UgandAshis 54 - Lecture 1 Half Moon Monkey Mountain

UgandAshis 54

August 28, 2009

Lecture 1 – Half Moon Monkey Mountain

Tuesday evening and I am sitting in the office chatting away with the head of the public health department. Convinced my first lecture is Wednesday evening we are talking about our new students at the long distance learning program. It is quite an enterprise and exiting to be part of. Students in 5 countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Sudan and Burundi) I stroll to the board and to my amusement I see that the lecture times have changed. Instead of Thursday I am lecturing on Tuesday. In fact the third year has just missed 3 hours of lectures.

So Wednesday the students had a new chance. The topic was vaccination and the course is called ‘Control of Communicable Diseases II’. The first hour I am sure I must have flustered some of the students as I was talking of the opportunities of web 2.0 , pod-casts, vod-casts, digital epidemiological mapping of outbreaks, open source texts, pub med, power point and e-mails. Only 2 out of 6 that had showed up had an e-mail address. It is time to change that fact. The lecture we were in had about 15 computers and the next door computer lab has 50 computers available and a reasonably fast internet connection. Then again the lecturers share one computer from 1997 for the 9 public health lecturers as supplied by the university. It is why all lecturers tend to buy their own laptop.

Back to the class I had a blast talking about the constraints and opportunities of drawing up vaccination program point in case the refugee camp in Oure Cassoni Chad. We also discussed the failure of the eradication program for poliomyelitis in Nigeria. The third hour I had the students group and think of the different step to design and implement a vaccination program in a population of refugees. Their contributions were highly sensible and the exercise was fun and educational. As a group they are birds of all kinds of plumage. There are clinical officers, high school leavers, district medical evaluators and a teacher. First class had a turn-out of 50%. Their year (the second year) is 12 people.

With my parents and my house mate Liz we visited the new compound near Saca lake. It is stunning and it shall be a pleasure to be lecturing there from next year. In fact the compound shall be opened with the graduation ceremony of last year’s students. The total number of students should have been around 700 last year and this first year’s enrollment seems to be around 650. These numbers need to be confirmed but the university has a big impact in Fort Portal and the surrounding areas. For many students travelling to Kampala or Mbarara would simply not be affordable and here is a brand new university with a hortus in their backyard. What more could a student wish for?
Perhaps a sighting of a monkey on the mountain.

Namaskar,

Ashis Brahma