I never thought this would happen, but we got made fun of today for having short white coats. The three of us had been pleased with ourselves, thank you very much, for actually getting to wear white coats of any length. Unlike all other medical schools, UW doesn’t believe in inflating our egos until the end of second year. So when we found out that we’d have to bring white coats to Uganda if we wanted to be believable medical students, we jumped at the chance (Well, I did. I won’t speak for anyone else.) But today, one of our Ugandan counterparts, a Makerere university medical student, pulled on the corner of my coat, as if trying to stretch it out to the proper length, and befuddled, exclaimed “your coat is too short!”
It almost felt like that day in 7th grade when a 6th grader (can you believe that?) made fun of me for wearing the wrong style of capris. When I got home and told my mom about what had happened, she sat me down and taught me some really biting comebacks, like, “well at least I’m good at school” or “Well maybe I’m a trendsetter.” Thanks, Mom, that definitely skyrocketed me to the pinnacle of popularity.
Anyway, I had to explain to our new colleague that in the US, we wear short coats until we graduate from medical school. We get to wear long coats when we’re actually doctors. Which makes me think, in all probability, I’ll be wearing a short coat for the rest of my life, but that’s for a different blog.
So we spent the first half of the day touring Mulago National Referral Hospital, which is where Makarere health sciences students train. We spent the morning poking our heads into each ward, being told we needed to go through the department administrator in order to go inside each ward, walking to the next ward, and finally getting so exhausted that we all sat down for a break.
Also I just watched The Last King of Scotland yesterday, so it was kind of cool to pick out the paces at Mulago where they must have been filming.
We left at noon and came back at 4 to have a meeting with Sam, who told us that we’ve a couple of administrative snags in the project. Oh, goody. Hopefully, everything will work out, and all will go on as planned…
Laila joon, You missed the point of all those biting comebacks! The intent was to provide such lame distraction from the actual problem that you would forget all about it and concentrate on how lame your parents were; which would, by default, make you cooler as you could then relate to all the other kids that thought their parents were lame.
First, you will wear a very long coat someday, and not too far in the future. And second, how much do I love your 7th grade story? TTTTHHHHHIIIIIIIISSSSSS much.