Ghana Trip 2023

  Friday June 30 Today was my last day in the hospital!! We started off with the weekly Friday morning meeting for most of the doctors. A doctor presented on respiratory distress in infants, it lasted about 45 min. Then, I went to the Outpatient ward with Dr. Mensah. Today we saw several cases including rashes, malnutrition, and viruses. Whenever a patient comes in, the parent brings the current medication they are on to show the doctor. Almost all kids start on herbal medications or paracetamol from a local pharmacy then come in when it doesn’t improve. One of my roommates had a cold and the medicine bought for her from our coordinator was an herbal cough medicine that mainly consisted of thyme extract. So, I think herbal medications are generally the first line of defense here.  Something interesting is that in the standard medical history questions the doctor gives to each patient, she would ask if they sleep under a treated mosquito net, most did. One infant came in and the doctor

  Thursday June 29 Today I went to the outpatient department. Normally this would have been a special clinic day (I think either sickle cell or HIV), but today was supposed to have been the holiday celebrated yesterday so they didn’t schedule any clinic appointment for today (the lunar calendar that decides when the holiday is wasn’t totally accurate since it’s based on when a human first sees a certain moon and there is often cloud cover, so they had to change the date about a week before). The outside statues of Princess Marie and Dr. Cecily Williams (a malnutrition pioneer researcher) were decorated for the holiday.   Some people still came in and the doctor had to tell them to come next week since the staff for the clinic weren’t in today. Here's a picture of part of the inside of one of the OPD rooms, there are usually lots of posters about disease prevention or treatment of malaria, TB, and HIV. The OPD functions mainly as an urgent care here, stats say that this hospital see

  Wednesday June 28 Today was the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha which marks the culmination of pilgrimage and is a festival of sacrifice. Yesterday driving back from the Volta region we did see a lot of trucks filled with cows and bulls and also lots of goats being tied up on the side of the road which Roland said were for sacrifice. Ghana is predominantly Christian (there are church signs on every street, especially Pentecostal church signs) but there are a lot of Muslims too, we’ve seen several small mosques and this is the largest mosque in Ghana that we’ve driven past a few times.  When driving past the Black Star Square (by the Independence Monument), we saw tons of people coming to the square that had shade tents set up for a service for the holiday. This is a public holiday here so the doctors told us to not come in today. So, we slept in a bit, then went to Labadi beach club which we stayed at for a while. I was able to lap swim in a rectangular pool which was good (even without g

  Tuesday June 27  Today we went on a day trip. We woke up early and left in a van around 6 am to drive to the Volta region. It was about 3 hours and there was a lot of greenery and large hills and smaller towns. We saw lots of goats.  Our first stop was the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary. Apparently the land around this village has had Mona monkeys on it for over 200 years (Mona monkeys are primarily in West Africa) and the sanctuary was started to keep their land protected. Our guide said that they traditionally believe the monkeys are messengers of the gods so they’re sacred and not killed. On the land, the monkeys live in 13 families, some as big as 150 monkeys. Each one has a “grandpa” that is the biggest monkey and always eats first. They don’t have a ton of tourists come through (this is really out of the way of any other tourist activities and in a small town) but when groups come, they get to walk in the land and feed some small bananas to the monkeys.  We walked just a short way

  Monday June 26 Today I went to the Emergency Department which was interesting. The ER here definitely doesn’t see that many very urgent cases (maybe two ambulances a week come) and it functions more as an ICU where they hold patients until they’re stable enough to be moved to the wards.  They have some paintings like this.  It is striking to see that even their ER doesn’t have that many resources, for example, last week a newborn was rushed here and they did CPR for a while but they don’t have any ventilators so the baby passed. Today, a patient had a heart defect that would require surgery but they can’t get that anywhere in Ghana and so they’d have to try to go to India or somewhere else to get the surgery (which is almost certainly too expensive for the family to afford).  I followed one of the doctors on his morning rounds and helped with online charting and basic examination things. The most common thing was definitely malaria (often with seizures) but we also saw sickle cell, s

  Saturday June 24  We woke up early and left in a van around 6 AM. It was over a 3 hour drive to Cape Coast but it was nice to drive out of the city and see lots of lush greenery.  Cape Coast is definitely still a large city but it isn’t as tightly packed as Accra and there’s more jungle. There were a ton of goats roaming around. We went to the CFHI program house in cape coast which is actually bigger than the Accra house. There are only a couple people doing the program there but one of them did activities with us and it was interesting to hear his experience; the hospital he’s at sounds kinda bigger and maybe better funded than the Accra facilities we’re at.  It was absolutely pouring rain so we waited around a bit for it to stop then we went out to lunch. We ate at a place right on the water which was pretty but the food wasn’t our favorite- a lot of us had undercooked pizza.  I tried a Ghanaian dish I’ve been wanting to try the whole trip called Fufu which is a doughy and starchy