Day 1: Travel to Uganda

Today started at 6:30 AM at Jen’s house, one of the members of the microvascular surgery team headed to Kenya, where our shuttle picked us up. We flew through the rest of the day and the following night (flying against the sun) to arrive in Ethiopia, where we split from the Micro team (Jen, Lina, Benjy, and ultimately Ignacio). Dr. Acharya, our professor from CBID, and I continued alone to Uganda. For me, these flights mostly involved listening and re-listening to a few playlists while watching the world pass below. There is something hypnotizing about the perspective from an airplane. The flights were empty enough to allow us to have an entire row to ourselves, which made traveling much more comfortable than I had expected. I even slept for an hour or so.

In the Entebbe airport in Uganda, Dr. Acharya and I got separated as we exited customs. Outside, I connected with our pleasant friend Winnie, our host from Makarere University, and we waited while Acharya collected a sim card and some cash. We then drove from Entebbe to Kampala, which was wonderful. The intense green of the foliage contrasts beautifully with the red earth and the red-tiled roofs of the buildings. Traffic was entertaining. Motorcycles weaved around the larger vehicles, which moved without the restrictions of lanes. The roundabouts were perfectly orchestrated chaos. I told our driver that I would have crashed the van. Winnie played tour guide with me answering my many questions about everything from the prominent plants to the local lizards.

We briefly stopped by our home for the next two nights, a guest house at Makarere University. When I met our housekeeper and asked her name, she responded with “I am called Immaculate.” Winnie then took us to a nice American restaurant where Dr. Acharya reunited with a special African tea blend. His appreciation of this tea was the highlight of the meal for me. While we ate the rain came – a rich and heavy rain of giant droplets and rumbling thunder.

The rain continued once we had finished our meal and it made our search for bottled water (with which to stock our rooms) very exciting. Actually, in the shadow of the COVID lockdown that ended here 8 days ago, Uganda enforces a 7pm curfew, which means that many of the stores close at 6 or even earlier. This resulted in us running between 4 stores in the rain trying to find anyone who would sell us a few bottles. Dr. Acharya ended up soaked!

Eventually we returned to our lodging and worked on our presentation for the following day (without wifi). We also did a dry run with our prototype, which failed to work as expected. We spent the last two hours of the day working to resolve those issues and we finally hit the hay at 22:00 local time (15:00 EST). A long day!