Much to my delight, when I woke up Sunday morning I discovered that Juvenal Kagarama, a vet at one of the Rwandan schools, was also staying here. We met last November at the Commonwealth Conference and got along extremely well. A bonus as with changes in my plans for Rwanda it’s not likely we would have stopped by at his school as was initially thought. He is here for two weeks supervising a group of Rwandan students doing clinical practice, and has arranged for Betty to make his meals. So I’ve been cashing in on solid lunches and dinners, which have been really good. Betty makes fairly standard Ugandan dishes, but she has the touch of making everything quite delicious. So Sunday I sorted through my stuff, deciding what to leave here rather than drag off on safari – lots of books and papers and some fancier town clothes, and trying to make sense out of gorilla histories and gross PM reports and my histo. Not totally successful I’m afraid.
Monday I did a quick run into town first thing to pick up some tickets – I’m becoming quite adept at getting around – taxi into town, boda the last way when I didn’t know exactly where the place was, and then taxi back. The boda guys were hilarious – I bargained down a bit to 2,500 Ush and the boda next to him asked how much I paid – I told him and asked if I would have been better with him – he laughed and said he would have charged 6,000 Ush, the muzungu (white) price. On the way back I overpaid the conductor ( I still can’t figure out how the prices change) and he even gave me my “balance” – or change and told me I paid too much!
The rest of the day was spent bent over the multiheaded microscope with Denis screening gorilla cases. Although his MSc was on intestinal disease in gorillas, he hasn’t had a huge number of cases to look at so it was a bit of the blind leading the blind in terms of normal gorilla histology, especially given the fact that the tissues were not well preserved. But we persevered and got through everything except one final case of an animal that was bopped on the head while out of the forest crop raiding – cause of death known so the timing on the path isn’t as crucial as for some of the other cases. If we only had another few days….. Seems like that is always the way it works. But I’m not delaying my holiday so it has to be good enough!
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