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Nurse, kill me please? posted on March 28, 2010 - 12:15am
Stephen collapsed and was rushed to a top Kampala hospital in a state of what his wife described as “near-death”. The doctors jumped into action, plugging in needles hooked into intravenous fluids, taking blood samples to laboratories, and slotting emergency medicines into Stephen’s mouth. But then, thirty minutes into all the action, Stephen started suffering seizures. The doctor on hand quickly worked it out: “He’s allergic to that drug,” the fellow declared, beginning the process of reversing its administration. The allergic reaction was quickly recorded, and a caution slip placed on Stephen’s hospital file (top Kampala hospitals have these). The next day, shortly after noon, much to the relief of Stephen’s wife, the patient was feeling far more stable even though the diagnosis had come in worrying: appendicitis. Surgery was required. Just then, a nurse walked in with a pack of medicine and issued it.
The Ellen Diaries posted on March 20, 2010 - 10:47am
Ellen is the highly inefficient secretary-cum-personal assistant of a weak-minded self-employed friend of mine based in Kampala. My Friend has known of her inefficiency from the day she submitted her job application, giving one a hint of how weak his mind is. Concrete proof that my Friend’s brain has been adversely affected by the dust of Kampala is the fact that he has kept Ellen in employment for a year and a half now, in spite of incidents such as the below. His excuse, though, is that he only needs Ellen to run basic ‘one+plus+one=equals two” errands, and nothing more. “I can’t even issue her with more than one instruction at a time,” he says, “but that’s okay, because I have a system.” To illustrate his point, he recounted the story of the week – and yet a typical, everyday occurrence for him:
Seriously, WTF Ug? posted on March 14, 2010 - 7:58am
Why is the idiocy factor so much higher these days? I’m not talking about my maid – that one and all her previous cousins and sisters have always been lower down the cerebral ladder. Yesterday evening, for example, in spite of my having told her in three languages (English, Luganda and Runyankore) that I wanted her to buy six sticks of roast pork from Bamboo, she still managed to hear “Spend about one hour looking for a place that will sell you a kilo of raw but relatively old pork at exactly Ushs6,000.” What impresses me is the way she accomplishes such tasks – I know, for instance, that if the closest chap selling raw but relatively old pork had been eighteen miles away but only offered a kilo at Ushs5,700, she would have walked back empty-handed. Irritating, of course, but one can go without pork on the occasional evening, or even send the wretched wench back out on the errand again in the hope that she will get it right eventually.