new 5 inch diameter spider or an increase in the number of cockroaches in the nearest pit latrine is dinner time conversation.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... small children dare each other to run up and touch your hand.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... you have eaten World Food Programme beans and rice for 18 consecutive meals.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... you have seen a woman collecting drinking water from a river while she watches 12 people bathing, and 2 children urinating upstream in the same river.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... people let you cut in the line for the well because you are white. Actually, the fact that you are standing in line to collect water from a well might be an indication that you are living in an IDP camp.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... you have had a discussion about whether you like the design of the MSF or the UNICEF pit latrines better.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... you have received 8 marriage offers in the last 2 weeks.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... insects that gather around a light are considered a food source.

You might be living in an African IDP camp if... all children shout "white person!" in their local language anytime you walk anywhere.

Two Weeks Conducting HIV Education in the Agoro IDP Camp

Africa is so beautiful. I was absolutely amazed every day I was in Agoro. The Agoro IDP camp lies at the foothills of the mountains of Sudan. The view was astounding. When it wasn't raining, the sky was deep blue with white clouds. The sunrises and sunsets were incredible. If this location was in the USA, it would be filled with condos and million dollar homes. However, it was filled with mud huts and extremely impoverished people.


Here is a sunset. This picture is good, but it still doesn't capture how beautiful it was.



This was our HIV/AIDS education team (minus me). Logan, the program director is on the left. Drew, a Canadian intern who is applying to medical school is next. Then there is Alex our amazing translator who worked non-stop for 14 days, and on the far side is Doris. She is the woman who didn't want to stay in a dirt hut and it turns out that after a couple days Logan had to fire her because she didn't want to help.

We conducted so many activities I don't know if I can do them justice here. Every day Alex and I would spend the morning playing a cassette tape of testimonies of people living with HIV (in Luo, the local language), giving a small lecture about HIV/AIDS and then answering people's questions. Around lunch, Drew, Logan and Alex would go to police and military bases and teach about HIV and give out condoms. In the afternoon we would show videos about HIV/AIDS or keeping girls in school. We would get 600+ people for each video showing. After the video showing would would play sports with the youth and then teach about HIV/AIDS in the halftime break. At night we would go out and teach people who were drinking about HIV and how to use condoms. We did other activities as well, but you get the idea.


I really like this picture. This girl is probably only 6 or 7, but she is carrying her little brother or sister on her back while she goes to help her parents work. The little shell/gourd thing is to protect the baby from the sun and the rain.



This is one the traditional musical instrument that they youth played in church and that the choir sings with at funerals. It sounds very interesting.

I ATE ANTS

One of the translators, Alex, is holding a container of the ants.



While I was in Agoro I ate flying ants. Need I say more? They were actually quite tasty. A little crunchy, but very tasty. They are called "mweng" in the local language, or "flying white ants" in translation. They are these huge, dumb insects that swarm around any light at dusk. So the protein-deprived camp inhabitants collect them when they swarm in their huts, cook them, pull off the wings and eat them.

I love Africa.

A picture of life in Agoro town

The Agoro IDP camp is right next to Agoro "town", a group of houses, huts, and businesses with slightly less dire living conditions. This picture was taken in the town where we ended up staying. We were supposed to stay in a mud hut in the middle of the camp and sleep on a dirt floor like everyone else. However, when we arrived one of the translators we brought with us (a Ugandan woman) was like, "I don't want to sleep on a dirt floor! It is unsanitary. We need to find somewhere else to live." So we ended up sleeping on the cement floor of a woman's storage room with no windows on the very edge of Agoro town.

I thought this picture is nice because it This is a grandmother cooking over a mud "stove" with her grandchild. The stove has a whole in the bottom where you feed in the wood. It is nice that the wood doesn't have to be a specific length.

A some what staged photo...

I am uploading some photos quickly while the internet connection is relatively fast.


This is probably the most staged photo someone has taken of me while I was in Africa. I walked up to this woman who was pounding/grinding corn and I asked her (through sign language/non verbal communication because she didn't speak English) if I could take her picture. She agreed and then I tried to ask her if she wanted to take my picture. She had never used (and possibly never seen) a camera picture before so I gave her a 10 minute lesson about looking at the picture in the back of the camera and pushing the button at the top to take a picture. So the woman had to try about 5 times to take this picture. In short, a very staged photo, but I like it anyway. I think the woman did a pretty good job for having never used a camera before.

Nimerudi! I have returned!

I have returned from the Agoro IDP camp! It is good to be back! I am spending a couple hours on the internet this morning trying to deal with the many emails I received while I was gone, catch up on the news and update my blog.



This is one of the 350+ pictures I took while I was in the Agoro Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp for 2 weeks. I hope to upload many more in the next few days.

The two weeks were amazing. I learned a lot and I enjoyed actually doing/leading some hands-on HIV prevention and education activities.

Goin' to the IDP camps for 2 weeks...

Sorry that my blogs haven't been very frequent recently. Unfortunately it is going to get worse. I am going to the Agoro IDP camp for 2 weeks. I will be sleeping on a dirt floor and there is no internet so I won't be able post for a while.