Arrival

Arrived safely in Lugulu late in the afternoon of March 23, after an 8 hour bus ride from Nairobi. I am still not adjusted to the 7 hour time difference, so am wide awake at 3 a.m. writing this.
The journey here involved an overnight flight from Philadelphia to London, then a 3 hour layover and an eight hour flight to Nairobi. I stayed 2 nights and one day in Nairobi with my friend Bruce Dahlman, a family physician from Minnesota who has been living in Nairobi while working to support family medicine training programs throughout East Africa. I had just a few errands to do in Nairobi, including a brief stop at Friends International Centre, where Nairobi Yearly Meeting and FWCC are both headquartered.
The rains have started just in the past few days; an hour of heavy rain this afternoon just as I was arriving, and then on and off all through the night. After two dry years and poor crops, everyone is happy to see the rains start. The fields have been prepared, and soon farmers will be planting. The rains bring the vegetation back to life and allow the crops to grow, but of course the rains will also bring more malaria. My friend Jan (who along with her husband Ray replaced us in Lugulu in 1995, but now works at the government hospital down the road in Webuye) says that at the government hospital they have 95 children in their 40 bed children’s ward. The government heavily subsidizes hospital care for children under 5, so Lugulu will not have many children here, as it would be much more expensive for families.
Some things seem new and different: in Nairobi, lots of big new shiny buildings; cell phones everywhere; and at least here in the hospital, many computers. But other things stay the same: the power was out overnight and much of the morning; and even though it has started to rain, there is no running water in the house (hard to know why, but I suspect the water table dropped enough during the prolonged dry period that the borehole that was drilled when we were here in 1994 is not longer reliable).
Today was taken up largely with meeting new people and renewing old acquaintances; tomorrow I start work in earnest.