Uganda Public Health Intersession 2020

Our journey to the home stay included a brief visit to the Equator. Here is a photo of the ladies in the program gathered together. Once we arrived in Kalisizo, we got a course in local culture from Ivan, one of our hosts from the community outreach team at the Rakai Health Science Program (RHSP). After the lesson, we went off to spend the first night with our home stay families. Here are Prisca, Han and Veena pictured with a few of their family members in the sitting room at their home.

Crash Course in communication at Owino Market To shop at Owino, first you have to get there. The traffic in the city center of Kampala is thick and overwhelming! Here we are, preparing ourselves to face the busyness and business in the market. The shopping trip, a disguised lesson in team members learning to communicate, was quite successful. Each shopping group was charged with trying to purchase the most outlandish T-shirt. This shirt, selected by the HIV study theme group, won the grand prize. Nick is now the happy owner of the Owino Market shirt of the year! Ndere Show Our Kampala accommodations are at the Ndere Center, which is also home to the world class Ndere Troupe. Three days a week, people come from all over the world to watch the show on the 9-acre grounds lush with gardens and several amphitheaters. The show is a terrific lesson in Ugandan culture, including cultural concepts of stress, time, love, and community.

Welcome to the blog of the 2020 Uganda Childhood, Health and Society intersession program.  This blog is written by undergraduates studying public health via a unique peer-to-peer experiential program that takes place across the country of Uganda each January. We are completing studies at Johns Hopkins University and Makerere University, and although we study on different continents, our purposes are exactly the same. We want to eliminate health disparities and create public health solutions for infectious disease as well as social and behavioral health problems. Tuesday, January 7 was Day 1 Orientation We bonded quickly by sharing experiences. Our program focuses on engagement in candid cultural exchange and we wasted no time sitting down and getting to know one another. We manage to have a lot of fun doing it. Mackenzie is about to get flipped 360 degrees, in record time. This is trust! Training Of RUral Women in Uganda (TORUWU) This organizati...