Mulago walkabout

I walked into an open room with high ceilings and the smell of cardboard. A long bench had a switched off computer missing a keyboard and a mouse. A bunch of twenty-somethings huddled about the bench threw me a cursory glance and went back to their conversation.

I interrupted a short lady with wide hips and a purposeful gait and asked her for Nancy.

"Oh madam Nancy! You follow me".

Nancy was scribbling some notes on a notepad which she handed over to the lady next to her and gave me a welcoming smile. She was to take me to all the clinics at Mulago so I could meet the pharmacists and clinicians and invite them personally to a CME being held the next week.

Nancy walked fast and avoided the stairs. We waited at the lifts and crammed in there with laundry hampers, hospital beds and supply crates to go up one floor. I have trouble summarising Nancy. She was not cold but neither was she generous with her words. She let me do the talking and added her "goodbyes" and "thankyous" at the end.

We jumped drains and squeezed through spaces between buildings. We waded through the PMTCT clinic packed with mothers and infants. The kids seemed to belong to every mother and to none. They flowed in the space between the seated mothers, from one bench to the other, around corners and into rooms. No one seemed to be tracking their movements or maybe they all did.

The TB centre was a breezy building with streak of greys flowing down it's beige walls and a tin roof that crackled as it expanded in the rising heat. It had benches outside with around twenty people in surgical masks. The lady at the desk wore one and so did all the doctors in the room. Three doctors sat on a long table with foot high piles of files and seemed to be interviewing three different patients. In all the clinics, we were asked to barge through closed door to the examination rooms and each time I'd expect a topless lady to scream at me for invading her privacy. Most patients just looked at me with glassy eyes while the physician shifted his attention to me.

We ended back at the main pharmacy and had a customary chat with Nancy's boss. He gave me the once over looking above his glasses instead of through while chewing on his rice and beans. He was skeptical but I'm not entirely sure about what exactly.