Thursday, 19 December 2013

And another week has gone by really fast – only 2 days left here in Uganda...

And the sunny, hot Ugandan weather is finally back after 2 weeks of lots of rain and muddy roads. Managed to get to Superhole for some paddling (together with Jessie last week in a borrowed kayak) and again yesterday. It was really good fun and I worked on my hole moves as on the wave moves – Superhole is just perfect for that!

Due to the heavy rains and crazy muddy roads the clinic was really quiet last week. But it´s back to normal now. And due to the Christmas holidays coming up more and more incredible cases come up every day. People who have been avoiding clinics and relying on local witch doctors now realize that they have to visit a clinic now before the clinic closes over Christmas! And it´s going to be worse for the next 2 days!

Here are some random shots from last week:



The kids at Superhole - always crazy for a picture ;-)

So I had a really good time here in the last 2 months – huge experience from the clinic, making lots of new friends while working there – thank you very much for the lovely time and the warm welcome and all the support! And then there was the kayaking, of course: The mighty Nile, as good as it gets, but threatened by 2 dam projects! One will be just a few kilometers downstream of the Hairy Lemon Island and – if built as intended will only leave 2 rapids for commercial rafting or kayaking on the river. The infamous waves at the Nile Special rapid will be gone too! And the other dam at the Murchison Falls section (Karuma Falls) will destroy another beautiful landscape in Uganda – both of them threatening the Number 1 income generating business here: Adventure Tourism! And expecting the generated electricity to stay in Uganda and help the local businesse grow and prosper is futile – as the Silverback-dam has shown: Electric power is still unreliable and blackouts often last 24 hours or more. And instead of supplying their own country with electricity it is sold to Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan!
For more information go here:

So we all hope that there is a chance the government will build a smaller dam so the stretch of whitewater that is here at the moment will be there for future generations of kayakers to explore!

So I´m leaving Uganda on Saturday to go back to rain, snow and freezing weather – and hopefully some snowboarding!

And I´ll definitely be back as soon as possible....

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Sunrise on the mighty river - definitly one of my most favourit moments out there!


Another week has gone by and there are only 10 days left for me in Uganda! I´ll definitely be parting with a laughing and a crying eye...
One one hand I really look forward to Winter and snowboarding on the other hand I´d love to stay here longer because of work and the people here and f course because of the kayaking!
I´ve been making quite some progress on the waves of the mighty White Nile – and a big part of this because of all the good advice I got on the weekends! Thank you very much Claire – I definitely had my best and funniest hours on the waves with you! One of it was my first ever Panam – and it is even on the video that was running for after-paddling video coaching! And of course Brendan, Dennis and Paul – thanks very much for the awesome times! Unfortunately Brendan and Paul left on Sunday after an awesome party and Claire and Dennis left the country today. So there is only one weekend left for me to go to the Hairy Lemon and work on my new moves: Panams and Backblunts – but I´ll make the best of it!


The clinic is busier every day and I´ve seen some cases that can only be seen as an even bigger failure in the already quite error-prone Ugandan health care system: a combination of sever malnutrition with a hydrocephalus plus signs pointing to sever malaria with complications equals the worst outcome you can imagine. We still try to help those kids but this feeling of utter helplessness is quite powerful.

Another sunrise 


And again - just fooling around with the colours!



 Beautiful colours of an early morning



Old boat vs. new kayak



A worldchampion - already smiling at 06:45 in the morning - and ready for another day in paradise! 



Guess what - another sunrise 



Early morning sessions on Club Wave - best light ever while Dennis is rippin´it! 



Dennis at work


In the meantime I got an amazing book to read: "Living the best day ever" - the memoir's of Hendri Coetzee! A truly inspiring book and lots of it happened right here where I sit now and type these lines...
It´s a book I can highly recommend - and it´s a fast read too.

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

I´ve had a really interesting week so far: On thursday was “Marie Stopes” day – a big family planning day at the clinic! A team of doctors came to the Allan Stone Clinic to perform tubal ligations in local anesthesia plus diversion of the patient - “focal local” as they call it here! So this is abdominal surgery under local anesthesia!
The only apply local anesthetics to the abdominal wall and then somebody has to distract the patients, for example asking them questions about their children or asking them to tell some other stories of their life. And it usually works really well! The doctors only wear sterile gloves and an apron but no facial mask! And normally there aren´t any complications. They have a special technique and instruments to perform the task of tubal ligation: with a special hook the palpate the uterus and the cervix and then go behind it to find the tubes and pull them to the surface and do the ligation. And normally the don´t even get antibiotics – and the room´s are far from a sterile environment. It´s incredible what the human body can endure!

One day earlier I went to the local soccer-field to train and play with the local kids! One of the clinic-employees organizes the training – and he´s doing a great job! After the 60 minutes of warm up, gymnastics and stretching I thought I wouldn´t be able to play soccer with the guys – but I could! And it was amazing to see them play – they really are into their sports but always without being aggressive or playing unfair. And this week on Tuesday there´s going to be a soccer game organized by the clinic: staff vs. patients – I´m really looking forward to this!!



After this unique experience I went for a slightly longer kayaking weekend to the Hairy Lemon!
The island is now a little bit busier on the weekends than it was before: Claire and her coach Dennis are still there as are Brendan and Paul. And Jessie and Jörg also joined us a day later.
So with all the good kayakers around my moves are improving every weekend – it´s really great to get tips and tricks from a world champion!
The weather is unexpectedly hot for this time of the year – it´s still supposed to be rainy season but we didn´t have rain for almost 10 days now. And during the day it´s really hot but we usually played a few rounds of frisbee golf - sometimes just making up new crazy routes to play around the island! Every now and then the frisbees go far from the goal and have to be rescued from the wet grip of the mighty Nile or some thorny bushes – including other players who also get stuck there trying to get to the frisbees.

Here are a few shots from last weekend:

Amazing night-sky - can you find Orion?



Dennis Newton @ Clubwave



Dennis Newton @ Clubwave



Fish-eye view of Clubwave



White egret on the shore at Nile Special/Clubwave 



...lookin for some food



Claire O´hara @ Nile Special



Paul Palmer @ Nile Special 



Paul again



and again!



 Brendan Kraiker @ Nile Special in an evening session



And Paul again - clean Blunt off the rope @ Nile Special 



Brendan rippin´ it @ Club Wave



And Brendan again @ Nile Special



Burnie - a long term inhabitant of the Hairy Lemon Island (a fruitbat) 



Early morning view from the island just before going to paddle at about 6:30



same as above...



Claire @ Club Wave just after the sun came over the ridge



Yesterday there was a soccer game close to the local primary school of Kyabirwa (the place I´m staying at) organized by Soft Power Health for children from a small village down the river. 20 of them were brought to the soccer pit in one Matatu (small vans used in Uganda for transportation – they would fit a maximum of 10 people in Europe) and we really had a lot of fun playing with them! And we´ll play again in 2 weeks!

So over all I´m having an extremely good time here in Uganda – enjoying the country and the people and of course the kayaking!  

Tuesday, 26 November 2013

Another 2 weeks have gone by really fast here in Uganda!

I´m seeing patients during the week at the clinic and on the weekend I´ve been paddling on the mighty Nile.
I had an amazing day on Saturday, paddling the river down to the Hairy Lemon with a big crew of kayakers. The boda-ride was a little bit scary though and Paul and me had a few close calls - so never chose a young boda driver - they usually can´t handle the boda boda! We were really lucky nothing happened - but: lesson learned! After 2 hours at Superhole, running the river, a short stop at the ferry station above Nile Special for Jabati we stayed at NIle Special for another 2 hours - a long day on the river! And on Sunday waterlevel was really good for Club Wave and went there before breakfast and went back for  another session after having breakfast. And on Monday morning Club Wave was at the best level I have ever seen it! Unfortunately Jessie Stone and me had to get back to Bujagali to the Clinic...









The clinic is busy as ever and this week on Thursday will be a huge family planning event: A gynecologist from the USA will be here and perform tubal ligations under local anesthesia - I´m really thrilled to see this - it´s going to be a huge experience!

And a really nice sunset here at the NRE-Camp tonight:



Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Uganda - finally back again!

After a short night at an hotel in Entebbe I jumped onto a previously arranged car to get to Bujagali and meet Felix or Gertrude, who own a boardinghouse. It was a journey of about 3 and a half hours – traffic police control included: We had the kayak inside the car on the passenger seat and the police officer said: “ What is this? What is a kayak? … This is not good … but it´s OK. Move on!“
My first encounter with the local police...
When we came to Bujagali the driver didn´t know the right location, so we had to go the clinic and ask for directions. So I met Dr. Charles today – instead of tomorrow. When we finally found the boardinghouse Gertrude showed me to my room, I unpacked a few things and walked back to the clinic to join the staff for lunch. Before that actually happened, I got first instructions in the lab.
Dr. Charles, the manager of the clinic, decided that I would spend my first week at the lab to see what tests there are available and how the would be done. There are not that many – mainly strip tests and microscopy. Though it´s not always easy when several things we needed to do those test where out of stock. And supplies usually take a day or two to arrive.
I´v been integrated into the lab-team pretty fast and carried out most of the tests on my own – except microscopy for malaria parasites – which you can´t really learn in a week.

 I´m staying in the blue house

On the first weekend I had arranged to go to the Hairy Lemon Island to do some kayaking. One of the drivers who usually works for the clinic agreed to get me there. The dirt roads were in an OK state so we got there pretty fast – I even managed to get a few surfs on Nile Special on friday evening – it was so amazing to be back on that wave! And the warm welcome to the Island by the staff who still remembered me from my last visit in march earlier this year – almost felt like coming home!
That weekend I met Harry – a Scottish kayaker who would join me on the Hairy Lemon for the next 2 weekends. At this time of the year the Hairy Lemon is still very quiet – only a few visitors and almost no kayakers are around.

In the following week I started to see patients with Dr. Charles and trying to get used to prescription practice here in Uganda. I´ve been doing some reading – but textbooks vary from what is actually happening here – mostly because of limited diagnostics. So usually the treatment is very broad to make sure an infection is sufficiently treated. Major complaints of the patients are infectious diseases – malaria of course on the top. And AIDS is a huge problem although Uganda is still a model country regarding the HIV epidemic.
Clearly also getting more and more a problem are the diseases of civilization like hypertension and diabetes – although the treatment varies again from what I´m used to: mostly older drugs that are no longer in us in Europe are prescribed due to the lower cost. And that is one of the bigger problems in Ugandan healthcare: cost! It is really amazing what they manage to do in the clinic with reduced possibilities.

The second weekend I went back to the Hairy Lemon Island – to get some more water underneath my kayak! And again I managed to get a few rides on Friday evening. And this time two other kayakers had arrived: Brendan from Canada and his buddy Paul from the US. Both quite used to big water and big waves, because they use to paddle the Ottawa river in Canada a lot! So the Island once more turned into a kayaking paradise! The waterlevels were good – low in the morning for surfing Club Wave and higher in the evening so we could surf Nile Special! With Brendan and Paul always keen to give advice it was really fun to be there. During the lazy times we played a lot of Frisbee Golf (like golf – just played with a frisbee along a course) or watched Paul´s amazing kayaking videos. Unfortunately those weekends are short and on Sunday evening I always have to go back to Bujagali and get ready for the next week.
This was also the weekend where there was a total solar eclipse in northern Uganda! In the southern region it was still good to watch – though after the moon covered about 60% of the sun clouds moved in and we couldn´t see the eclipse any more.



Paul on Club Wave

This week would be a lot more stressy than those before: On one hand I had to get into medical practice, on the other Dr, Charles asked me to do a presentation for him in a local bank and then In the clinic to. Unfortunately the internet at the Nile River Explorers Camp (which is free to use for Mzungus) is sketchy at the best times so it was hard to get by good facts on stroke in Uganda. And to make a presentation in an easy understandable way but also suitable for medically well trainied personnel at the clinic wasn´t easy. But it worked out and the presentation was well received – at the bank and at the clinic.
I also started seeing patients on my own with one of the nurses translating for me. I still had to ask my fellow doctors now and then – especially regarding referrals to hospitals or other specialists but otherwise – with the assistance of the nurses it went quite well.
On Thursday I joined a team from the clinic to go on the Family Planning Outreach – which was very interesting to see and also an adventure due the heavy rainfalls in the Jinja area. Some parts of the road got flooded and uite a few cars got stuck in there. Luckily we didn´t have to go into Jinja that day and only witnessed the chaos from a safe distance. The Family Planning is all about different methods of birth control: from shirt term (Condoms) to long term (injections and implants) to permanent (operation) and goes along with immunization of babies.

On the weekend I – of course – went to the Hairy Lemon again to meet the two boys and to celebrate Harry´s last weekend in Uganda! And we did get a party started on Friday evening with a few other visitors – young people from Austria and Germany who work in Kampala and spent their weekend on the White Nile. And it was a great party, I can say!
On Saturday we ran the river from Kalagala to the Hairy Lemon – Harry guiding us down (cause I dind´t remember all the various channels – and showing Brendan and Paul the famous rapids of the White Nile. We had a great day out on the river – always having in mind that in a not to distant future all those rapids could be flooded due to another dam being built downstreams. This would have an huge impact on the local tourism business and all the connected jobs – but is totally negated by the government. The local companies are now trying to raise the awareness of people – tourists and Ugandans alike – to this issue and we kayakers eagerly join in to spread the word!
Unfortunately this weekend the waterlevel wasn´t high enough for Nile Special but we had an awesome session at the Club Wave on Sunday morning – and due to the advice by Paul my moves are getting better and better!
This time of the year still being wet season doesn´t help with the waterlevels at all – it only makes the dirt roads slippery and at some points so deep that it always is an adventure to be out there in a car: you never know if you´re not getting stuck in the mud. Which didn´t happen yet – but only due to the immense driving skills of the local drivers.

So three weeks have gone by and here is my first blog entry from Uganda – I´ll try to do more reegular updates!

For more information: http://www.softpowerhealth.org/


Friday, 6 September 2013

Day 4 - K1 Men Prelims

Here are the pics from the Prelims:



Unfortunately I messed up my 2 runs...
I´m slightly disappointed, especially because I had some pretty good runs in the last official Training on Sunday.
But it was a lot of fun and a huge experience in any case!
And the next Worldchampionships will come for sure! Maybe even Olympics... who knows?
So over all I made 65th place.
My teammate Marcel unfortunately finished in 24th place - 400 points short of the cutoff to get into the quarterfinals. 1500 points is an extremely high cutoff - so the level is prettty high this year! Dane Jackson, who is the current leader, has 2700 points!!! 
I´m excited to see how high the scores will go in the Semi and Finals!!!

Thursday, 5 September 2013

Official Day 3!

Day 3 is over!
We saw the Prelims of the Squirt-Boaters (women and men) and the Prelims of the K1 Junior Women.
Here´s a link to some Photos I took:



And here is the livestream again!!! Tune in to see my Heat at about 21:40 central european time! My BIB-Number is 2!!!

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Prelims K1 Junior Men and OC1

The Juniors really showed where kayak freestyle is heading: especially Hunter Kataich from the USA and Max Karlsson from Sweden had amazing runs! I think with those scores the also would do great in the K1 Men Seniors competition!!!

Here is a link to some pics of todays preliminaries!!


And the official results of the first day!

Opening Ceremonies

And now the Worldchampionships are officially opened!!
There was a parade with a parade band in Bryson City and Cherokee Warriors shared some of their dances.
In the evening quite a few bands were playing at different locations throughout Bryson City - unfortunately the shuttles left at 10pm already...
Still it was a nice ceremony!

Here´s a video of the opening ceremony: http://www.freestylekayaking2013.com/

And there are 2 livestreams:



and another one (but not live at the moment):








Friday, 30 August 2013

My day off...

Since Monday this week the official nations training is on it´s way. This means one hour for about 20 kayakers (sometimes it´s only one nation but more often there are a few nations together), which equals about 4-5 runs per kayaker. This does not sound that much - but it is quite exhausting. Additionally I´ve been paddling in the morning too (there´s about one hour left for free training) so I decided to take another day off.
So how could I spend this day resting and being productive at the same time?
What about taking a few pictures of (almost) every nation training today and focusing on the faces??
And here are the results (click the link):

--> Freestyle Faces <--

(Those are to many pictures to upload to the blog, sorry)

So here are some random pictures from today:

Paddling with Juuso again- feels like Uganda ;)
Claire O´hara
Katya Kulkova
Max Karlsson in his brandnew Dagger Jitsu Carbon
Max again
Maria Lindgren
Jez Jezz