Akwaaba!

Greetings from Ghana!

Or Akwaaba! (yes, said with an exclamation mark.) I am in Accra, Ghana, neglected country on the African itinerary, currently enjoying the world’s most feeble air conditioning, in a room where if you turn the fan on it makes a noise like it’s about to fall off onto the bed, and if you move the curtains the rail falls off, the floor is covered by sticky bits of faux wood that come off whenever you step on them and then track you around the room, and unusual insects keep on appearing out of BLOODY NOWHERE. I LOVE IT.

My overwhelming affection did not have an auspicious start. I  set off from Bognor Regis at the ungodly hour of 3am with a very chatty taxi driver who regaled me with his erectile problems (“I don’t mind telling you, as you’re a doctor” – lovely). I landed in Italy at 11:30 and had a stop over of about 2 hours during which I discovered I had forgotten all the Italian I ever knew apart from ‘vino rosso’ ‘prego’ and ‘grazie’. Turns out though that this is more Italian than anyone else knew on the flight over to Ghana and when I tried it out on the Italian steward he was so impressed with my linguistic know-how that he gave me the whole bottle of red wine*. This made for a very pleasant, though sleepy, journey.

*There was only 1.5 cups left in it – still, it was the rest of the bottle so that is my story and I am sticking to it.

On arrival in Ghana, there was the most almighty queue for immigration. Man alive it was hideous. I have never seen anything so awful. Somehow due to being so extremely short and self-effacing I managed to wind up almost at the very very back, just in front of a very cheerful man who was phoning his wife. He had a laugh like Santa Claus – “ho ho ho!” he said, “this queue is crazy my darling! I will be here for at least 2 hours! Ho ho ho!”

He was not wrong. I waited 2 increasingly sticky hours before having my passport stamped by a very cheerful immigration officer and then going through customs with another very cheerful customs officer who looked at my luggage tags.

Him: “Han?”

Me: “That’s me”

Him: “Beautiful Han!”

Me: “Stinky Han.”

Him: (as if this was the funniest joke he had ever heard) “Ho ho ho! Off you go!”

I wish Border Security (the TV show) was like this.

I was being picked up from the airport by one of the nurses from Unite for Sight, Jerome, another preternaturally cheerful person.

Jerome: “I knew it was you straight away.”

Me: “Ha! Is it because all Unite for Sight volutneers look exactly the same (scruffy hippy youngsters)”

Jerome: “Well, they always have two bags…one for the glasses, and one for them. And they always have a third bag. And that is always a rucksack.”

Profiled.

I finally arrived at my hotel just before midnight. In the middle of checking in, the receptionist started up from her seat.

“To me!” she cried, and rushed away.

I followed her immediately only to discover she had rushed to a toilet and had, remarkably quickly, removed her trousers.

Me: “Oh!”

Her: “Tummy!”

Me: “Right. Got you. Tummy. To me. Easily mixed up.”

I was then shown to my room, which was in the sad state as already described. Now, before I set off to Ghana, I was told to bring a bedsheet as ‘sometimes the sheets in hotels aren’t as nice as the ones you’re used to at home.’ Frankly I thought this was a hilarious load of balls – aren’t as nice?? - and clearly advice aimed at pathetic namby pambies, not stern, weather-beaten, hardened travellers such as I. 

So I didn’t pack any sheets. But I made the mistake of reading in my Ghana guide, just before I was to set off and far too late to make the necessary sheet provisions, the following:

“tumbu flies, or putsi, are a problem in Ghana. The adult lays her eggs on drying laundry, and when the eggs come into contact with human flesh (when you are lying on a bed), they hatch and bury themselves under the skin. Here, they form a crop of boils, each with a maggot inside. Smear a little Vaseline over the hole, and they will push their noses out to breathe. It may be possible to squeeze them out, but it depends if they are ready to do so as the larvae have spines that help them to hold on.’

As you can imagine, this unhappy passage left a deep imprint on my soul (as I’m sure it has left on yours, especially if you’re about to have dinner.)

So when I arrived at the hotel and switched the light on and something ran across the bed, my nerve failed me. I’m ashamed to say, I spread Tim’s travel towel over the sheet and my hoodie over the pillow and opened up my little mosquito tent net and crawled sadly in.

Also, there was no internet.

BOO.

So after a fairly uneventful night in which the cumulative effects of the air conditioning finally got cool enough to wake me at 3am – at which point I turned it off, as it has no temp control settings, only on and off – which means the heat woke me again at 7am – I woke up in a slightly grumpy state of mind.

But that was soon to change.

I had been told nothing about what I would be doing while here (obviously) apart from (on the day that I arrived), that there were 6 other volunteers all staying in the same place as me, who had all arrived earlier that day from the US. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, hurrah for not being lonely! 

On the other hand….6 volunteers from the US?

Turns out, the 6 volunteers were one ophthalmic consultant, one optometrist, and 4 ophthalmic nurses, who were all remarkably pleasant. Almost none of the ophthalmic nurses had ever been out of the country before and were amazed at absolutely everything they saw in Ghana. Ghana itself is a very pleasant country. It is not too crowded. It has good roads. The people are ridiculously pleasant and polite and friendly and all the best things you can imagine about people. The environment is pleasing. The climate is delightful (for an equatorial country). The food is very tasty. But the nurses were absolutely boggled at everything they saw and kept on exclaiming about all of it, which was funny because Ghana is really not that astounding, though I guess it would be astounding if you had never, ever left the US. They found lots of things very difficult – they really did not like the food, for one – and when I was leaving the place we were doing our outreach one of them literally ran after me shouting, “DON’T WALK OUT BY YOURSELF! IT’S NOT SAFE! YOU MUSTN’T!” – this at 3pm in the middle of a not very busy town, surrounded by children. 

The outreach itself was very interesting. Unite for Sight operates a lot of outreaches, and you can read more about it on Unite for Sight’s own website, which itself is a wealth of really genuinely interesting information about public health, grassroots initiatives, self sustaining projects, etc etc. Briefly though, there are outreaches almost every day to areas all around Ghana. During those outreaches the team sees an unholy number of patients and dispenses medication, glasses, or refers for surgery or further investigation, also sponsored by Unite for Sight. Fascinatingly, they don’t measure people for implanted ocular lenses here – they just plonk a standard +18D lens in – which obviously can lead to huge refractive errors. But since it’s better than being almost completely blind, and since the people coming to clinic never do close work anyway, it doesn’t matter. 

I saw a huge number of very advanced pathologies which I won’t go into here - some of the most advanced cataract you can imagine, end stage glaucoma, and a wide variety of retinal scars. All the patients waited remarkably patiently for their turn, and were ridiculously nice and friendly and all the rest of it. They all knew my name because, when we had to introduce ourselves in front of the whole assembly, the Users (esp the nurses) were all very quiet and humble and mumbly and also pronounced the Twi words in a very strong American accent and no one understood them and so their announcements were greeted with silence. Being the self effacing sort that I am, I thought I’d go for it. I was at the very end, and I stepped up and said very loudly, “Ye fre me Connie” to which there was a ridiculous and overwhelming response of “Akwaaba Connie! Sistah Connie!” and loud applause. Dennis, one of the Ghanian nurses, explained to the US contingent – “they are more used to British accents, you see.”

We worked through the day without a break for lunch and when we set off for home at around 4pm I was starving. We stopped on the way for dinner – I was very taken with the idea of having fufu, which is cassava, with goat stew, to which idea the vast majority of the US crew responded with horror, loathing and disgust. The consultant found this hilarious and thought he would have fufu with me, along with one of the nurses. The others opted for rice and chicken and though this arrived and looked very tasty, none of them seemed to enjoy it, trying their very best to eat it but picking at it in that dispirited way which can’t hide disappointment. The three of us who had fufu ate it traditionally – with our hands – having washed them first in a communal pot. The consultant went first, and then insisted I washed mine in the pot, and then made everyone else do it too.

Shower, then discovering the internet is well and truly buggered, but then discovering that the plugs here – heavenly! – are British ones! – and then upstairs for drinks on the patio with all the team, now considerably cleaner and more relaxed. One of the nurses manages to trick the consultant into thinking she’s brought some hash with a bag of kale chips (‘you are the coolest person I have ever met’), and a good deal of wine is drunk.