The world is a much smaller place than when I grew up, and I'm not even that old. I can wake up in my house in suburban New England, and go to bed in Kampala, Uganda. Which is what I did over a year ago, before COVID turned the world upside-down. I had never before travelled to a far corner of the world to try to understand and experience the delivery of health care in a developing country. Many of my friends who are surgeons take medical mission trips: dropping into some corner of the world and operating for days on end, making a tangible difference to the patients they serve.