August 4th, Dirt Roads and Pygmy Goats.

Today we went up to Kumasi. I mentioned this before, but I saw so many crazy things during the drive, that I figured I should show some pictures. I wish I got more, but it was a little hard to take good shots with the bumpiness of the road (or lack of road). We were Kumasi-bound for maybe 6 hours and grabbed food at a rest stop. Here are some cool sights!

You can’t really tell, but this dirt road stretched on for soso many miles. No lanes, just trucks and buses working around goats, people, potholes, and other trucks and buses. What’s more, this red dirt stains everything. The air is thick with this stuff and when I got back to the hotel my laptop was covered with a film of it, which I can’t get off. My clothes and hair also have a red tint to them now. Also, I’m pretty sure I ingested way too much of this stuff, because I keep sneezing.

Usually when someone visits my family in New York, they take pictures of the squirrels. To a native New Yorker, it just shows you haven’t been here long. But I’m pretty sure it’s a universal trend. In Alaska, it’s the Caribou that get tourists excited; In Mexico, it’s the iguanas; and in New York, it’s the squirrels. So it makes sense that in Ghana, I kept taking pictures of the cute little pigmy goats that roamed the streets.

The road is surrounded by these villages, which look like they need a power hose taken to them. Like I said, the dirt is infectious. And absolutely everything has a red tint. Miles between each town, we’d see people walking with jugs of water on their heads, large bags in their hands, or their children slung to their backs. I don’t know their story, but I’m sure they walk more each day than I ran in high school.

Here’s the one picture I wish I got: A bull and some people, chilling in the back of a pick up truck.

Yes, I swear I saw it.

So I might be stuck in Ghana time...

See, everything we ever did in Ghana was delayed by at least 30 minutes, usually an hour, and sometimes even 4 hours (or just never got done). If our outreach driver told us to be ready by 7, it usually meant he would pick us up around 8:30 or 9:00. By most of the world’s standards, that would be ridiculous, laughable, unacceptable even; but we got pretty good at reading Ghana time. So even though I’m back stateside and starting school up again, I find I may have grown a little too comfortable with the delays. I think this blog is running on Ghana time, and to those of you who aren’t in my time warp, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. My computer stopped working entirely during my first day in Kumasi, and I was left with a notebook and runny pen to keep my blog going. Now this turned into much more of a journal, but I’ve still got all my entries! To whoever’s still interested, I just need to rework some things to make up for my broken computer and lack of Internet during my trip. Sorry about the delay. And thanks for waiting!

August 3rd. Surreal.

We really did a lot today. We started our day on the outreach but ended up back in the capital city of Accra. When you do so much traveling on a workday, it’s bound to feel long and surreal.

This is how it started (I’ll list for the readers’ sake): Wake up at seven. Sort glasses; laugh at the 60’s type spectacles. Travel to the makeshift clinic. Get set up with the stations: medical history, eye charts, physician, medicine and eyeglass dispensary.

I was doing eye exams, which are in meters here, and I’m happy to say I’ve got 6/6 distance vision! Because I only speak Brofo (that’s English), I mostly communicated with hand motions, smiles, and a mix of English and Twi. By the end of the day, I did about fifty eye charts. The patients were all smiles… some peaked with their other eye, some showed off, and some were just nervous.

I’ve been getting the feeling that whenever we go somewhere, we’ll always be trailed by a group of kids. They just smile so wide, and are always ready to show off their English. I think the eye test was good fun for them. They slowly inched towards us, and were eager to try the eye test as well. Every once in a while, they’d whisper the number we pointed to from the sidelines. They did a lot of dancing too. Ghanaians are natural CatDaddy-ers.

Eventually we headed back to Accra. As we traveled, I got the impression villages were always set up in the same way: the main street and small-scattered houses that all face, and are spread out from, the main street. I don’t know… it’s a little hard to explain.

Once we got back to Accra I relaxed a while and got ready for dinner. We went out to a Lebanese restaurant in the younger up-and-coming district of Accra. It was noisy, vibrant, and very lively. It reminded me a little of my trip to Beijing, with all the expats and younger travelers who were here for unknown reasons.

Everyone in our group was super interesting. They were either in university, or med school, or even recent graduates and going into their ophthalmology specialization. Most of us were American, though many were also Canadian, and some even British or studying in Ireland. It was really interesting to hear about everyone’s unique background.