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.