I’d like to share a story from
Africa that is very much linked to a small slice of
Saskatoon life.
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| Chrsitine Dranzoa outside the Faculty of Vet Med, 2002 |
I have a long history in Africa and for the last eight years
of my career as a wildlife veterinarian I took Canadian students from the
Western College of Veterinary Medicine to
Uganda. We would not have been able
to carry out this program if it had not been for the head of the
Department of Wildlife and Animal Resource
Management at the
Makerere
University veterinary school. Her name is
Christine Dranzoa
and through several exchanges of letters and email she laid on a tour for me in
2002 to see what was what before I actually took students there.
After that introductory tour it was relatively simple for me
to convince the powers-that-be in Canada that there was a really worthwhile
opportunity for Canadian students to learn a huge amount about veterinary
medicine, and much more, in a new setting.
I also found out that Christine has a remarkable history,
which I will compress (and which does not appear on any website). She was born
in West Nile, the region of the country where Idi Amin came from. When he was ousted the equally gruesome despot,
Milton Obote, targeted everyone in
West Nile. Christine, aged 12, fled to Sudan
as a refugee. She managed to get out of that nightmare and finished high
school, got her BSc and went on to her PhD work. At age 27 she spoke to the dean at the vet school about the lack of
a wildlife department and soon found herself not only founding one, but also
becoming its head! We worked with her near the end of that tenure as this rather grainy old footage, shot with an early version of a digital camera, shows.
For the first three years Dr. Dranzoa traveled with us in the field and worked with
the students on her specialty, which is birds. Her thesis work had been on the
nesting ecology of birds in partially logged forest fringes. We visited
Kibale National Park where Christine did her studies and used mist nets to capture
birds, ring them, and collect blood samples for disease studies. We even found
a couple of cases of avian malaria.
We were also able to secure funding at the WCVM to bring
Christine to Saskatoon to deliver a moving talk about issues related to
wildlife in her country. When my wife and I took her to one of our favourite
places,
Prince Albert National Park,
we
were lucky enough to see a huge swirl of snow geese above a slough near the
appropriately named town of
Duck Lake.
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| Snow goose cloud. Photo by Trudy Janssens, Photogrpahy One2One |
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When her eight years as department head were up Christine
was promoted to the post of
Deputy Director of the School of Postgraduate Studies
for the entire university (30,000 students, 3,000 graduate students) at age 35!
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| Artist's impression of the new campus |
Dr. Dranzoa has gone on to meet new challenges. Two years
ago (in her forties) Christine was tasked as one of the team founding a new
university in her home region, in the district of
Arua in the
West Nile sub-region. This was after elders in the community petitioned Uganda’s president,
Yoweri Museveni. It
was
founded in 2012 and has now been registered as
Muni University. Christine is the current Vice
Chancellor.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Christine has been
active in other fields, especially in ones related to women’s issues in Uganda
and beyond. Although we came to know her well and enjoyed our many visits with
her, she never told us that she co-founded and is Chairperson of
Nile Women Initiative an NGO which aims to address gender
disparities in her home region. She is also Honorary Secretary of the pan-African
Forum for African Women Educationalists.
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| Christine (r) with Fifi in 2003 and Angela, Chrstine's sister |
Over and above these remarkable achievements she has now
raised 18 children, none of them her own (she has never married). Most are kids
of her siblings who were either killed in Obote’s pogroms or died of AIDS. The
youngest, Fifi, is about to finish high school. A few are not even relatives,
but just orphan children who are friends of her extended family. When we
visited Christine’s home we discovered that the bedrooms were set up as
dormitories – boys and girls. How could it have been otherwise?
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| The nursing clinc is under construction |
Christine has written to me seeking help with equipment for
a nursing station, a small but much needed part of the campus, especially
during the construction phase when not only builders but also the
general public, will have it handy. She had
heard that there were organizations in Canada who could ship containers of
stuff to needy areas. After a bit of sleuthing I met (so far only by phone and
on line) a Regina-based nursing PhD who has shipped 79 containers to 19
countries in the last 10 years. Her name is
Pammla Petrucka. Dr. Petrucka has a well-oiled system and access to a large warehouse in Regina.
She can also get hold of a full array of medical equipment ranging from bangages to bedpans, tilt
beds to tubing and walkers to wheelchairs. On top of that she has a team of
volunteers who can fill a container in a single day. All the equipment is
donated, in good condition, and free. The problem is the shipping. It costs
about $25,000 to ship a container. This covers the cost of the container, the
physical act of transport, and the paperwork. The container is not returned and
is likely to end up being a useful addition at the destination. I have even
heard of containers being fitted with air conditioning before shipment.
My wife and I, and several of those former students have
managed to raise part of the funds needed to get one container to Uganda, but
cannot reach the full $25,000 needed to complete the shipment. We are
channeling our funds through the
Hospitals of Regina Foundation, which has NFP charitable status so that
our donors will receive tax receipts.
Apart from being an author and retired professor I am a
storyteller and have told stories about my career as a wildlife vet on 4
continents. The Africa stories often have threads about Christine in them. I
hope that this comes as no surprise.
Lindsay lost no time in
finding everything that Christine needed, and a whole lot more. Jo and I made a
bunch of phone calls and were soon given about eighty fairly modern textbooks on
nursing and medicine by her former colleagues. The folks at the WCVM and St.
Paul’s Hospital gave us seven excellent microscopes.
