Tomorrow is my first day at the hospital – we went for a tour today and it is completely indescribable as almost everything here is. It is divided into Old Mulago and New Mulago. Old is a web of dozens of smaller buildings housing wards including TB care, pediatric oncology, labor and delivery (just to name a few). The buildings are built with red dirt paths connecting them and several of the walkways are covered. New Mulago is a six-story open air more modern hospital building with newer operating theatres, more labor and delivery, more infectious disease wards, the ER, cardiology and many other specialties.
I hope I have time to walk around with a camera because it’s so frustrating to write this all down but not really having the words to capture what I’m seeing. But that seems to be the resonating theme for me here: It is something that you can learn SO much about a place before arriving and that knowledge has nothing on the actual experience of it. No matter how prepared I was, no matter how much research I did, no matter how good of a traveler I might be, nothing could accurately describe the experience here, and I’m assuming that tomorrow’s day at work will be no different.
As for tomorrow, I’ll be on the labor and delivery floor unless things change (which is also common here…you have to go with the flow or you’re bound to be frustrated). I naively thought it was an error in my information packet that 27,000 babies are born here each year. It was not a typo: I’m told 80-100 deliveries per day.
Click here if you’d like to read more about the hospital.
