It ain't s'posed ta go that way...

...that was the comment from Kathleen (a Scottish missionary nurse friend of Gregg and Karen) about our little adventure that started earlier this afternoon...

Gregg, Russ, and I were spending the day in Kampala together, taking care of some financial matters and absorbing the culture of the city. We had just had lunch and were walking up a road called Bugunda around 2:00pm towards the bus station to check on schedules. Russ was following behind Gregg pretty closely and didn't see that Gregg had just stepped over an open manhole in the sidewalk. It could've happened to anyone, you know when you're walking sometimes and you look away briefly and assume that the sidewalk is going to stay flat, but you trip over a raised bit of concrete. Well, this was more than a little bump in the sidewalk. I guess city maintenance here can't keep up with all the people stealing manhole covers to make a few shillings on scrapmetal.

So anyway, Russ didn't see the open manhole hazard and fell four feet straight down into it and landed on the tip of his ringfinger breaking it. The blood and the crooked finger and the pain nearly caused him to pass out on the hot sidewalk right then and there. Russ sat up and I stayed with him while Gregg went for help. A sympathetic lady selling souveniers on the street kindly offered us her handkerchief and some water which we politely had to refuse. I didn't have any spring water left in my bottle from lunch and had nothing to wipe the blood with, but we thought it was better to not take risks with street water and a questionable rag.

Gregg waved down a taxi and asked the driver to take us to the International Hospital on such and such road (you don't want to go to the Ugandan hospital, so I'm told), and the driver said that he thought the hospital had moved to another part of town. Gregg used his cell phone to call a fellow missionary to confirm the new location and explain the directions to the driver partly in English and partly in Lugandan. All of that took about twenty minutes as Russ's finger throbbed and the color drained from his face. After obtaining accurate directions, our driver sped us across town to the hospital on streets and dirt roads jammed with trucks and mopeds and cars and bicycles and walkers and big buses all swerving around and jockeying for position in this teeming city with no traffic lights, traffic cops, or traffic laws for all we know.

The hospital was a great relief to see--clean, modern, etc. It took about three hours but they cleaned everything up, x-rayed the finger and put a splint on it. Russ goes back to see an orthopedic surgeon for a checkup on Tuesday. Total medical expense: 54,000 shillings ... price of cokes on the veranda overlooking the city at sunset: 2400 shillings... value of memories and lessons learned: priceless.

After a great dinner of Lake Victoria Tilapia, potatoes, and curry sauce that Karen made, we spent the evening visiting together and are now ready to go to bed. God has been so good to us!

By the way, Kathleen was holding up this x-ray of Russ's finger:




(We regret that this is the only image we've posted since our trip began. However, we don't have the USB cable for our camera and Gregg's printer/scanner doesn't have a memory card slot. Sorry!)