volunteering in Abor - week 1

Kendra and Achoo
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Sorry it's been two weeks since our last update - it has been busy and the town where we are now doing our volunteer placements (Abor) doesn't have an internet cafe, so we have had to wait until we get a chance to come back into Akatsi.

Starting last Monday, July 3, we began our placements that will continue for the next 4 weeks - Kendra working and teaching at the orphanage called In My Father's House and Ryan at Sacred Heart Hospital in Abor. We are staying in a room at the orphanage and Ryan walks or gets a ride to the hospital each morning. To make things easy we are just going to each write a paragraph about what we've been doing...

A preschool class at In My Father's House
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Kendra:

Well this week has been full of ups and downs but overall has been very rewarding. The orphanage is called "In My Father's House"and was started by a Catholic priest from Italy named "Poppi" (his real name is Joe but the kids have named him Poppi). It is funny because there is a very strong Italian presence at the orphanage since many of the volunteers who come are from Italy. For example, all the kids say "Ciao" instead of hello and went absolutely crazy when Italy won the World Cup! It makes things feel a little more like home. In terms of my volunteer work, I am teaching english to the preschoolers and kindergardeners in the morning and science to grade 5s and 6s in the afternoons. Despite the fact that I am not a qualified teacher, I am teaching my own classes due to the fact that there is such a shortage of teachers. It has been hard to see the amount of corporal punishment that is used on the children. Thankfully they do not expect that I hit the children while I am teaching. I am also spending a lot of time just playing with the kids and giving them lots of positive attention and hugs which they so desperately crave. I have already grown very attached to some of the kids at the orphanage. It is hard not to want to take them all home with me, especially a little one year-old girl named Mary who was found a few weeks ago wandering the streets after being abandoned by her parents. Sometimes it is very heartbreaking to see so many children who have either been abandoned, given away, or orphaned. However, the orphanage takes very good care of them despite the limited amount of resources available. There are also a large number of children who have physical and mental disabilities. Most are from families who could not afford treatment so the orphanage has taken these children in and are funding their operations and rehab. In My Father's House truely is a wonderful place and despite the many hardships, is a place of a lot of happiness, singing, dancing and laughter. So in closing, all is very well and I am defintely learning as much from the children here as they are from me.

The operating room in Abor's hospital
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Ryan:

I am volunteering at Sacred Heart Hospital in the town of Abor, which is a private hospital which serves a large area of the Keta-Akatsi district. Being a private hospital, patients must pay for services or be insured under the brand new government-run plan that began this year. It also means that the hospital is relatively well stocked with most types of drugs, well staffed, and has enough equipment to get by. The facilities include an out-patient department (OPD)where doctors and MO's (I think medical officers) see patients. I hang out there a lot to listen to the doctors interviewing patients - luckily two of the three doctors need english translators because they don't speak Ewe (one is Nigerian, the other from a different region of Ghana) and that's how I can understand what they're saying. There is also a female and maternity ward, which supplies a lot of the hospital's work. In a day there are always a few deliveries (oh yes, with no pain medication, and very little assistance from nurses!), and the doctors will perform C-sections in the operating theatre at the hospital as well. Also in the theatre, which as you can see by the photo is very basic, they do hernia repairs and appendectomies. All of this is done by a general practitioner, nurse-anesthetist and assisting nurse without the modern anaesthesia machines (they have one, but the power often goes out, so they can't rely on anything electric!). There is also the male ward, which is not nearly as busy and as one worker told me the patients are "usually old men who come here to die". Although that may be the case sometimes, there are also a lot of people who get better thanks to the work of the staff. But things are definitely VERY different from a hospital at home, the most obvious things are the types of diseases that occur and also the mortality rates. Malaria must account for almost half of all the patient visits to OPD, and infant mortality is tragically high. Tuberculosis, skin infections, typhoid, and injuries due to accidents of many kinds are some other cases that I've seen more often than in Canada.

So far my main role has been to simply observe, watch how things run at the hospital, follow the doctors on ward rounds, and just get used to things. I would like to get a bit more involved eventually, but I think it was a good introductory week all in all. Definitely eye-opening, and the doctors have been good at informing me about malaria and other diseases I don't see a lot of.