"Urgent"

Sorry about the absence of a blog in the recent days.  I wrote one three days ago, but it turned out so dull that I decided not to post it. 

Meanwhile, I have made it a daily routine to play soccer with my Ghanaian friends.  The goals are a pair of rocks placed two to three feet apart and the field is on rather a severe slope, but it is refreshing to be able to compete athletically.  Soccer is not my sport: in eighth grade I tried out for goalie, but instead of blocking the ball, I repeatedly panicked and rugby tackled the oncoming strikers instead.  Surprisingly, attempt two has been better, as I have been competing at an acceptable level.  This phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that I am the only person wearing close-toed shoes. 

I started at the hospital yesterday.  I was supposed to start last Monday but a series of professional mishaps combined to prevent me from possessing the paperwork necessary for me to start until this Tuesday afternoon, and as Wednesday was a national Muslim holiday, I finally was able to go to work yesterday.  Tangentially, although Ghana is obviously a Christian country, there is no visible friction between the Muslim minority and the Christian majority. 

The hospital is well run and organized, which is really all you can ask for in a rural hospital in the developing world.  Yet, there is an obvious lack of funding and urgency.  In the Western world, there are machines to measure vital signs, but here in Africa, one must do it by hand.  So, one has to count the pulse for a span of a minute, measure blood pressure in a very rudimentary way, and count the number of times that the patient inhales and exhales in a course of a minute.  This task and ferrying blood from the blood bank to the operating room for blood transfusions have been entrusted to me.

Additionally, there is an utter lack of urgency in the hospital.  A patient under operation had life threatening levels of hemoglobin, so I was sent to the blood bank "urgently" to fetch some blood.  I found that there was no one in the blood bank, so I had to go to the front desk, then to the lab, to have a guy, who was talking on the phone and laughing, ambling in ten minutes later.  The guy seemed to have some trouble finding the blood, and once he did, I had to wait for it to be warmed for another five minutes.  Luckily, the patient survived.

The children at the orphanage have heartbreaking stories.  A lot of the little ones did not even have any clothes to wear and many were starving before they came to the orphanage.  This makes you subconsciously exaggerate, or otherwise invent their positive qualities because you are so overcome by their unfortunate circumstances.  As an adviser of mine put it, I have to be careful to not let the emotional override the rational while working with the kids in the orphanage.  All their needs cannot be met, and it would simply be unrealistic to expect them to be.

More optimistically, Julia and I will be heading to Cape Coast/Elmina tomorrow where we will be joined by Bianca.  Bianca is riding the 12 hour bus from Tamale to Accra today and tomorrow, she will ride the three hour bus from Accra to Cape Coast.  Unfortunately, after this trip, she will be going back to Belgium.

A great thing about living in a developing country is that the travel costs are insanely cheap.  A bad thing about living in a developing country is that you never know when a road will be abruptly broken by a river and when you will have to charter a canoe to get to the other side....  Anyway, barring road flooding, this will be a very welcome get away.