Happy Birthday to Me!

Oh my gosh I turned 20 years old in Africa! Not many people can say that they spent a birthday in Africa! I am extremely blessed & it was quite an amazing birthday! So from the beginning...

We had a very eventful day today. We were up by around 4:30 this morning, and left the house a little after 5am to head to Accra. It was a bumpy 3-4 hour drive and most of us slept.  When we arrived, we went to a grocery store and did some shopping for meals here in Abomosu.  While people were finishing up grocery shopping, Leah, Kayla, and Lindsey went and did a little shopping on the street vendors and bought some really cool stuff! Yaw (our driver), Paige, and I went and found fresh coconuts on the street.  He cut open the coconuts and we drank the coconut water straight out of the coconut! It was pretty darn disgusting!

From there, Yaw drove us to the Accra Mall so that we could get more groceries for the week.  We also did some gift shopping there and everyone got some really fun things!  Including bowls, keychains, bookmarks, fabric, and I got a cool book cover! We had lunch in the food court, looked around a bit more, and then headed out to another African market.  They had a lot of really cool things, like carvings, paintings, bags, keychains, and jewelry! Everyone had a really good time seeing everything and bargaining with the workers!  And I have to say, most people were pretty successful! The people selling the items were definitely forceful which was kind of intimidating, though.   Paige & Lindsey both bought bow and arrows which was really cool. We will be back in Accra next Tuesday, so we mostly just looked around and will buy things when we come back later. 

After the market, we started our journey back to Abomosu. There was a lot of traffic so it took a lot longer to get home! Reika had an experience with sunflower seeds that was pretty hilarious.  Since she is from Japan, she has never heard of sunflower seeds.  Scott had brought some and everyone took some, and she was just completely baffled that we were eating seeds from a flower.  She even said she was going to have to tell her mom that she was eating seeds.  It was hilarious! An interesting sight we saw on the way back was the home of Bob Marley's wife so we pulled over and took a few pictures!

When we got back, Darcy got together all our leftovers from the past few nights (fried rice, chicken gravy, bread, etc) and we had dinner.  As dinner was ending, the lights went off and everyone started singing happy birthday and out comes Darcy with a cake with 20 candles on it! I was completely surprised.  Our oven doesn't really work very well and I really wanted a birthday cake and I was worrying that I didn't get one, but turned out they bought one at the grocery store and surprised me! It was awesome and I really appreciated it!

After dinner, Darcy, Scott, Leah, Reika, and I did a 5 25 workout again. It's tough but it was good.  Afterwards, Darcy, Scott, Leah & I walked into town just to go for a walk. It was around 10pm, so it was dark.  There was loud music so we checked it out and there were quite a few people around and some people were dancing!  We just kinda checked it out and everyone was excited to see us and were dancing with us and pulling us away, so we got out of there. We walked back to the house and told some of the other students, and everyone wanted to go check it out! So we got most of the group together and went back so we could join the locals!  We danced and had so much fun! Everyone wanted to dance with us because they rarely get to dance with, let alone see, white people. The place where everyone was dancing was basically a bar, but there were children in there as well, which was kinda weird.  It was just a super small room and not very many people were there at first, but when they heard all the white girls were there, they flocked! It was definitely an interesting experience. Scott is the only guy on our trip and since he is an administrator he basically played daddy while we were there and made sure no African boys were dancing all up on us.  They were at first, but whenever Scott came around, they would stop.  There were quite a few creepy drunk people, probably about our age, but there were also some pretty darn attractive men as well. Darcy says I found my "prince" because he kept wanting to dance with me.  His name was Yaw, just like our driver, and he was super tall and attractive. He wasn't really creepy and didn't dance creepy and he taught me a few dance moves that the locals do and it was fun! He kept talking to me in English, but with his accent and the loud music, I could barely understand anything he said.  At first glance, he seemed like he could be a creeper, but he ended up being a lot more respectful than the other guys, and he was a lot more fun.  A lot of guys would touch our butts, and I figured it was because they were looking to take something, and Yaw told me that the people that do that are thieves, so my suspicion was confirmed. I put everything in my front pockets and luckily, nothing was stolen! It was pretty odd and there were some interesting characters, but it was definitely an interesting experience because their culture is so different.  Scott was absolutely hilarious.  He taught some locals the "Usain Bolt" and they loved it! Everyone dances with everyone there, so some guys were backing it up on Scott and he was just going along with it! It was hilarious watching my PhD professor in a situation like that! It was definitely a fun night. & no one needs to worry! I won't be coming home with a husband or anything! But I wooouuuuld like to snatch up one of the adorable babies... *wink*

Darcy, Lindsey, Reika, Leah, Kayla, and I while walking to the village

Today was a super busy day and it is currently  2 in the morning (only because I have been catching up on my blogging and birthday posts on Facebook), so I have been up for a while! Luckily, we get to sleep in tomorrow and have a lazy day! But it was an awesome day, and an awesome birthday for me! I appreciate everyone who made it so amazing!

Don't Take a Washer & Dryer for Granted.

Today was basically spent doing the same thing.  We went to a village called Akwasobo or something like that and conducted more surveys about the boreholes.  Today, we learned that that village doesn't like the boreholes because the quality of the water is bad.  They have a hand dug well that everyone in the town uses because the water is better quality, so they want more of those.  A lot of the locals were saying "Moo-HOO-Ya-Fay" to us, which means "you are beautiful".  Everyone admires us, but I honestly think that the African people are beautiful, especially the kids and their eyes.  Their eyes are just so darn amazing! 

After we got back, me and Leah got in touch with the culture and did our laundry by hand.  The house we have, which is extremely nice for the area, has a washer & dryer but they don't work.  So, we had to get buckets with soapy water and wash our own clothes in the bathroom.  And now, the clothes are hanging on a rope outside.  It was definitely an experience.  The locals don't have washers & dryers, so they have to wash EVERYTHING by hand.  & trust me, they live in the dirt, so their clothes get dirty.  This DEFINITELY made me appreciate having a washer & dryer & a mommy to do my laundry (sometimes).

Leah & I doing laundry

Our pot of laundry

Before dinner, me, Leah, & Lindsey went on a walk in the opposite direction from town, and we came across the illegal mining again.  It was as the sun was setting (the sun sets around 6 to 6:30) so we got some pretty awesome pictures.  Seeing the jungle and trees and sky and pretty sights really reminded me of the Lion King.  It was a quick walk and we explored a little, but the sight was so pretty im pretty sure it's one of those things i'll remember forever. But I guess thats how this whole trip is. For some reason, the pictures uploaded fast today, so here are some pretty pictures I took!

Well. Tomorow is my BIRTHDAY! NO LONGER A TEENAGER! WAHOO! I am so blessed to be spending my 20th birthday in Africa! (:

Boreholes & Cocoa

So the past two days in Abomosu have been pretty great.  We haven’t done anything extremely exciting to report on, but just being immersed in the African/Ghanaian culture is just awesome.  So I’ll give you a summary of what I’ve done the past two days.  

Yesterday, we had a meeting with a man who is in charge of the water wells here, which are called boreholes.  In Ghana, basically nothing scheduled is set in stone, and we learned that quickly.  An 8:00 meeting that includes local Ghanaians usually happens around 10ish.  That’s what we experienced yesterday.  We were up and ready by 8, waited for the water guy to come meet with us, and then didn’t get out in the community until afternoon.  In the health clinics, the “big days” are on Tuesdays and Fridays, and on the other days, it is busier in the mornings.  Since it was a Wednesday and we didn’t arrive until the afternoon, there was literally nothing to do.  Me and Paige did a little bit of data entry.  The clinic is trying to move from using mainly paper to using computers, and apparently they have been trying to do this for years.  We basically just typed people’s names and the city they were from.  We walked home from the clinic a little bit later and went through the village.  After we got back, we relaxed until dinner time, and Sherri and Darcy made some delicious fried chicken and mashed potatoes.  After dinner, me, Leah, Darcy, Scott, and Reika did some interval running outside our gated house.  We did lunges and squats, then we did intervals of walking for 2 minutes, jogging for 2 minutes, and sprinting for one minute and we did it 5 times.  It was a gooood work out.  I guess you could say my face was red for a while.

 

Today, we were out of the house by 8:30 to go conduct more water interviews.  Leah and I went with a Ghanaian named Seth who works for World Joy (the company who owns the house we are staying in) and he translated for us.  We went to a village called Ekorsu and we interviewed 9 households.  It was definitely interesting to do the interviews and learn how much having these boreholes affects their day to day life.  Before the boreholes, everyone fetched water from a stream which was a long walk multiple times a day.  Now that they have the boreholes, they have so much more time to do other things.  Children usually fetch water in the mornings, and when they went to the stream, they were often late to school and were exhausted from multiple trips.  Now that they have boreholes, the kids are at school on time, the adults are at work on time, and they overall have more time to do more things.  And when the kids are in school, they educate themselves to be successful in the future, so having clean water now can affect the community in generations to come! Also, families have noticed that they are a lot healthier after the boreholes, which is the most important thing.  We only did 9 households because the village was a farming community and all the adults were at work, so we got to everyone that was home, and had another quick day.  After we were done, me, Leah, and Scott (a professor) walked from our house to the village.  We walked around and said “How are you” in Twi to the locals and just spent a little time in the community.  How are you is pronounced "Et-Te-Sane" and the response is usually "Ay-Ya" which basically means good or fine. Scott, one of the administrators, ended up giving a little girl some candy  and she ended up following us all the way home.   She was super cute, but she didn’t speak English.  We told her many times to go home, said “bye bye”, and tried to walk fast and ahead of her, but she wouldn’t leave.  When we got to our gate, we were just going to shut her out, but she got her body in the way and would not move.  We got Yaw (pronounced Yow), who is our driver for our trip, to tell her to leave in Twi, and she finally did.  Apparently, that’s how a lot of kids are here.  Even if you don’t give them anything, they will follow you and bother you and won’t leave you alone.  After Yaw saved us, he showed me where cocoa comes from.  Steven Abu, a man who works for World Joy who helps run the house we are staying in, has 7 farms, and he has cocoa trees.  They look like a big, yellow fruit hanging on a tree.  Yaw cracked the fruit open for me, and in it were white, big, mushy looking seeds.  He told me to take one and suck on it, so I did, and it tasted like a slimy apple! It was so weird!  He opened the seed and inside it was purple, and after these seeds are dried out, you get cocoa.  It was super interesting to see that chocolate, one of the loves of my life, originates from a big yellow melon looking thing on a tree.   The rest of our afternoon/evening was spent making and eating dinner of rice with carrots, chicken, and green onions, and doing the interval running.  It has overall been a good two days.

Me, Darcy, Scott, Leah, and the little girl who wouldn't leave us alone

cute kid

step by step of the cocoa beans

My First day in Abomosu

Me, Reika, Joana the nurse, and Leah at the Health Center

My first day in the house we will be staying at until next Friday was spent in a health clinic a few villages away.  We woke up early and our driver dropped groups of us off at different health clinics.  The one in Abomosu was the biggest one in the area, and there were many people waiting to be helped when we got there.  It was very interesting because a lot of the health center is outside.  It is so different from American clinics, I can't even describe it.  We took a tour of the center, and we even got to go into the room where babies are delivered, and we actually got to see a baby that had just been delivered.  There is one nurse that delivers all the babies, and she told us she would love to have us help.  It would be crazy to say that I helped deliver a baby!  We will see what happens though.

Me, Leah, and Reika went to a very very small health clinic a few villages away.  One of our tasks was to go to homes of the villagers with the a nurse and to ask questions about the bore holes, which are wells that they pump to get clean water from.  The nurse asked them questions that Professor Mackleprang created, like if having the bore hole gives them more free time, how often it breaks down, etc.  We visited 4 homes and talked to villagers and the nurses translated from Twi to English.  It was interesting and a good experience to actually go to the homes and see how the water wells affected their day to day life.  Before the bore holes, children would have to walk extremely far to get water, and it would affect their schooling and education.  Now that they have the bore holes, we discovered that the water is better and they do have more free time, but there were some complaints that they broke down too often.  No research has been done to see how the locals like the bore holes, so it was interesting to be a part of that.

Leah, our nurse, and I with a bunch of kids in the village.  They all gather around to see the "Obruni's" (White people)

After we conducted a few interviews, the nurse, named Joana, took us to meet another nurse before her shift at the clinic started.  Both women were extremely nice, fun, and hilarious.  It was a great experience interacting with them and talking about their culture vs our culture.  We walked back to the health clinic, where we watched shots being administered. We were even asked if we wanted to administer the shots ourselves, and we of course said no.  There wasn't a whole lot to do at the clinic because it was so small, but we did help with copying down medications from patients records to the insurance information.  The nurses handwriting were extremely hard to read, though, which made it difficult. 

Behind the health clinic was one of the bore holes, where we got to pump the water.  I can see how it would be a lot of work for a kid to fill up multiple buckets at a time. 

One fun thing I did was take a test for Malaria.  We heard a baby crying in one of the rooms, and we asked why, and the nurse told us the baby was getting a test for Malaria.  I asked what they do to test for Malaria, & she said she would tell me if she could do it on me.  It was basically just a finger prick for blood, and then they put it on a thingy and wait for 20 minutes and read the results.  But it wasn't really a finger prick, it was more of a finger stab. And the kit came in a closed package, so it was sterile. Our van came to pick us up when there were still, like 13 minutes left until the test could be read, so I didn't get to see the results :( I'm assuming it was negative though!

After Joana pricked my finger

The rest of the day was spent, for me, just relaxing until dinner.  Me, Paige, and Reika cooked dinner, which consisted of carrots, cabbage, and top ramen, so it was basically a soup.  There are bugs EVERYWHERE and one of our "jobs" was to use a spoon and keep getting the bugs out of the water we were boiling.  It was seriously nasty.  Cooking the food was pretty sketchy because we kind of just put spices in and made it up, but it turned out pretty tasty, besides all the bugs around.

It seems like we will spend a few days doing the same things - interviewing and working in the clinics.  It's been a great experience!

I am having a hard time uploading pictures to the blog, but I am doing my best!  For some reason, a lot of the pictures either look like crap or just won't upload, so I have a lot more pictures to show you than this! Most of them should be on my facebook, so just bear with me.  Miss you!

My Time in Nsawam

So we spent the past day and a half in a town called Nsawam at the Catholic Orthopedic Training Center, which is basically like a hospital, or a center, for kids and adults with amputations or deformities that need assistance, either short or long term.  They serve over 6500 patients throughout Ghana, and most are outpatients but they do have inpatients. They make the braces, prosthetics, crutches, corrective shoes, etc, right at the center.  Each patient is measured for their specific needs, and the workers there make them within a few days or weeks. I absolutely loved the time that we spent at the OTC.  I learned so much, met some amazing people, and had a great time.

Children born with disabilities here are basically considered cursed.  This is an ancient view on disabilities that is still present here in Africa.  In Ghana, it is believed that a newborn isn’t a person until he or she has lived for 8 days, so it is not uncommon for parents to kill their newborn babies born with disabilities.  They “send them back to the Gods” by not letting them live.  It’s not necessarily that the parents are bad people, it is just that is what they believe and it is part of their culture.

Where the prosthetics are made

People without arms or legs is more common in Africa, basically because the medicine here isn’t nearly as good as in the United States.  In the US, if someone badly burns their arm, gets in a motor vehicle accident, or gets an infection, doctors can usually save their limbs.  In Ghana, people either put off going to the hospital because they know they can’t afford it so they don’t go until it’s an absolute emergency, or the doctors just aren’t skilled enough so amputating is the best option for survival.  Birth defects are also common because people are poorly educated when it comes to prenatal care.  Sometimes, mothers try to abort their babies by taking medication, and when it doesn’t work, the children are born with disabilities.

While I was at mass, the group met a woman named Louisa who was born without arms.  She has been given many awards for her work in education and for being a role model for people with disabilities in Africa.  She was a baby who was supposed to be sent back to the Gods, but somehow survived.  I didn’t get to hear her whole story because I wasn’t there, but from what I heard, it sounded pretty amazing. She has learned to do everything with her feet.  She eats, cleans, writes, etc using her feet.  You know how people sometimes talk with their hands and make big gestures when explaining things? She does that with her feet. It is rather remarkable.  She invited us to her village on Sunday where we met the village administrators, chiefs, and elders.  It is customary for the village leaders to meet and welcome the guests, so we went around to different places and met the leaders.  We also got to go into her home.  She was extremely welcoming, sweet, intelligent, and definitely inspiring.  She had a documentary made about her and is just overall very successful. It was an honor to meet such an amazing woman.

Louisa showed us how she lights her stove.  She strikes a match with her feet!

After getting back to the OTC (Orthopedic Training Center) that afternoon and eating lunch, Sister Elizabeth, one of the women who run the center, gave us a tour of the factory where the prosthetic legs and stuff are made.  It was Sunday so the workers weren’t there, but she basically told us what each bench made and a quick overview of how they make them.  When I was at the OTC with just Professor Mackelprang, the workers were in the factory room, and a few of them explained to me exactly what they were doing, but it was very hard for me to understand them with their accents.  It’s pretty amazing how resourceful they are when it comes to creating things to assist the people with disabilities.  The patients basically don’t have to pay anything, and the center can fix people in the simplest of ways.  Making prosthetic legs is a big part of what they do, and a lot goes into each and every patient.

That evening after dinner, Dr. Scott Finnie brought out his guitar to the kids classroom and played music and sang songs with the children as well as some of the older kids and people who work there.  It was one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.  Scott sang them many American songs, including Jesus Loves Me and Twist & Shout, and they sang us some Ghanaian songs.  The kids would get up and dance around.  There was one boy named Zach who has two prosthetic legs who  was just dancing nonstop.  Seeing all these kids with physical disabilities sing and dance to songs that we played for them was just awesome.  It was definitely a highlight of my trip.

Today, we got to just spend time with the kids in the center.  We played with them outside, colored, played with toys, and played on their new computers.  It was very fun.  The kids love us white people and are always trying to get us to play with them. There was this certain little girl who was extremely quiet who attached to me and she was the cutest thing.  She was born with her feet facing the wrong way & I’m not sure if they were turned in or out, but she was wearing special corrective shoes attached to a metal bar that connects her feet so they are forced to face forward.  Eventually, it will correct her feet permanently.  She has to walk with the bar, so it’s similar to walking with a snowboard.  She has to slide one foot at a time.  I kept asking her name and age, but she would just look at me.  The only time she spoke was when I asked her to name colors, so she did speak English.  She wanted to play and color and have me hold her, but she just wouldn’t talk. I think she was just very shy.  But she was adorable.

Something that stood out to me about the kids was that when it was snack time, almost every single one offered to share with us.  They weren’t good at sharing with each other, but they all offered us a cookie or some juice.  It was very sweet.  Also, one of the only white people they really know is Sister Elizabeth, so they called all of us “Sister”, because that’s what they know.

I really enjoyed the short time we spent at OTC. I only wish that we had gotten to spend more time!

We arrived at the house in Abomosu about an hour and a half ago or so, which was around 10pm.  We will be living here until next Friday, spending time in this rural community.

Adios! I Miss everyone!