Weekend

*** It’s Monday morning. Congrats to Paul on winning a fre tro-tro ride for correctly identifying Dancing in the Dark as the song from which I pulled the title to the previous post. Also, congrats to the Habs to smoking the Laffs twice over the weekend! God I wish I could have been there to see it. Still, making the playoffs will be tough and those wins will be little consolation if we don’t make it.***

On Saturday, we were supposed to travel to three villages where we are going to start clinics, but on the Ghanaian clock, Saturday equals Sunday. There was some confusion with the driver of our van, so we postponed it to today.

The first village, Adumasa, is one that I have been to before with Maxwell. We met with the chief and the local assemblyman and they showed us the building they are going to give us for the clinic. It needs a bit of paint, but it’s more than adequate. After making some arrangements there about fixing up the building, we went to Tedeso, following a terrible dirt road. More on that later. This village had set up a really good clinic with the help of the American Embassy. It was really impressive—lots of space and well-furnished. There were even six, two-bedroom apartments for staff. The only problem was that there was only one midwife/nurse and an attendant running the place. We hope to take over management and provide more staff.

From Tedeso we went to Anyanso. They constructed a building to be used as a clinic almost ten years ago but have not been able to get anyone to run it. The building was good, not quite as well-appointed as the clinic at Tedeso, but it has almost everything we’ll need. We just need to evict the current tenants—several mice and way too many huge wasps.

Because our van is not exactly airtight, we all got filthy from the dirt road. It’s disconcerting to see dark brown water at your feet in the shower. At first I thought my tan had improved until I scratched my arms and saw my skin miraculously lighten.

All in all it was a productive day. The chiefs and officials we met with were all supportive and development-minded, so I think we have found good people to partner with. It’s a bit tough going to these places, simply because you want to help immediately but we just don’t have the resources (financial and human) to do everything overnight. I can’t wait to see the finished product: self-sustaining clinics managed by the communities with technical support from RUCNET. But that is going to require a return trip to Ghana, as the best we can do in the next few months is to have a few of them running, but managed by RUCNET.