July 23 Update

Wow.....busy is an understatement. The past three days have been beyond hectic but we have really gotten some good information. Tuesday we went and visited a school during which we went to every individual class and quizzed them on the material they are taught by the foundation. The kids were very excited and eager to share and the experience was amazing. We also got to see and experience some other parts of the city that we don't get to see a lot. The taxi took us almost 20 minutes longer to get to our meeting place than it does for us to walk because traffic was so bad, but hey...you deal with it. Later that night a friend of ours brought over a documentary about Phillip Lataya. He was a famous musician from Uganda whom was the first public figure to announce his HIV status. It was the first step in helping to fight the disease and to begin to combat the stigma that is associated with it. It was a very interesting documentary.
Thursday morning there was a meeting at 9:00 at the foundation. As usual it ended up being canceled. There is a huge event called Presidential Elections to be held on Friday. The event recognizes the Presidents that have been elected from each school involved in the program and then lets them all campaign for the title of the city wide President. Everyone seems to be very excited but the planning has been so last minute and rushed that it is bound to have some issues arise. It was fortunate that the meeting was canceled though because we were able to interview some of the mentor supervisors and to also have some impromptu discussion with some of the mentors on the program. They had a lot to say, both good and bad, and were quick to make sure their names were not included. I think we will end up with a good number of recommendations for the program to work on over the coming year despite the fact that we were prevented from conducting the planned research. After the meeting we got ourselves some food and then headed back to Kapalagala. This is the "slum" area where one of our informants lives and that we were meeting for coffee. Since we had cooked him dinner a couple of weeks earlier he was insisting that he treat us to at least coffee. We headed out there and he was surprised. He complimented us on how down to earth we are and said that he was apprehensive to ask us to come there because he thought we wouldn't want to hang out in that kind of area with him. We told him that we really enjoyed it cause it gave us a chance to talk to so many people and thanked him for the opportunity. It just so happened that his dad was in town from Rwanda so we asked if we could meet him. This shocked Willie as well because it made him proud that we would offer and want to meet his father. His dad is a business man that runs hotels in Rwanda and then sends the money back home to the kids. On average he is in Rwanda for 20 days or so and then comes back to Uganda for the last week and a half of each month. It is a much better situation that most people have. He was very excited to meet us and we had some really interesting and insightful conversation.
Today we had scheduled meetings at the Ministry of Health with the Commissioner of Planning and the Commissioner of Quality Control. After arriving and waiting around for about an hour and a half we were told that our meeting with the Commmissioner of Planning had been canceled but we could still meet with the Commissioner of Quality Control. Well, we met him but he just took our names down and heard about our research and asked that we come back some other time. It really wasn't what we had hoped for and he was not interested in the least. Oh well. We then went to Mulago Hospital to talk to the lady in charge of resubmission of our IRB approval. She was more frustrating than helpful. Well, she wasn't even really willing to help. Period. It was very frustrating and caused us to just head home rather than try and run other errands. So, most of our day was waisted but we have plenty planned for this evening that will hopefully turn it all around.

Hopefully you are still enjoying the blog. Things have gotten so crazy that I had to change the layout a little bit. There is so much information that I haven't even been able to include here that I know all of you would find fascinating. The good thing is that I will be back soon and you can hear about it in person.
Cheers!