Internet has been running slower than a slow thing lately.  Patience......Talking of slow things here is a snail I spotted the other day when I was walking to work in the rain, it's about 4 inches long

Forgot to mention the fashions in my last update.  The ladies, mostly outside the town, wear very colourful outfits with very pointy shoulders - sometimes rising quite a few inches above shoulder height. They look very graceful as they are walking along.  The shoulder designs look like a feat of engineering.

Had some drama last night.  Got back from town (I'd ventured into the fruit and veg part of the market this time) and it suddendly sounded as if it was pouring down with rain.  If only.....a water pipe had burst in Dr Shabani's bedroom and water was flooding out - by the time the head of maintenance had been tracked down and the stop cock had been located (noted for future reference) 3 bedrooms had been flooded and most of the main sitting room.  Shabani had created a bit of  damn to try to stop the water flooding out of his room.  Much of the evening was spent on clean up - dustpan was v effective in scooping up water!  Some of the guest house is now without water - I'm lucky - I had water and didn't get flooded.  Who knows what will be available later...

Bit of controversy here at the moment over a local forest.  There are government proposals to give some of the land to a private company to grow sugar cane.  It said that the land was deforested however when MPs went on a fact finding mission they discovered the land was still forested!  There are acres and acres of sugar cane grown here - plans to chop down an important forest to grow sugar cane seem like madness - particuarly when there is uncultivated land elsewhere.  They've been experiencing land slides near here and people have been killed  these are likely to have been exacerbated by deforestation.

There was a (peaceful) protest in Kampala against the government yesterday.  Protesters were soaked with pink water and dispersed......

Was on the ward this morning finding out a bit more about the work of the nurses.  There was a boy who had come back after surgery.  He was given morphine because he was in such pain.  He had a very big brain tumour which should have been operated on years ago.  After surgery all the side of his head was swollen - he couldn't really open his eye, he was in a right state poor thing.  He was with his grandmother who was very worried about him, however people all over Uganda speak different languages and so can't always converse with each other unless they can speak English.  It must be quite frightening being so worried and not knowing what exactly is happening because you cannot communicate.

I also saw Dick being brought back from surgery. I think he suffers a lot with fits.  Here's a photo of Dick I took earlier in the week.  He was eating a lolly and didn't know his tongue had gone blue so I took a photo to show him.  He was quite weak when he came back to the ward as he'd up most of the night vomitting - he still managed to raise me a little smile though.

Nearly finished my initial report - I've a meeting  (hopefully) with the Medical Director tomorrow so should hopefully be able to finalise it and work out what I'm going to do next. I've been looking at information flows within the hospital, working out the high level process - from the time a patient registers to when they go out the other end and have follow up appointments - and mapping what happens in terms of information during this process.  It seems a patients name and no is recorded at least 30 times during a stay.....The report identifies potential issues and improvement actions.  I'm also producing a framework in terms of how the information could be logically stored which they can use if they implement an electronic system..