home sweet home :)

Wli Falls

Lisa and I backing into Wli Falls

River Volta

Boti Falls

Elephant!

Mole National Park

I cannot believe I have already been home for three weeks! It has been so wonderful to be back but I had such an awesome summer in Ghana!! Our twelve day trip around the country was absolutely amazing. It was filled with disaster after disaster but they all ended up working out for the best. From buses that were sold out days in advance to hotels constantly losing our reservation to taxi drivers that were clueless as to where they were going. But in the end, we ended up being the perfect two weeks!! We saw elephants, baboons, warthogs and antelopes in Mole National Park; shopped in the largest market in West Africa; swam under Wli Falls, the largest waterfall in West Africa; vacationed at meteor created Lake Botsumtwi; took a day cruise on the River Volta; and crammed into ever form of Ghanaian public transportation...It was an awesome way to end ten weeks in Ghana! Thanks for following my adventure in Africa. As much as this blog can attest to my love for traveling, I am so happy to be home and don't plan on leaving anytime soon! :)

Almost home :)

So we didn't get to meet Obama but we did get to see him! We were right along the road as he drove by so we had a perfect view of him waving as he drove by!! And it was so worth the 6 hours of waiting just to see how excited Cape Coast was for his visit! I was definitely proud to be an American :)

I cannot believe that this will be my last post from Ghana! We are leaving tomorrow morning to travel around Ghana for twelve days and then leaving for home on the 28th! We are really excited about our trip: We are going with two other volunteers and are heading to Tamale, Mole National Park (to see some elephants!! A safari, Ghana style!), Kumasi, Lake Botsumtwi, and the waterfalls in the Lake Volta region. I have really, really loved my time in Cape Coast but I absolutely cannot wait to be home! I have learned so much and met some amazing people in the other volunteers. I am really grateful for this opportunity and I would do it again in a heartbeat but I seriously cannot wait for the 29th!!! I know that time will fly by as we travel and I cannot wait to be home in the blink of an eye!

See you all so very soon!! <3<3<3<3

it's not malaria...it's obama fever!

Obama fever is sweeping the nation!!! In his first visit to Africa since his inauguration, Obama will arrive in Accra tonight and will spend two days in Ghana. Tomorrow he will be spending the day in Cape Coast! The city is absolutely alive with energy and excitement! There are billboards covering the streets with a picture of Barack and Michelle or with a picture of Barack and John Atta Mills (Ghana’s President) all declaring “Akwaaba!!” (Welcome). Secret Service agents have been patrolling the roads and waters for months now and their presence has been impossible to miss over the past few days. The streets are being cleaned, the buildings painted, the city beautified. People are walking around with Obama watches, earrings, pins, dresses, shorts…you name it! It’s absolutely hilarious and so exciting at the same time! We are hoping to catch a glimpse of him from near the Cape Coast Castle tomorrow but it has just been wonderful to see how much hope Africans have because America has elected an African-American President. It is impossible to not be totally wrapped up in joy and energy!!
Other than Obama news, I have spent two weeks in the NICU and it’s been pretty cool. The first week I mostly just fed, changed and cuddled the little babies. Their mothers aren’t allowed in the NICU because of space constraints so it’s important just to love on them as much as possible. I obviously have loved loving on day old babies! This week has been even better because I have been shadowing Dr. Erobu, a junior doctor from Nigeria. She is absolutely wonderful and has been teaching me so much. She makes her rounds visiting babies in the Delivery Suite and in the ER before heading to the Outpatient Department. When we are examining newborns in the Delivery Suite, she lets me do their full assessment to ensure that they’re healthy which is cool. Plus because she is Nigerian, she doesn’t speak Fante so all the nurses and patients know to communicate with her in English, which makes spending the day with her a lot more enjoyable! Today was an insane day in OPD – we had to resuscitate two babies and then spent two hours on another 6-day-old baby who had a temperature of 40.6°C. Dr. Erobu keeps me right in the action, helping to resuscitate the babies, start them on oxygen and even drawing blood samples for the 6-day-old; very cool!
That’s all I have to report for now! Hopefully the next entry will be filled with pictures of when we’re asked to dine with the President and his family! Haha. One week from today, we will be leaving Cape Coast to travel for 12 days before returning home. Oh how time flies when you are having fun!!

Happy Republic Day!

Lydia, a stroke victim, with her sisters

Pretty clear why the CP patients are my favorite!!!!

John, my favorite patient of all time!

How strange that we have passed the halfway point!! Yesterday marked exactly five weeks from when we arrived and four weeks from when we leave! I am still loving Ghana and learning so much but I am definitely counting down the days until home (28 days, 9 hours; in case you were curious ☺)!! Friday marked my last day in Physical Therapy, yesterday was spent administratively getting ready to switch to the wards, and tomorrow I will start in the NICU! I am really going to miss the PT – not only did I learn a ton and gain a lot of independence in treating “my own” patients but I also felt really at home in the unit with the other PTs and the patients!
The cerebral palsy children continued to be my favorite patients because we would play for an hour! The children here are absolutely adorable and get really excited around “obrunis” (foreigners) so they would rush into the unit to give me a hug and start their treatment. It was hard to say goodbye to them! I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed learning about strokes and working with stroke victims. I found their improvements the most rewarding and I was so moved by how hard they worked. It was unbelievable to think back to Week One when I saw them for the first time and to realize how far they had come. When I first saw Lydia, she was completely unresponsive, could not sit unsupported, neglected the left side of her body and had absolutely no movement on the affected side. By our last visit she was awake and alert, aware of her left side, communicating fully with me, transferring from sitting to standing and from bed to wheelchair and was even walking a bit within the parallel bars – incredible!
My favorite patient was 9-year-old John who had a facial palsy and suddenly all movement on the left side of his face. He has been steadily improving but needed emotional support just as much as actual therapy. I can only imagine how hard it must be to be a 9 year old boy and unable to show emotion in half of your face. His dad told us that he was picked on a lot at school and completely stopped speaking even though his voice was fine and his annunciation normal. Unfortunately there isn’t a Speech and Language Pathologist at Central Regional but we tried to be creative in getting John to speak again. He was such a sweet kid and I just loved hanging out with him and watching his confidence increase. He bounded in at 8 am my last day to tell me about how he had come in first place in two of his classes that week – one of which was English and he had to read a story he wrote out loud. I was so impressed and warned him I would be popping back into the PT unit to make sure he was still talking loads after I was gone!
One of the most interesting patients I worked with was a 12-year-old girl named Lordina who was born with C1 C2 instability with a separation of 6.3 mm, which is nearly fatal. She had surgical fusion a couple of months ago but came in with zero strength in her lower limbs. She was gaining strength and was able to walk with the support of the parallel bars by the end of my time. Another interesting patient was Florence, a 21 year old involved in a road traffic accident in February. She has had two skin grafts since then to her right leg and 90% of the front surface is grafted skin. It took me a bit of time to get used to massaging the skin grafts and stretching them out but it was pretty remarkable! Laurel and I were also obsessed with Eric, a diabetic whose right leg was amputated below the knee. They don’t give prosthetics in Ghana so we were working towards getting his balance steady enough to use crutches. It was really hard work for him and he would joke that we were “physiotheorists” for making him exert so much effort. Eric was hilarious and we loved having him around; he was the only patient that made Laurel and I tear up saying goodbye. Yet as wonderful as PT was, I am sure the wards will be just as amazing. Mama Comfort is the in-charge nurse at the NICU and is really welcoming so I cannot wait to cuddle little babies all day! The NICU is connected to the pediatric ward so although I don’t officially head to pediatrics until midway through next week, I’ll be able to hop between the two!
Things in Ghana have been really great outside of my placement as well! It has been raining non-stop for a week and everyone is a bit stir-crazy. Even though June-August is the rainy season, it normally rains for a day and is then sunny for a day. But we haven’t seen the sun in a week! It is especially hard because life in Ghana literally shuts down when it is raining: teachers and students don’t show up for school, patients don’t show up for therapy, storeowners in town never open up. We’ve been sleeping a lot and watching DVDs but cabin fever is starting to set in!! This weekend was a nice break though; we stayed in Cape Coast because there was a beach party Saturday night for all the volunteers at a beach resort nearby. We spent Saturday night and most of the (sunless) day Sunday at the resort than went back to our friend’s house to watch the Confederation Cup Final. Soccer is absolutely huge everyone in the world but the US and all the volunteers have been following the Confederation Cup. I didn’t know any of this but the Confederation Cup is supposed to be a warm-up for the World Cup between all the teams that have won a Cup in the previous four years (World Cup, EuroCup, North American Cup, etc). The US were outstanding throughout the tournament and surprised everyone by ending up in the final vs. Brazil. We were so excited to watch the game even though no one was betting on a US victory. It looked hopeful at halftime with a score of 2-0 but Brazil came back to win 2-3. Bummer! Regardless though it was an incredible game and a blast to watch with all the volunteers!! I think that’s all I have to report as of now; missing everyone loads!!!

fun times in physiotherapy :)

Eve, from Scotland, with our favorite patient Abi who fractured his femur!

Me with Maamesi - the sweetest girl with CP

The four "obrunis" (foreigners): Lisa, Laurel, Eve and me

Lisa, me and Eve. Love my job!!!

I cannot believe we are already in week three!! Time is absolutely flying by! A month from Wednesday Sara and I will be leaving Cape Coast to travel throughout Ghana for ten days – insane!! This weekend was really great: Olivia (a gap year student from South of London), Louise, Sara and I traveled to Nzulezo, a village on stilts. It was a five-hour trip from Cape Coast by tro-tro. Tros are basically VW vans that are used as an inexpensive mode of transportation between cities. They are quite an experience though because they cram people in and are pretty hot and a bit miserable for five hours. But we survived our first real tro journey! We were staying in Beyin Beach Resort, which is conveniently next to the Nzulezo Visitors Centre, and a beach resort with a lot of character and things we now consider complete luxuries (chocolate bars, hot water, coffee, even Monopoly!!). Saturday morning we went to the stilt village. Nzulezo lies on the fresh-water Lake Amansuri about 5 km from Beyin, an hour canoe ride. The village houses about 500 people and is one solid construction raised about the water with a wood and raffia walkway between the houses and buildings. Our guide told us that they live above the water because their ancestors were refugees from modern-day Nigeria who were chased to the Lake by another tribe during a war. It’s the rainy season right now and this past week rained more than they have seen in four years. Unfortunately that meant that the village was pretty much flooded. You couldn’t even see the stilts from which the village is named and some of the buildings (including the guesthouse where we almost stayed) were half underwater. It was really sad to be walking through the village and just wading through the water covering the walkways. But apparently when this happened four years ago, it only took a week to drain enough and since it has been relatively dry since Saturday, I’m hoping the village will be back to life soon! Even though it was really different from how it typically looks, it was actually pretty cool to get to experience the one weekend when it was flooded! We spent Saturday afternoon on the beach, enjoying the sunshine and then made the six-hour trek home Sunday morning. It was a great experience!! And hopefully the pictures will upload ☺

Kakum National Park Canopy Walk

Louise, Sara, Sam and Me - Our Housemates! :)

My new boyfriend, P.K.

Living the life at Coconut Grove Beach Resort

Home Sweet Home

We have been in Ghana almost two weeks now and although it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, it has been absolutely amazing as well! I was pretty homesick for the first week; definitely more than I was expecting! But I have really started to settle in – into my placement, our host family, and the group of volunteers.
I am at Central Regional Hospital, the largest hospital in Ghana and very modern by Ghanaian standards although very different from “modern” back home. I am going to be spending my first month in Physical Therapy and moving to a Pediatric Ward for July. The Physical Therapy unit has been so awesome thus far and the therapists are really welcoming. There are two other volunteers, a physiotherapy student from Scotland and a licensed physiotherapist from Australia as well as two resident therapists. I spent the first week half of the week observing Laurel and Eve and they are a wealth of knowledge and have been wonderful! Now I am doing more things a PT Tech would do back home: taking vitals, applying electrical stimulation and TENS, administering therapeutic ultrasounds, stretching, massaging and supervising patients’ exercise programs. The majority of the patients are stroke victims and back pains although there are a lot of children with cerebral palsy whom I love working with since pediatric PT would probably be my focus. I am learning so much I can’t believe it! What great experience! I could see myself being happy doing PT or OT as a career although I want to wait to contrast it with the Peds ward…everyone who knows me knows how much I love to change my mind about medicine!!
Our house and family are perfect. There are now four volunteers staying here and a fifth is coming next week. Louise is from Scotland and is going into her fourth year of medicine at Edinburgh. Sam is from London and is on a gap year after school and he is going to Nottingham in the fall. The four of us have a lot of fun together and it’s even better having lots of people around! Millicent, our house mom, is so great about feeding us and getting us whatever we need. I am now a lot more comfortable with the family so we spend a lot more time with them. There are so many people that live here that I can’t even keep track of who is permanent, who is just visiting, who is family, who is renting a room…Besides Millicent, we mostly just interact with Angela (Millicent’s daughter, 26, AMAZING and so helpful, just signed a contract to play soccer in Germany, all around stellar person), her son P.K. (almost 3, NEVER sits still, adorable and so much fun although exhausting! Loves to hang out on the roof with us), Joe (Millicent’s youngest child, 20, loves having people his age around especially now that Sam is here and there’s another guy!) and Kwasi (Angela’s nephew although I have no idea the relation, 13, brilliant, I’m going to kidnap him and bring him home). The house is so wonderful!!
Last weekend Sara and I went to two different beach resorts that are like 15 km away in opposite directions. Coconut Grove on Saturday was in Elmina and is super luxurious. It has a pool and is on the beach although it’s not safe to swim there (common in Ghana because the coast is rocky and the undercurrent is apparently incredibly strong). It rained off and on during the day but was still the perfect day. We were deliriously happy and when we couldn’t be in the pool we were running in the sea in the pouring rain in our swimsuits or sitting under a cabana listening to the rain. Sunday we went to Anomabu Beach Resort, which is really popular with the volunteers. It was a really sunny day and you can swim in the ocean at Anomabu. Overall it was an incredibly relaxing and wonderful weekend! This weekend we went to Kakum National Park on Saturday to do the canopy walk – walking on 7 rope bridges high atop a rainforest was quite an experience!
More volunteers are coming to Cape Coast through Projects Abroad everyday and it makes it even more exciting and even more fun! We honestly are living the life here…getting amazing exposure to medicine, making awesome friends, experiencing life in Africa, beaches every weekend…sometimes I wonder if it’s real! Cannot wait to be home with family and friends though and hope all is well! <3<3

Internet is not very good here so I don’t know that I will ever be able to post pictures while I am here but I will try to!!

across a different pond...

Hello from Ghana!! I am in Ghana for ten weeks volunteering with Projects Abroad. I am living in Cape Coast, 100 miles west of Accra, and working in Central Regional Hospital. I am here with the wonderful Sara Duke, another Chi O at UVA, and after twenty-four full hours of traveling, we made it to Accra two nights. We were picked up by a Projects Abroad worker who brought us back to our country director’s house which triples as the Accra office and a guesthouse. We met some other volunteers there but we’ll probably never see them again since we’re in Accra. We met an interesting character as well: She decided to come to Ghana because she has plenty of money; and had the time since she was kicked out of her prestigious boarding school during her senior year. The first things she told us? That she hates Ghana and can not wait to go home and that Cape Coast is the worst town in the entire world. Awesome first feedback to receive...But we are determined to prove her wrong! And so far we have!!
Yesterday we came to Cape Coast and moved into our house. Sara and I share a room at Millicent’s. It’s a really big house with two rooms and a bathroom on the roof and Sara and I have one of the rooms. No one lives in the other room right now but that girl should be here next week. And then there are four volunteers next door but we haven’t met them yet. The roof part of the house is huge so we were out there for hours last night just looking at the stars. Yesterday we had an induction to Cape Coast which is a wonderful city! It’s less crowded than Accra and easier to just walk around. We’re like a 5 minute taxi ride from the city centre and a 10 minute taxi ride from the hospital I am working at in the other direction. Today was my first day of work. I am doing Physical Therapy for the first month because there are two other volunteers there now and they want me to learn from them. One is a PT student from Scotland and the other is an actual PT from Australia who wasn't there today. So I basically just shadowed the student all day today which was cool because she was really, really nice and a great teacher! By the end of the day they had me giving treatments and were asking my opinion. Haha. Plus they see a TON of kids so that's awesome!! And it doesn't hurt that the PT section of the hospital is air conditioned... :)
The heat isn’t as bad as I thought. You definitely get incredibly sweaty all the time but it’s not deadly at all. Our room is really bad because it has no air circulation but it’s nice outside where there’s a breeze. We have the whole roof to ourselves so we're just out there all afternoon and evening reading or napping. Our house mom is nice although they give us a lot of privacy so I don’t think we’ll really interact with them at all, even at meals. The hardest thing is not being able to drink water just from the tap because I don’t drink as much as I would like. We drink water from these plastic packets which is hilarious and I actually like it. What else? The transportation system is interesting because it's all by taxi but they're line, shared taxis so its more like a bus! They're really easy to flag down (especially because we are "obrunis" - foreigners - so we stand out just slightly...haha). But they only go in certain routes so for instance I have to take two different taxis to get to the hospital. And on the way home it waits until it is all full before leaving for town! It's not bad at all, I like the system! I think that’s all I have to report for now. We're going out with a bunch of volunteers tonight so hopefully we'll get to know more people! Much love from GHANA :)