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!