--
Ok, now it's 11:01 pm here. I fell asleep in the car. Then I did 50 push-ups and a stomach workout on the floor of my bedroom in the Telecentre. Then I showered. Then I kind of sort of put all of my stuff away because my two roommates are much cleaner than I. For the past two days I've had all of my three suitcases and backpack sprawled out and unzipped on the floor. Now I'm pushing off sleep until I finish this post because I jotted down a few interesting parts of my day before I fell asleep that I'd love to share with the world. I have to make sure I sleep enough for a 7 am outreach departure tomorrow morning. :( So I'll try to make this quick!
The sound of Epic Sax Guy was heard around the world at 6:46 am Ghana time this morning. Yes, he is my alarm. He is also the story of my sophomore year. Sets me off on the right foot every day.
What also sets me off on the right foot in the morning is an unexpectedly delicious breakfast! It's even better when I have unforeseen ample time to eat it because my driver is late to pick me up! I was incredibly impressed by the Telecentre's continental breakfast. They had a seemingly self-replenishing supply of hot oatmeal (made in a pot! not even the instant kind!), corn flakes cereal, fresh toast, and hard boiled eggs. This would have been easily been enough to satisfy me. But then there was the most exotic jam selection I've ever encountered! I tried my toast with both mango and pineapple jams. The strawberry was just too old school for me this morning. There was mango juice and pineapple coconut juice. I didn't get to sample the pineapple coconut juice, but I am sure it is as delicious as the smooth and silky and tangy mango juice. I will report on my pineapple coconut juice experience tomorrow.
Today was my first outreach experience. I probably should have begun this blog writing about why I am doing this trip and some of the expectations I have for the volunteer work I'd be doing. Unite For Sight is essentially the reason I am here in Ghana. The NGO sponsors free eye treatment in a number of target clinics for outreach patients who are restricted in their access to health care by poverty, which encompasses more than just insufficient funds for health care expenditures. Poverty restricts one's access to health care for other correlative reasons such as lack of transportation and lack of education surrounding medicine and, consequently, knowledge that help is available, of common risk factors and and general ways to conduct oneself healthfully. Unite For Sight cites that there are at least 40 million cases of preventable blindness in the world. Eye health is so important where there is poverty because, with simple solutions such as eyeglasses or ten-minute surgical cataract procedures, people's lives are drastically improved and they instantly become productive members of society again. This helps more than just the person who needed eye treatment, as those who were previously caring for the patient are relieved of such obligation and can once again channel their energies towards production and, hence, the economy.
The outreach efforts of the eye clinics sponsored by Unite For Sight involve teams of ophthalmic nurses and volunteers who traverse the borders of the cities to access the rural villagers. We conduct patient screenings, which include visual acuity tests and eye health diagnoses by the ophthalmic nurses. The ophthalmic nurse prescribes the outreach patient with either a medication, a set of eyeglasses, or a referral for further assessment by an ophthalmologist. We are in charge of visual acuity screenings and the process that follows the prescription, i.e., distributing the eyeglasses and/or medication, informing the patient of his/her referral, and the medical documentation. I will be conducting a research project alongside Sophia and Jonathan, so my volunteer role is a little different. My work will combine the typical volunteer agenda with the work for my research project. I will be collecting my data from the same places where I will be going for outreach, so there wouldn't be any conflicts of interest here. I will begin my data collection once my surveys have been translated into the most common local dialect, Twi, so that we will have fewer language barriers and, hence, more opportunities for viable survey data.
Anywayzzzz. So this all started today. We were picked up from the Telecentre by Dennis and John and driven to today's outreach camp with the Crystal Eye Clinic. During our bumpy car ride, I began to read Shaun Ellis's The Man Who Lives With Wolves. This will definitely be my favorite book once I've read it. I read through the first three pages of the prefix and I melted. Shaun Ellis is such a bizarre man who knows how to love in a way that is so strange yet so pure, and he does a beautiful job conveying his true feelings. I want to meet him someday.
A lesser pleasant experience I had during the bumpy car ride was the shocking sight of a guy in the street who was ever so casually flailing his jean pants in the air to conceal and reveal his underwear-less self to the traffic onlookers. He was actually 20 feet away from two police officers who were definitely turning a blind eye, for he made his presence known. When he finally settled to tie his jeans around his waist, he covered his rear, which was previously exposed to the police officers, but, from the front side his schlong was still peeking visibly from the inner seam. Sneaky, sneaky.
Another thing I noticed: school children walk (edit: RUN) to school together, and girls here don’t let their hair grow until a certain age. While at the outreach I was able to take a minute to attend to the noisy commotion coming from the adjacent building. There was a high school graduation! This was the second time today I was faced with the image of schoolchildren dressed in uniform and having to slap myself because I was quick to assume that boys here just wore dresses. To my dismay, this was not true. It is a cultural expectation for girls to keep their hair short until a certain age, which I surmise is just before they graduate high school because the female high school graduates had stylized their hair. Another interesting thing about this graduation was that it lasted the ENTIRE day. I would say the ratio of ceremony to mingling was about the same as that of, oh, say, my high school, but since the ceremony was going on from before the time of our arrival at 10:00 am and until around 4:00 pm and the people were still mingling when we left at 7-ish, I concluded that the proportion of business to socializing remains consistent from across the Pacific. Well. This generalization holds for at least high school graduation ceremonies... I think.
There were also boys who had completed their military cadet training and had put on a performance at the ceremony. They also had those funky ropes around their left shoulders that were adorned on the security guards at the airport. If I had a photo editing program on my netbook, you might be able to see what I'm talking about here:
The outreach camp workers made individually packed hot lunches for each UFS volunteer! I was so impressed. People are so friendly, generous, hospitable, and gentle here. I could learn a few things from their ways here. Our lunches were fried rice and fried chicken with the same hot sauce I had eaten at Fingalix the day before. My fellow UFS volunteers couldn't take the heat, so they did not apply the sauce. I happen to be accustomed to hot foods because of my lovely neighbor Susan who cooks spicy Indian food all the time and who has inspired me to integrate spice into my cuisine. Chelsea loooooove spices. Also, considering the fact that I've eaten fried chicken and rice twice in the two days I've been here, I think this (the fried chicken and fried rice, obvi. not the spice) is something I'll have to get used to.
Other interesting food I ate today? Mini bananas from the basket on a woman's head! It cost me 1 cedi for a half batch, which was eight mini bananas. I think I ate four of them. They were so yummy.
I also made another friend who was carrying stuff on his head. He was a young boy. He had some funky fruit. I would have bought it but I didn't have small enough Ghanaian currency to buy a small quantity. His name was Simon, and I wanted a picture with him because he was so adorable, and he agreed so long as I give him what I initially thought was a copy of the picture, but no: his hand was pointing to the camera because he wanted my camera. I engaged him in conversation and realized that there was a chance that I'd come back to the same place again because Unite For Sight conducts an outreach at the same place (I wish I knew the name) on the first Thursday of every month. I think I will request to conduct outreach with the Crystal Eye Clinic for July 7th, because I kind of sort of promised Simon that I would have a copy of the picture for him on that date. I gave him my phone number and name and told him to call that number if I wasn't there on July 7th. He told me that one day he would teach me 'his language' Ga, which is another local Ghanaian dialect.
I know I've mentioned the chickens everywhere. There were chickens at the camp. There were also stray dogs. Cute dogs, too! They looked friendly and harmless, and, from my conversations with other volunteers, I seem to be one of the few (cough: the only) who was vaccinated against rabies, so it is naturally my duty to seek out these stray animals and see how they respond to a human's advance. The dog seemed scared of me. :( A Ghanaian lady walked by and said to me, "he's probably scared because of your color." And I was like... hmmm? That might actually be a possibility!
Tejas is a fellow volunteer with whom I am developing an interesting relationship. It's been a while since I've had people obsess over my buffness and physical strength... since high school I think? Yeah, when people would ask me all the time how much I can bench, etc. Tejas first wanted to know if I was a swimmer because I have broad shoulders. That was yesterday. He asked me again today. Then he asked me if he could arm wrestle me. I told him after a month of me doing push-ups every day (hence my 50 push-ups from before). He agreed to the challenge. Then he proceeded to ask me if I ever flexed so hard that I ripped through a shirt. He was serious! Then I thought about it, and Sophia interjected to recount the story of the Unite For Sight concert last winter during which I ripped my pants while MCing. I had jumped onto the stage and my entire pants split from the middle seam. I thought the noise was really loud because the audience was silent. So I kind of made a joke about it and proceeded off the stage and deferred MCing to another UFS member. Tejas must have some kind of special mind-reading powers to have gotten that one out of me.
No comments:
Post a Comment