Getting Ready, T-4 days!

Hello everyone! This will be my first ever blog posting. I was hoping to create a page to allow people to track what I am up to during my up coming trip to Uganda. We will see if this works, no promises on how often I will update!

Over the next 5 weeks, from April 4th to May 9th I will be working in and traveling around Uganda. I will be traveling to Uganda with Lisa Hamilton, a good medical school friend of my, for those of you who do not know her. We both have arranged a 4 week medical rotation through Makerere University. We leave O'hare this Saturday evening, have a nice long lay over in London during which we plan to do some site seeing, then on to Uganda. We finally land in Entebbe, Uganda (outside of the capital Kampala) at about 7 am on Monday morning.

During the 5 weeks in Uganda, I will be doing a 4 week medical rotation. Although the details are not going to be finalized till we arrive, the general plan is for me to do 1 week of Emergency Medicine in the capital Kampala at the large hospital there, Mulago Hospital. The remainder of the time, I will travel to a smaller city, Tororo which is near the border with Kenya and work with a doctor there. My understanding is that he has a clinic in Tororo and also does some traveling clinics to smaller villages throughout the area. We will see what ends up happening!

At the end of our rotation, Lisa and I have set aside 1 week to do some traveling and site seeing. We are hoping to get permits to go "gorilla trekking" in Southeast Uganda. The endangered mountain gorilla is only located in a pocket of land shared between Uganda, Rwanda, and DRC and very few permits are availabe to see them, so Lisa and I are going to keep our fingers crossed that we can make it work. We are also hoping to do some Class 5 rafting on the Nile while there.

Keep posted for updates of my travels :)