Away We Go

I'm sitting in the LEX airport waiting for my flight to ATL where I meet up with Ginger and Meagan before going off to Amsterdam. I have already benefited from random stranger's help with my bags and waiving fees and I hope I encounter the same generosity throughout my trip.

For those of you who don't know what I will be doing, here is a run-down. In Amsterdam, we will be the typical tourists. Meagan hasn't been to Europe and Ginger and I haven't been to The Netherlands and we had to fly through there on our way to Uganda, so why not!? If anyone has some recommendations for sightseeing, do tell!

We will be in Amsterdam for 6 days, then we are off to Kampala for 7 weeks. My dear friends Ginger McKay and Meagan Brown have been working for the last two years on an evaluation of a non-governmental organization called the SAS Foundation. It was founded by Dr. Richard Muhumuza, a Ugandan who received his medical education in the US, who while practicing medicine in Baton Rouge also wanted to address health care in his homeland. SAS consists of a low-cost primary health care clinic in Kampala and an HIV education program taught in primary and secondary schools throughout the country. The curriculum is taught by local mentors, some of whom are openly HIV positive.

I will join in on Ginger and Meagan's anthropological research and also network with humanitarian aid and development workers throughout Uganda as pre-dissertation research. Hopefully I will find a dissertation site, but I mostly wanted to get my feet on African soil. A friend who wanted to do research in one country got there and didn't like. It can happen. So I wanted to be sure Sub-Saharan Africa was really for me.

While Ginger and Meagan are my dear friends, they are also gifted anthropologists and academics. Ginger has been accepted to the Public Health Department at the Oregon State University and Meagan has been accepted to the Public Health Department at Louisiana State University. Both will pursue doctoral degrees and have been fully funded. With the rise in unemployment, grad schools have been flooded with record numbers of applications. Now more than ever, there acceptance and funding is a profound accomplishment. Since I just finished my first year in the doctoral program at the University of Kentucky's Anthropology Department, it is an exciting time for all of us.

So that's why I'm going and what I will be doing! The majority of my trip is going to be hard work, but I will try to keep this updated with my shenanigans. Last summer Ginger and Meagan said they wanted to hear about the everyday things in American life. The boring, mundane, things I will miss so please comment and keep me up to date on your shenanigans too!

My flight is about to board. Take care all and I'll post again in Amsterdam!