August 3 - August 6 - Travel Diaries
- Teja Sathi
- Aug 6, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 21, 2023
This trip, we are accompanied by a new team of graduate students from the JHU Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID). The team is doing similar ethnographic work that we did last year at this time – also related to breast cancer. Read our blogs from August 2022 to know what Kim Hwang and I were up to then. We are mentoring this new team while continuing our own work to serve the state of breast cancer diagnostics in Uganda.
Thursday, August 3 – Friday August 4
Our travels started in Dulles Airport (IAD), where I met the team in the Qatar Airways check-in line. They had made the trip to IAD that morning from Baltimore. We got all our documents checked and headed to our gate. Something unique about this new graduate team is that each member has a different nationality! When it comes to travel, that means there are some differences in scrutiny from airport and immigration officials. After a 13 hour flight, we arrived in Doha, Qatar where we started our ~24 hour layover. We checked into our hotel rooms in the city and after a quick, but filling breakfast on land, we set out to explore the city for a few hours. We spent time in the Old Souk, tried some new food, and enjoyed the bustle of the market in the evening.
Saturday, August 5
The next morning, we headed back to the airport to hop on our flight to Entebbe, Uganda. We were met with the familiar “Welcome to Uganda” wall at baggage claim and purchased sim cards. After we picked up our bags and got the logistics squared away, we found our friends from Makerere University who would be helping us with transportation during our time in Uganda. We made the drive from Entebbe to Kampala and checked in to our accommodations near Mulago Hospital.
In the evening, Dan – our friend and collaborator (BME graduate from Mbarara University of Science and Technology) and Ishir (a BME undergraduate student from Johns Hopkins doing research in Uganda over the summer) met us at the hotel for dinner and we all had a good catch-up with introductions to the new team.
Sunday, August 6
On our first morning in Kampala, we had a breakfast at the accommodations and did some preparatory work for our training sessions in Mulago during the weekday. More on that later.
We then headed to Acacia Mall for water and supplies before checking out a market and buying a pineapple 😊 In the evening, we had dinner with a faculty member from Johns Hopkins, Dr. Jarso, who lived in Uganda for a few years teaching and conducting research. He will be the graduate team’s in-country advisor for the rest of the trip. He shared some of his insights and rolodex of contacts with the team from his time in-country. We spent time helping the graduate team prepare for their first ethnographic interviews the following day then called it a night.
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