Tamale, Damongo, Savelugu – Day 12

Today we left the hotel at 5:30am to hop on our plane up north for site visits.  Given all the craziness that occured the last time we tried to fly north, I didn’t real believe we would make it until airborne.  The flight took about an hour, and then we had a two-hour drive ahead us over to the West Gonja hospital in Damongo. A bumpy, dusty ride.  Seriously – so bumpy, so dusty.  In contrast t the south which is mostly Christian, the North is predominantly Islamic, so we passed by several mosques as we drove.  There also seems to be a lot more bicycles up here.

West Gonja is a Catholic Mission hospital, serving a large community, complete with a surgical area and maternity ward.  We started with roundtable meeting between our staff and theirs – the conference room was so hot I literally almost passed out but managed to make it through.  Then we toured their facility, which was a fairly large compound.  One of the most interesting things was the solar panels provided by the Austrians to light the operating room.

From West Gonja we had to head back on the bumpy, dusty road over to Savelugu to see the Guinea Worm Eradication program led by the Carter Center (http://www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/index.html).  What made the drive back especially difficult is that the AC in our car wasn’t working very well – I think it got maxed out on the initial drive and maybe the filters got clogged with dust.  So Shelby & I both just tried to conk out for a bit in the back seat and ignore the fact that our AC was noisy but not producing much.  Guinea worm is a really horrible disease, and hopefully close to eradication.  First we visited a local water source complete with a filtering program.   It was so hot when we got out of our cars – we later confirmed it at 105.

 

Then we headed over to the clinic.  See this beautiful girl?  See the creepy worm coming out of her leg?  Thats why we’re here and doing the work we do.

Landing back in Accra we were all looking forward to cool clean showers at the hotel before dinner, but TY changed up the game plan and asked we go straight to dinner at Captain Hooks.  I was so grimy, but oh well.  After dinner we surprised RV with a birthday cake since he’ll be flying on Thursday and not really able to celebrate – he was genuinely surprised by it which was fun.