Day 59

Today was my first day back at the clinic in a long time. As I was walking to the clinic today I ran into Kwame with his three daughters as they were walking to the clinic. They all had upset stomachs so I walked with him to the clinic talking about the differences between Ghana and America. I decided that I would stay with Kwame the whole day from the records office to dispensary. I first sat with him at the records office thinking of all of the questions to ask him during our interview. It took almost half an hour for him to figure out the situation with the records. His three daughters are 5, 7, and 10. They are absolutely crazy. When he told me they were sick I thought he was joking because they were running around dancing and singing. Once we got all of their records we went to the O.P.D., which took another half hour. We finally got into the consulting room with the chief where he brought all of the kids in and sat them down at the chair one by one for the doctor to examine them. He was much more thorough on the first kid than on the other two but he spent only a couple of minutes on. The youngest girl was acting out a little bit and got yelled at for acting silly in front of the doctor. Once they were all checked out we went to the dispensary to pick up the medication. The doctor prescribed two of them to get injections, which brought instant tear to their eyes. The older sister was being a brat and basking in the fact that she wouldn’t need one. The other two went into the injection room literally kicking and screaming. It took two nurses and her dad to hold her down while they gave her the shot. While the 7 year old laid on the bed still screaming about her shot, it only made it that much worse for the 5 year old. She was beyond terrified to get her shot. She was even squirmier than the older one but the nurse surprisingly got the shot in without any problems. Once they were finally finished with everything I asked to take Kwame aside to do my interview with him. The nurses room was filled up with the patients from the overflowing wards so I just opted to give the Interview in the hallway. It was quiet enough that my recorder would pick up all the sound. He consented to participate and I began my questions. It only lasted about 15 minutes but I learned so much from him that has become critical for my research. A few of the questions were new and really helped me understand why parents bring their children to clinics. I spent the rest of the day in the dispensary talking to Rita and Edmund. I went home later than normal and Cassie told me she was going to go to the Town Park if I wanted to join her. I hadn’t eaten lunch so I bought some peanuts to snack on while we walked. The best part about eating the peanuts is being able toss the shells to the ground wherever you are. We walked down to the park and saw a man with a wooden box labeled icecream on his head. He was handing out cones with white and pink icecream over them. Cassie and I each got a cone for 50 pesewas that was absolutely divine. It was more of a sample size and melted if you didn’t eat it right away but so good we couldn’t stop thinking about it. The town park is just a huge soccer field where people come to watch the school kids play. School was actually canceled this week due to the sports activities going on. Today was football (soccer) and tomorrow is track and field evens. Football is the favorite sport of Ghana so there were close to 300 people there surrounding the field. Cassie and I walked around the park for twenty minutes running into friends here and there. Our friend Mamaya gave us some shortbread that melts in your mouth. We met up with one the teachers at the School where Cassie observes. George is a nice looking young man that is very chivalrous. In Ghana when you say you like something, it doesn’t mean the same thing like it would in America. If you say you like something in Ghana it means you want that right now. So when we mentioned that we love the sweet bread here George literally ran after the sweet bread lady and bought us a few rolls. He wasn’t even going to eat any himself until we told him if he bought them he has to eat at least one. Only moments after we finished our sweet bread we met a new guy that goes by 50 cent. Original. He even tattooed his nickname on his arm. It looked so awful, you could tell he did it at home free hand. We had been waiting all day to buy ourselves a fan-milk and I guess he the seller had just passed us while we were talking to 50 cent because one second he was behind us and the next he was no where to be found. 50 cent heard us talking about it and sent a little kid standing around to go and get the fan-milk seller for us. While we waited for him to come he told us he was a motorbike driver and he dreams to go to America. The little boy came back and 50 cent paid for our fan-milks. Cassie and I felt so spoiled during this we could hardly believe it. We joked about how if we really were awful people we could get our groceries paid for all the time by the love struck men. We could tell them how much we loved onions and we would get a ton of them. We watched the game for about half an hour before we remembered that Portugal vs Spain was playing tonight. I never pass on a moment to watch Ronaldo so I was looking forward to this game. We asked George if there was a place in town we could go to watch the game. He told us there wasn’t but we should go to his place to watch it. We agreed but decided to go home and cook dinner before going to his house. We had a bit of time to kill so I did a quick 30-minute workout and took a shower. We were thinking about how it was going to be too dark once the game ended so we would just stay and watch the game with Grace. The game was supposedly supposed to start at 6:30 but we couldn’t find it yet but Grace said sometimes even the TV shows are on Africa time. She told us it might be on later so we just waited and wrote our notes inside until she could find it. It was close to 8 before she found it but it was already over and they were going over the highlights. Spain had won, but there’s still one more game between Italy and Germany to decide who plays in the final game. I am loving my time here and can’t believe how many different activities I get to experience everyday. I have found that on the days that I just agree to be apart of something I have the most fun. I was tired from the clinic so I could have stayed home and slept but instead I had such a wonderful day and met so many new people. Out of the many lessons I’ve learned from living here it’s to truly have a sense of adventure.

XOXO

AMA