Friday, September 28, 2007

OMG I am DONE

A quick update before I head out to dinner: I have officially completed my program with Unite for Sight, and I have also just submitted applications for school next year. That is nuts. Also, I finished the applications 3 days early, unheard of for me! I am all kinds of happy right now.

I will post some thoughts on my experiences here in the near future - for now, I am going to be too busy enjoying my last 5 days in Ghana. I'm planning on traveling with some friends to a place called Beyin tomorrow - it is supposed to be a beautiful beach ton on the West part of Ghana's coast. From there, we're going to travel to Nzulezu, a village nearby built on stilts above the water. I'm excited!

I should be back in Accra by Tuesday night, and then I'll finish my preparations for leaving. And now, have a look at my Thursday:

-leave here at 01:00
-arrive airport b/t 01:30 and 02:00
-fly from Accra to Morocco at 05:15
-Arrive Morocco around 09:00
-Fly Morocco to Brussels around 14:00
-Arrive Brussels around 18:30
-Catch bus from Brussels to London (?) at 21:00
-Meet my cousin first thing Friday morning.

THAT IS NOT A FUN DAY.

But then, I get to see people who know me! And love me! And I get to hang out in England and Wales for a week with my mom. THAT IS FUN.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Akwaaba (you are welcome)

Well, I've officially been here for four weeks! I'm having a fantastic time, and am so happy that I came here. This past week and a half has been our busiest yet, hence the delay in sending the email. Our work handing out flyers around Accra has paid off, because we're seeing about double the typical number of patients at our local screening centre. Outreaches have been especially busy, with the minimum number of patients still above 100, and the max at well over 150. We were very lucky this week to have two professionals with us. One is Dr. Lotfi Merabet, an optometrist/professor at Harvard Medical School - he's here to help out with outreaches as well as to teach our ophthalmic nurses whatever he can. Oddly enough, before going into optometry, he did a PhD in vision research in the same lab as Claudine (for those who don't know Claudine, she's a post-doc at York and a very brilliant/wonderful person)! One of the other new additions to the group is Roberta, a young doctor from Italy. Having more than one person doing the actual checkups is helping things run more smoothly. I saw the monthly report for August yesterday - over the month (I was part of the program for the second half of August), we saw almost 1500 people over the course of about 20 outreaches. 150 of those people were referred for surgery.

My most interesting day was probably last monday, when Maureen and I went with Margaret (a nurse from the Crystal Eye Clinic) to the Liberian refugee camp in Buduburam. Buduburam is home to approximately 46 000 refugees who fled from Liberia during the civil war. Most of them lost their homes and family, and likely will stay in Ghana for the rest of their lives rather than go home to try and start their lives from the beginning again. There is a full-time screening program there that is run by local volunteers, and once every two weeks Margaret spends a day at the camp to see the patients who need medicine or possibly referrals for surgery. The camp was extremely well-run and efficient. We saw well over 100 patients, with Margaret diagnosing, referring and prescribing at an average of 2.5 minutes per patient! Everybody was friendly, and it was a very positive experience.

Aside from work, we did manage to have some fun this week too. We visited the Wli waterfalls on Sunday, and it was probably the most beautiful place that I've ever seen. I waded through the water and got within about 5 metres of the falls. Apparently, you can stand right under them during the dry season, but since we've had a lot of rain, they were a bit too 'watery' to do that during our visit. Standing so close to the waterfall made me feel like I was at a spa - the wind and water coming off them felt like an intense body scrub, something I desperately needed after spending 4 weeks in the smoke and dust of Accra. On our drive back from the falls, we stopped at the monkey sanctuary and saw some monkeys. We brought bananas with us, and the monkeys peeled and ate them right out of our hands! That was a very good day.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Accra Week Two!

I've had a very busy, and very good second week in Accra. I feel like I'm settling into my life here a little bit more - feeling more comfortable with my clinic and outreach duties, making new friends and getting more confident with exploring my surroundings. As with last week, my favourite part of the program is outreach. We did a few more local outreaches this week, seeing about 70 - 100 patients each time. I also completed my training, so I'm now able to dispense medicines and feel like I'm really helping our patients.

The most significant part of the last week was our overnight outreach. While Accra has a lot of need for eye care, regions outside of the greater Accra area are in even greater need. For this reason, a three night trip was planned to take us to New Edubiase, which is about 4 hours Northwest from Accra. We left Sunday afternoon and had a pretty relaxed night - got dinner and then went back to our hotel (The 'Holliday Inn' , haha) where we killed some giant spiders (they were really, really scary) and went to bed. Other than the spiders, the place was really nice! Our two outreaches went really well - on the first day, we met the local chief and then went to a village where we saw just over 100 patients, referring 19 of them for cataract surgery. The second (and final) day was really busy - we saw more than 200 patients over 9.5 hours, referring 30 of them for surgery. That was also my first day actually dispensing medications, and it went very smoothly. It was interesting thinking that the number of patients sent for surgery just from that one day of outreach would have used up all of the money we each raise for Unite for Sight - at the time it felt like a lot of money but I'm sure that the demand for surgery extends far beyond the money we bring in. We ended up staying in New Edubiase again that night rather than drive back in the dark to Accra (we were all too tired anyways). It's likely that we'll be going back there again next month, a trip that I'm looking forward to very much.

The rest of the week has been relatively low-key. On Thursday I went to a market to hand out some flyers advertising the Unite for Sight eye camp (and picked up some cool souvenirs to bring home). We had an outreach today that was pretty successful, and we'll be going on outreach again tomorrow. Aside from work, we've got some fun plans for the weekend - we're going to a beach tomorrow night, and hopefully we'll be doing a day trip to a canopy walk and a former slave castle on Sunday! While Accra isn't the sort of place to do 'sight-seeing,' its really interesting and after all of the sight-seeing in Europe, it feels like a really unique and lively place. Accra itself is huge, and the landscape surrounding it is very dry and barren, but as you drive outside of it for any distance the land changes and you see remnants of the rainforests that used to cover the area. I'm hoping that sometime in the next month we may get a Saturday off so that we can do a weekend trip to some other coastal places that are supposed to be really nice.

And on a completely unrelated note, I managed to get a care package from my parents! I've been pretty close to running out of a few necessities (contact lens solution etc) thanks to some bottles opening in my checked luggage. Mom and dad came to the rescue, and with my boxes of fancy granola bars, twizzlers, cookies (although apparently mom thinks that I need a diet, she gave me oreo 'thinsations,' with only 100 cal per pack and none of that great oreo taste!) I'm now the envy of the other volunteers. I also have some tea and a flashlight c/o my awesome neighbors Don and Colleen who arranged the shipping :) Thanks so much guys!