Missions -- Uganda; Negrillos; Uganda -- Description and travel
After the affiliation of the Toro branch with the medical headquarters
at Mengo, the work was placed on a far more satisfactory basis. A report
had to be sent in every three months with statistics dealing with
daily attendance at the dispensary, out-patients’ visits, etc. Then,
in addition to this, a list was made out yearly of drugs and dressings
needed for the forthcoming twelve months, which ensured an adequate
and regular supply of medicine. The work, however, passed through a
varied succession of small vicissitudes. Our faked-up building had to
be pulled down, as the site was needed for a new missionary’s house,
but in exchange we got a brand-new airy dispensary. We scarcely knew
ourselves with such spacious surroundings, and the two little native
assistants, who had been trained to attend to all dressings, assumed
quite a ridiculous air of professional importance, to say nothing of
the feelings of the quack doctor! But at the end of a fortnight we were
completely evicted from our grand premises—patients, staff, drugs, and
all. A violent storm had destroyed the only house that had been standing
ready to receive a fresh addition to the staff of missionaries, which was
then only within a few days of arrival in Toro. As there was not another
available inch, the new dispensary had to be speedily converted into a
domicile.
Feeling decidedly crest-fallen, my little assistants and I packed up all
the medical impedimenta and carried them over to a little reed building
that had been the reading school till the constantly increasing inside
pack had necessitated more ceremonious premises.
We completed our removal, and had not been installed many weeks when a
furious hurricane swept over the little hill capital, and succeeding in
throwing our new dispensary completely over on its side. When the debris
and roof were cleared away, a most heterogeneous collection of medicines
were revealed, all hopelessly mixed up in wild confusion. Pills of every
shape and form were scattered about, bottles of liquid drugs, and stock
mixtures had been smashed up, and the combination of odours was enough to
frighten away all the microbes for miles round. Once more, and for the
fourth time, the dispensary was transferred to different quarters, and
there it remained until the present complete medical compound was erected
at the advent of the much-longed-for and long-expected doctor in 1904.
Through the generosity of a friend in England the “Gurney Hospital” and
new dispensary were then built, together with the doctor’s house. The
former is a good-sized building consisting of two wards for thirty-four
patients, besides consulting and waiting rooms, while the broad ten-foot
verandah which runs all round allows ample space for convalescents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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