Most people dress really nicely in Kampala and especially at our university. A lot nicer than I dress at home. Women are often in stylish dresses, skinny jeans, and leggings and men wear khakis and long sleeved button downs. I don’t know how they handle the heat! Apparently they find it “cold” at night when in fact it’s beautiful weather. In the rural villages people don’t dress so fancily, but as we’ve seen, they take out long colorful dresses for holidays like Easter. In the slums they obviously do not dress fancily either, but it is a lot more common than I had imagined.
This week we visited a mental health facility. One of the girls on my group is a psych major and is aiming to conduct research there. Unlike Mulago, it was a really nice place exactly as you would see in the U.S. But like Mulago, we were taken all around the facility, into patient wards and even a private room.
There is an outdoor area for the patients to enjoy, yet most of them were laying on either the concrete or the grass and sleeping. My understanding was that patients were kept out of the bedroom as much as possible to keep them from sleeping all day, but that could be wrong. I found it kind of disturbing that some people were curled up on the concrete instead, but again, I may have misinterpreted and maybe they enjoy sleeping there because it’s cooler. Another odd thing about the facility was that they treat drug and alcohol abuse as if it was a mental illness; they have a special ward for it. Additionally, there is a ward for individuals who were previous gunmen; so, all the staff members are trained to shoot a gun “just in case”.
This facility had 100 nurses, about 750 patients, and 10 DOCTORS. (Calling all Psych majors! You are needed!!) Psychiatric treatment is extremely limited in Uganda and is highly associated with stigma. Many patients do not want to go home at all after treatment for fear of being ostracized and abused due to their past illness. Some patients do not have a home to go back to at all. Many of the patients were there due to war trauma. The woman who presented to us described vividly how they feared being “cut”, had their families lost or murdered, and couldn’t sleep at night.
All in all, another disturbing hospital visit that made me extremely grateful to be a U.S. citizen. However, those facilities were much nicer than many of the shack homes of Kampala. Minus the lack of freedom, it almost seems as it would be much more comfortable to reside there.
…The longer I am here, the more I realize how much I love home. Motonony just seems more and more enticing…
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