While I have nonchalantly taken our parents sponsorship of my education completely for granted…Kenneth is over the top with gratitude and sentimentality. But as he tells me about his life over ugali and chicken, I realize what a dramatic difference my parents have made in his life. By sponsoring him through university, he’s been able to get a job, support his family, pay school fees not only for his kids but his brother, and hope to sort out environmental sustainability in Uganda. Back in 1992, he tells me he would never have dreamed of being able to buy someone else lunch in Kampala.
So having my own attitudes challenged by my Ugandan brother has been one highlight of my time in Kampala so far. Otherwise, the HIV/TB teaching has been pretty incredible. My two favourite diseases over two weeks including some top of the game speakers, a nobel prize winner, a demonstration of adult circumcision (cuts your chance of infection by 60%) and lots of real live patients with real problems. I have felt slightly drunk with the experience, as well as bewildered by the problem of HIV in East Africa where every day more people get infected than start treatment.
Kampala is pretty mad. The roads are a bodaboda and taxi jam. There are these ridulously large ugly dinosaur-like birds everywhere. The campus where I live is alive with students, gathered in little groups: break-dancing/ singing/ playing football/ making fire/ praying/ campaigning. And finally the rain. It’s like nothing I’ve seen or heard before. It makes our walk home from school very amusing to the kids chasing after us as we literally slide down hills of mud and rubbish. And so the Kampala experience has given me some new resolutions – to become more like Kenneth in appreciation of life’s graces, to find a cure for AIDS, and to learn to walk like a Ugandan; always staying completely clean and dignified however much mud there is on the road.
