Nzulezo- The Village on Stilts!

Hello Family & Friends!

Here are more diaries as promised! There are few talking about the experiences I had at the clinic last week as well as my trip on the weekend to the village on stilts! I hope you enjoy reading them and I will post more soon!

This week at the clinic was amazing and I definitely have a lot to write about! Tomorrow I am going to a primary school to do a presentation about malaria. I have butterflies right now just thinking about it as I am really not one for public speaking. Hopefully it goes well!

Enjoy the diaries and keep following for more updates!

Peace & love
-Sara


August 4th,

I went to volunteer at the maternity clinic today. I checked all of the blood pressures of the women as they were arriving while another nurse checked their weights. Then the clinic began with a song and a prayer once everyone had been registered and had there blood pressure + weight taken. I continued to take blood pressures for other women who came in after the clinic had begun. The women seemed to have drastically low blood pressures today. I was concerned that I was doing something wrong at first but I looked through their previous charts and for the majority today their blood pressure were 90/50- 100/70! At home that would be considered low for a non-pregnant person! I was chatting with a lot of the patients in Fante while doing their BP which they all got a kick out of. I think I am responding better now to “Sister Aba” than to Sara!

Later on in the day I helped with HIV testing. One of the nurses did the test and then I recorded the patient’s information in the record book and whether or not they tested positive based on what I determined by looking at the test strip.

I almost witnessed two deliveries today but neither of them were progressing enough on my shift. I waited around afterwards but they probably won’t give birth until later this evening. One of the women was breech and her cervix was stuck at 4cm. It had barely dilated all day and she was in a great deal of pain. The position of the baby as well as the failure for the baby to descend would result in a Caesarean section back at home and they do perform Caesarean sections at the hospital here so I don’t know why this woman hasn’t been referred for one. I would be so nervous to deliver a breech baby, especially when the clinic lacks many resources if there were to be any complications with the newborn. I am very worried about the baby and hoping to hear good news when I go to the clinic tomorrow!

After I left the clinic I went to my friend Eunice’s house. She is a nurse at the clinic. She wanted me to meet her baby daughter, Asabia. She was at her mother-in-law’s place and they were watching a hilarious soap opera that was dubbed in English. After watching soaps and playing with the baby I finally sauntered back to the office. There weren’t many people around but I popped in just in case. Then I went home with Caro.

We had supper and our tea party. We talked with Emmanuel and the kids for awhile. Moe (the eldest of the children) taught me a Ghanaian dance. You slap the sides of your legs twice, clap your hands once, and then hit your chest twice. It has a catchy rhythm! Now it is stuck in my head and I will probably just keep doing it over and over until she teaches me another dance!

Well I better get to bed. I am going on an outreach program for the clinic tomorrow and I have to leave my house at 5:30 am. Its going to feel a bit like the days of clinical at school!

Da yie! Sleep well!

August 5th,

This morning I left the house when it was still dark outside. My friend Frederick who is a taxi driver came to get me at my house and brought me to Shama. I arrived in Shama shortly after 6am and waited at the junction for the nurses (Anita, Amelia, and Priscilla) to arrive. Unfortunately this is Ghana and they were running behind so I got stuck there for a little while waiting. It is never good to stand in one place for a long time here as taxi drivers and tro-tros will come up to you constantly trying to drive you somewhere. They were especially confused to see a white girl all alone in the pouring rain and when they asked me where I was going I said "right here, I have no where to go" . They thought I was crazy. The nurses finally arrived at 7am. By this time I had received a few marriage proposals and had eaten an entire loaf of sugar bread! We travelled out to a small community called Yabiow together for our outreach program.

While we were in Yabiow we ran a small clinic for children ages 1 month- 5 years old. Parents brought their children out to the centre of the town where we were set up. We took all of their weights and compared it to the expected weight for the child’s age. If it was underweight we would consult with the parents and give them suggestions for nutrition. Many of the babies were due for their injections which they get at 6 months and 9 months so Priscilla was administering those. I was checking weights and recording them with Amelia. The scale really did not make the children happy, I think every single one of them cried. The scale was a hook and we hung it up with a rope to an archway. Then you put the child in a cloth that has leg holes and a band allowing it to attach to the hook at the bottom of the scale. When you place the cloth on the hook you let go of the child and record their weight. Then you remove them immediately as they aren’t very pleased about it!
We were all singing since we are silly nurses and that seemed to help make the children happy!

After we completed our outreach program I went back to the clinic in Shama and spent the rest of the day at the general health site. I worked with a nurse named Jessie who I had never worked with before. She was really nice.

There was one woman who was very sick that I was able to give an injection to. My friend Ellen was having a tough shift because her grandmother was on the ward and was quite sick. She kept going over to check on her. She was hooked up to an IV which ended up needing to be changed several times. The poor woman was in so much pain but since she was quite elderly her veins were not good enough to handle the IV that they were running. Eventually we got the right vein and she rested comfortably while the infusion went through. Later in the afternoon she came in to the treatment room to thank all of us and to say that she was feeling much better. “By God’s grace” she kept saying. I love when I am able to get a little bit of geriatrics over here!

When the patients come into the treatment room they always sit and speak with the head nurse who then diagnoses and writes a prescription. Then the other nurses and I will follow the orders, for example giving a drug, injection, dressing, etc. The conversations are always in Fante so I always get a translation after but today I was able to sit and talk with a patient about his symptoms because he only spoke French. He was from the Ivory Coast. It was pretty fun to dig my French speaking skills out of the closet although they were very dusty! I haven’t spoken French very much since high school but we were able to get to the root of the problem which is the main thing!

After another incredible day at the clinic where I once again was privileged to be shown all kinds of skills by the nurses as well as meet many incredible patients, I went back to Friends of the Nation. No one was around, but Caro found out today that apparently Fridays are half days for everyone at the office. We have been staying there until 5 for the past 2 months haha. We never noticed that people had gone home though because people are always out everyday. I guess we know for next week!

After work we met Emmanuel and went around to a few little shops in Takoradi. Then we went out for supper with 2 of our friends who work at the Coastal Resources Centre. Their organization partners with FON and shares a building so we met them at work. One of them is from the UK and her name is Shoshanna. The other one is Alex and he is from Australia. He just started at CRC this week and only arrived in Ghana 3 days ago so we thought it would be nice to take him out and show him around. We had supper at a new restaurant/nightclub that had opened recently called Vienna city. It was a very fancy place, almost too fancy for Caro & I since both of us enjoy walking down the road and buying rice in a plastic bag from our “fast food” lady!

Tomorrow Caro & I are travelling to Nzulezo - the stilt village. We were going to go out tonight but after having a late supper and chatting for awhile at the restaurant we were tired out and decided to call it a day.

Ochena! Until Tomorrow!


August 6th,

Caro & I woke up for a nice breakfast this morning that Hilda made for us. We then left for Nzulezo. This is a small village built above the water on Lake Amansuri. They say roughly 500 people live in Nzulezo and that it is over 500 years old. No one knows for certain why this village was built out in the middle of the lake. One legend has it that a group of refugees from modern-day Nigeria built it when they were chased there by another tribe during the war.

Caro & I were anxious to get going this morning and we left to catch a tro-tro to Beyin (the town where we could get a canoe out to Nzulezo) right after breakfast. We met an Irish couple named Vicky & Calum on the tro-tro. They were also going to Nzulezo so we ended up spending the day with them.

Our tro-tro ride to Beyin was a lot of fun! There were two ladies sitting in front of Caro & I asking us all kinds of questions. They were getting us to speak in Fante and having a blast watching us try to do so! Then one of them mentioned how they wanted us to marry their sons but we said we were already married. I had a ring on so they believed me but the one woman didn’t believe Caro and wanted proof. Caro pulled a picture of her boyfriend out of her wallet and the woman grabbed it and kissed it. We laughed so hard! She trusted her after that!

Once our tro-tro arrived in Beyin we set out for Nzulezo. While we were waiting for a canoe there were a couple of guys who kept taking pictures of Caro, Vicky, Calum, and I with their cellphones which was really awkward. We told them to stop but they wouldn’t. Sometimes it really isn’t fun being the minority and constantly being reminded that you are different, that you aren’t one of them, that you are so different that they need to take picture to show their friends that there were “obronnis” in town. It is a very unique experience to have. I usually don’t mind it but today I really felt alienated from a place that I have been feeling at home in for the past 2 months.

Thankfully our canoe was not filled with people who wanted to take pictures of us although we did pass by many canoes that shouted “obronni” and took our picture. After a day of this I was pretty exhausted. I would love to know how many camera phones in Beyin have a picture of us on them now!

The canoe ride out to Nzulezo was very serene. It was quiet and every tree and ripple in the water looked absolutely perfect. You could hear birds and frogs out in the distance. Once we arrived at Nzulezo a guide took us around the town. It wasn’t what I expected. Everyone talks about how beautiful it is but it is actually a very small, poor community. The people there do not have many opportunities for jobs. There is also little access to education. They are working on expanding their school right now and improving it so they ask all visitors to make a donation. While we were there we bought some akpeteshie to bring back to Canada. We enjoyed the tour around the village but the 4 of us had mixed feelings afterwards about the place as it is depicted as a must-see in the travel guide but being there made us feel awful because there were so many children begging for money, random pieces of boards missing from the walkways, and heaps of garbage in the water surrounding the village. There aren’t any clinics in Nzulezo so there is a lot of illness and if a person is very sick they will have to take a canoe out to town. I also can’t help but wonder about sanitation. Their garbage goes in the water, they drink the water, and they must have to relieve themselves in that water as well.

After our tour of the village we took a canoe back to Beyin. We walked along the main road of this town for awhile until we found a restaurant down by the ocean. We went there and had a bite to eat. All of us were pretty hungry by this point. After our “lupper,” we walked down the road and searched for a tro-tro. This is where things got messy! It was shortly after 4 and we couldn’t find a single tro-tro heading towards Takoradi. A man ended up convincing us to take a taxi to a junction 15 minutes west of where we were and promised us that we would get a tro-tro from there. We ended up finding a tro-tro heading towards the junction so we got it in but it broke down in the middle of nowhere. Then we took a taxi to the junction which was not 15 minutes out of Beyin, but over an hour! This meant we were now further away from home and getting a little too close to the Ivory Coast! When we were getting out of our taxi it was after 6 and it was quickly beginning to get dark outside. We had no idea where we were and while there were many tro-tros none of them were heading east towards Takoradi. I wanted to know where we were so I went over to a woman who was selling biscuits. She had her biscuits on a table with a newspaper underneath them. The newspaper was written entirely in French. In my head all I could think was “oh no I am in Elubo” (the dangerous town bordering the Ivory Coast). Luckily this wasn’t the case, we were in Tikobo 1. That was the one piece of good information as the 4 of us paced up and down the road to find a car. We were surrounded by taxi drivers giving us ridiculous prices to take us to Takoradi and others promising that if we went further west we could catch a tro-tro. None of us were crazy about that idea so we ended up bargaining with a taxi driver until he gave us a fair price.

The taxi ride back to Takoradi was brutal. The driver complained the entire time that we weren’t paying him enough even though he had set the price and agreed to it. He wanted us to pay more because he knew we were tourists and assumed we had money. We ignored him and let him ramble away. All we wanted was to get back to Tak. It took us ages to get there since the driver drove half the speed limit so that we would think the drive was longer than it was. Too bad for him Caro & I have travelled west before and have been living here for two & a half months so we know the distances and how much things should cost. We didn’t say anything about how every single car was passing us and just let him drive 20 miles an hour. When we arrived in Takoradi he dropped us at a tro-tro station and immediately got out of the car. He ran over to a group of guys that were standing outside their taxis and suddenly they were all surrounding us. He told them we had agreed to pay him 50 cedis when the deal was 40. He lied to them to try and get more money out of us but we gave him the 40 that we had agreed to and walked away. The moment where a group of angry taxi drivers were surrounding us was probably the scariest moment of my time in Ghana. I had no idea what was about to happen and I was so glad when Caro gave him the money and we all dashed out of there!

We made it home around 10pm. Vicky and Calum still have to travel to Cape Coast so I hope they make it there safely! Caro & I are now going to enjoy a nice bowl of fufu and unbraid her hair while we watch the movie pretty women.

I am so happy to be back in Tak!

Bye for now!


August 7th,

We were up pretty ate last night unbraiding Caro’s hair and we didn’t even finish it! Vicky & Calum made it home safely last night which was good! They will be going back to Ireland tomorrow!

The moment we woke up this morning we started working on unbraiding Caro’s hair. We worked on it until lunch time. Then we attempted to eat the lunch that was prepared for us- fish heads and rice. The rice was good but the fish head was a challenge for us. We both picked at the meat and avoided the eyeballs. We didn’t want to be rude and we have always tried everything they put in front of us but the eyeballs were a definite no.

After lunch we decided that the girls at the hair salon would be able to finish unbraiding Caro’s hair and they would probably be quicker at it than us. We got ice cream and snacks on the way to the salon because we knew we’d be there for awhile!

Once we got to the salon I helped the girls unbraid Caro’s hair. Then they washed it and dried it. We arrived at the salon at 2pm and didn’t get home until 11:30pm! They didn’t start braiding my hair until after 6! It was a long afternoon but we had fun and we both love our new hairstyles! I had my hair braided by Suzy & Alberta and we had fun singing and dancing! I ended up getting cornrows again but this time with wine coloured extensions!

My head is pretty sore right now from all of the pulling and tugging to get the braids tight but I am thrilled to have long hair again!

Until next time!