give me the pen.

I’m writing this blog because I’m usually showering at this point in the evening but currently can’t because the whole town’s water has been shut off. Not exactly sure how that works but I mean hey, at least the power came back on right before the water went out or we really would have been in trouble.

I started off my week in a different place than the hospital. Ashley and I went to RCH (Reproductive Child Health), which is kind of like plan parenthood, but with added services. We spent our morning with a nurse named Tina who specializes in tuberculosis treatment and any other type of infectious disease. The clinic also gives out all necessary vaccinations for children and prescribes medications for those dealing with other infections. The second aspect of the clinic deals with pregnancy tests, STDs, birth control and any family planning type counseling. After watching Tina complete her appointments she told us to pretend we were back in school because she was going to lecture us on anything and everything she could think of that had to do with infectious diseases. After six pages of notes and an extensive knowledge she let us go home for the day. The next time we return to RCH we’re probably going to assist them on some school visits where they evaluate the health of all the children in a “quick and efficient manner”.

The rest of my week so far has been spent in the ER where we’ve seen everything from car accident victims wailing in pain to an old man who wouldn’t speak and tell us what was wrong with him. The coolest case I saw this week was a woman experiencing ectopic gestation, which is when your baby is developing outside of your uterus. When this happens you need to undergo surgery as soon as possible to save both the mother and child. However, here in Ghana there is no rush to do anything so they decided to treat her appendix pain first and even let me put in her IV line! Yes, I had a lot of help and supervision, but they said it still counts as my first independent IV line.

Our lives outside the hospital have been just as interesting, per usual. On Monday we decided it would be a good idea to make banana bread since our family bought us about 50 bananas (no, I’m no exaggerating). Our house mom makes fresh bread every couple days and sells it so we had a bread oven and most of the materials/ingredients already. Everything was going great until we realized that you can’t control the temperature of the bread oven since all you do is light the fire underneath and let it go. So we decided to just put it in and check about every 10 minutes. But you see, we completely forgot to warn our sisters that banana bread is supposed to be dark in color so I got out of the shower to one of our sisters yelling to me that our bread was burnt. Little did they know the bread wasn’t even cooked…. At the end of the night and numerous attempts to control the temperature we ended up with a banana bread that was actually burnt on the outside but a little bit undercooked on the inside. On a better note, we discovered kontomire, Ghana’s version of spinach, and now have a new favorite meal that incorporates it. We even told our homestay family we’d eat it every week since they were so happy we actually finished something they cooked for us.

On Tuesday we went over our friend Kojo’s house and watched Ice Age 3 because the people here have a weird obsession with animated movies. He also attempted to teach us a card game they play here (the only one) called Spar but I’m pretty sure he just cheated the whole time because we had no idea what we were doing. This week two things were also confirmed: Ghanaians ALWAYS answer their cell phones when they ring and pens are like gold. The don’t care what they’re doing or who their talking to, if the phone rings, they answer it. I even witnessed a pastor answer a phone call in the middle of leading a prayer. As for the pens, people value pen's at our hospital more than they value lives. If your pen runs out of ink you must bring the pen to the pharmacy where they will replace it after you hand over the one that's empty. Therefore, it makes each ward a tension filled place where people are constantly eyeing your pen and waiting for you to leave it somewhere. 

Anyways, I think that’s all I have for now but this weekend we’re headed to a surfing village to take some lessons. So as long as I’m still alive I’ll have some fun stories to share about that!

"are we there yet?"

hello friends! I’m writing to you today while sitting on a pillow because my butt bones are nice and bruised from traveling yesterday. The roads here in Ghana are more potholes than road, which made 10 hours in the back of a mini-bus quite the painful experience. However, the ride and pain were completely worth what we saw. We travelled to a remote village called Nzulezo. Nzulezo is also called the “village on stilts” and is located in the middle of Lake Tadane in the Western Region of Ghana. In order to get to the village we had to take an hour canoe ride through rain forests and canals where we saw some of the prettiest scenery yet.

            Upon arriving at the village we were in awe with what we actually saw and learned. The village is home to 450 people and has been around for 600 years now. They’ve only had a school for the children the past couple years and have absolutely no health services for the people. Most women give birth to 8-10 children who lay around and sleep on the dock-type streets all day. The village has a bunch of farmers who travel by boat to another area on the lake where they grow their crops and try to sell them to generate money. The people live off of each other and make occasional trips to the main land when necessary.

            The pictures don’t even do it justice but it’s amazing to see how people can live so happily with minimum resources. It’s a scary thought that most of these people think this is the only way to live since they haven’t been taught otherwise.

            After the village we all went to a small restaurant that’s actually owned by a couple from Spain who moved out in the middle of nowhere to relax and retire. I’m not sure I would have chosen that area to retire but hey, to each his own.

            I guess I’ll work backwards now and return to Thursday evening when we returned to Cape Coast and had the best meal of our lives…. PIZZA. After our Global Citizens Initiative class they treated us to the most amazing pizza we’ve ever eaten (not really, it just seemed like it). Friday we spent the day in town where we ate at a vegetarian restaurant and then sat at a picnic table on the beach for a little bit. Weekends are something we’ve come to LOVE since they’re a complete change from our long workdays and small town shops in Asikuma.

            An update on the health of the group; Skyler (my roommate) now has malaria but already got the medication and is improving each day. The hospital even let us go in the lab and help test her blood which was pretty awesome. I think I’m going to spend a couple days in the lab just to see how they do all the different tests and run the samples. Ashley woke up with a fever this morning but we’re hoping it doesn’t turn into anything worse. We’ve had 3 people from the overall group (not Asikuma) get typhoid fever but it’s very easy to control here and they all got better within a couple days, so don’t worry!

            Tomorrow starts my second week in the ER/out patient department so hopefully I’ll have more interesting cases to share! Talk to you soon! 

warning: do not touch the hot peppers

            To say this week was a quiet one would be an enormous understatement. Monday was our first day in the ER and it was the busiest day I think they’ve had in a long time. The majority of patients are rushed in due to severe malaria symptoms or hypoglycemia and the nurses quickly put in IV lines and get them on the proper medications. We also see a lot of sickle cell patients that come in with severe joint pains because of the “cold” weather. It’s really wild because they consider 90 degree weather cold and all walk around with wraps and jackets on while we’re sitting here dying and sweating. While in the ER we made a friend named Evans who is a prescribing nurse and at this hospital that pretty much makes you a doctor. Evans works in the out patient department, which works a little differently than doctor’s offices in America. Every morning hundreds and hundreds of patients sign into the hospital that feel sick but don’t necessarily think they have emergency-like symptoms. After getting their file they’re assigned a room and wait until the doctor (or in this case, Evans) makes it through the long line of people. Evans was so excited to meet us that he told us to come with him to his consulting room to help and observe. While observing he taught us how to check someone’s ears, how to palpitate the spleen, how to correctly listen to someone’s chest and how to fill out forms when they need a lab test.

            Some of our more interesting moments included: seeing a teenager who had two masses in her breast that need to be removed as soon as possible, looking into the eyes of elderly man with really bad cataracts, reading a patients cardiogram, and watching a counseling session of an alcoholic that needed help after a couple harmful nights out. However, our teaching reached a whole new level when a 25-year-old guy came in and needed a prostate exam. OPD is a very interesting and educational place to be since Evans presents each patient to us as a case study and then has us make educated guesses on what we think the diagnosis should be.

            Today we got a special opportunity to visit the public health department on their clinical infant vaccination day. The hospital is very strict on routine vaccinations when a child is 0-5 years old so they host a clinic every Wednesday for mothers to bring their children in to get the proper medicine.  Although we spent most of our time holding babies and talking about how cute they were, it was still a great experience and we learned how to give intradermal shots, which are much harder than intramuscular ones. One of our biggest mistakes of the day was agreeing to visit the morgue….. All I’m going to say about that is: take whatever picture you have in your head of a third-world country morgue and make it about ten times worse.

            On a different note, Skyler and I had some interesting home stay experiences this week as well. First of all, our family has used some money that they’ve saved up from hosting Americans and bought a washing machine. However, the washer isn’t hooked up to any type of water system so you have to pour the water in at the beginning, drain it after washing, fill it up to start rinsing and then drain it again after the rinse cycle. Our sister started it and gave Skyler the hose to hold while we waited for the “wash” cycle to be over. Little did we know that the machine doesn’t warn you when it’s time to drain so mid-conversation we had a shower of dirty water come shooting out of the hose into Skylers face, all over the front of me and coating the walls. We sat there laughing for five minutes instead of controlling the situation but the family couldn’t even be mad since they flooded the entire house the previous morning.

After cleaning up that mess we decided to cook a normal dinner for ourselves: eggs and hash browns. We thought it would be a good idea to add some onions and hot peppers to our potatoes….little did we know that would be a horrible decision. The hot peppers they have here aren’t even available in the U.S because they’re that hot, but our family failed to share that information with us. So after cutting the peppers and taking the seeds out I did the worst thing I possibly could… scratched the corner of my eye. The next 30 minutes were spent convincing myself I was blind, experiencing the worst pain I’ve ever felt, and pouring endless amounts of water into my eyes hoping that it would help. I finally got some blurred vision back and spent the next hour with a swollen and blood shot eye. The second wave of pain came to both Skyler and I when we realized that our fingers felt like they were on fire and that even putting a little bit of pressure on them hurt like nothing we’ve ever felt before. We then found out that when you handle these stupid peppers with bare hands the spicy part gets on your skin and causes a burning that they compare to “sticking your hands in hot oil” (again….. our family withheld that information until we were dying). Since there’s no vasaline in this house and soap and water did absolutely nothing, we decided to walk back to the hospital where we knew they would be able to do something to help us. After being made fun of we got some gauze soaked in vasaline wrapped around our fingers and walked back through town looking like the village idiots we are.

That’s all I have for now but we’re headed back to Cape Coast tomorrow evening for some training classes so if the internet works, I’ll add some more pictures!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN EM! love you!

"i like the way you train"

Good morning! Mom, you would be proud to know that I sort of went to church today. In Ghana they find it perfectly acceptable to project church on a loud speaker for anyone within a two-mile radius to hear. Needless to say, 6:30am came pretty quickly when about 4 different churches started their masses. 

Anyways, we arrived at the ProWorld bunk house on Friday evening after a public transportation adventure. From Asikuma we have to take a 45 minute taxi ride to the tro-tro station. Although tro-tros are “buses” I just need to express that they’re equivalent to our work vans in the U.S (the type electricians or plumbers use that are sometimes referred to as kidnapper vans). So just picture four American girls (in scrubs) squished in a small van with more Ghanaians than seatbelts and all our stuff for the weekend. The tro-tro ride was about an hour and a half since we stop whenever anyone needs to get out and pick up random people on the side of the road. Once we got to Cape Coast we had to take another taxi from town to the bunkhouse. What’s crazy is that the 3 hour journey only cost us 6 GHC which is $3…. something that would never happen in the U.S.

Saturday was our impact project day, which is a morning of hands on volunteering. ProWorld has decided to build a hospital in a remote village about an hour away from their offices. The hospital will have many different departments such as a children’s ward, female ward, male ward, maternity and out-patient care. Placing such a large hospital in a village like this will not only help build it up but will also provide many people from surrounding areas a new job opportunity. Since the construction is literally just starting we spent all morning moving and molding cement bricks. I also got some lawn-mowing experience the Ghanaian way….. using a machete. After a couple hours and some battle wounds, we heading back to cape coast, but not without some excitement. About a half hour into our ride we completely blew a tire and were stuck on the side of the road in the rain while the men tried to fix it.

Skyler, Christina, Ashley and I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and walking around town where we were mistaken for athletes multiple times. I’m sure it was the sweat, dirt, and sneakers that made them all confused since we were approached and told, “I like the way you train” by a few different people. Today we’ll be hanging around the ProWorld house catching up on some work before heading back to Asikuma for the work week. This week I start in the emergency room so I’m sure I’ll have plenty of interesting stories to share about that.

Just incase you were wondering, we had our first “going out” experience to a Ghanaian bar on Friday night. Except their “bars” are gas stations with party tents and tables set up. It’s quite interesting to see. Taxi drivers also find it perfectly acceptable to pull over on the side of the road and have lunch while they leave you in the car (and no, they don’t get any for you). And in this culture they hiss at each other to get one another’s attention. So before learning about this cultural detail I honestly thought there were just a lot of people with Tourette’s syndrome who walked around hissing all the time…embarrassing.