Ashley Shira’s Blog

Day Seven…a day late!

Well to pick up where I left off from day six…..we left the hospital and all went to the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel for lunch and swimming.  We paid 10 cedis to use the pool, but it was absolutely beautiful.  (there were big lizards all over the place, but they didn’t bother anyone) We enjoyed just relaxing, swimming, eating by the pool, and reading.  We bought some gifts in the gift shop and I was excited to see an ATM.  We needed to change money for several days, but hadn’t been able to get to an exchange bureau before they closed.  We called David to pick us up around 5:30 and headed back to the mission house.  When we got back Junior was there playing basketball so Kaitlyn, Kim, Emily, Andrew, Junior, and myself played a game of HORSE until it got dark.  Then we went inside and prepared dinner.  We all ate leftovers….Izzy and Andrew were glad we had leftover pasta for them, becasue they hadn’t had time to go to the store plus they were leaving the next day to work on a ship for 10 days so they wouldn’t need the food. After dinner we all played a couple hands of UNO and some Phase Ten Dice.  We had a ton of fun!! We had forgotten how much fun card games are.  So now on to day seven.  The water truck came at 4:30a.m.  It woke us up, but we were glad to have water again! When we got to the hospital, the ladies in the office (Selassi and Ernestina) had an assignment for us from Dr. Akosua.  We were excited to have something to do that was similar to what we do as medical students back home.  We researched DKA so we would be ready to present it to her on Friday.  We went to the male ward and followed up on the patient we admitted yesterday in DKA. After that I went back to the pharmacy to continue the project we started on Monday.  We took a short break for lunch in the hospital canteen.  We have been wanting to try some local food so we had Jolof rice (a spicy rice) for lunch.  It was pretty good! I went back to the pharmacy until the end of the shift at 2pm.  We went back to the house and changed into our swimsuits and headed to Labodie beach.  It is very close by and inexpensive to get in….it cost us 3 cedis.  Once we got settled into our chairs we were bombarded by vendors selling all kinds of things.  It was actually a little fun to have the shopping come to us…..like QVC but better. We stayed at the beach until about 5 then headed home.  Kaitlyn and Emily made pancakes for the four of us for dinner and we played some more UNO and Phase Ten Dice.  We are all really having a lot of fun spending time together!!