Nathan & Megan’s Blog

We’re Here!

Hi everyone,

As this is our first post (and probably the first time I’ve ever blogged), I think it’s appropriate that it’s from Africa.

Megan and I had quite a time getting to our final destination.  I’m guessing that anybody who’s travelled to Africa can attest to some of the difficulties and delays.  Our flight out of DFW was 3 hours later which caused us to miss our connection to Accra, Ghana.  We did make it to Frankfurt without any trouble otherwise though.  After thinking about our options, I thought we’d end up staying a day in Frankfurt and flying out the next day (which would have been cool), but fortunately there was one way of making it to Ghana without staying overnight.  We caught a flight to Casablanca, Morocco from Germany and from there we flew to Accra.  Through our journey, we met a Ghanian doctor in Germany who practices in Dallas who was stuck in the same predicament as us.  He was a very talkative and friendly guy, and it was nice to have someone to travel with.  None of our other flights were delayed, which was nice, but we ended up traveling about 40 hours straight to our final destination in Nalerigu, Ghana.  We actually ended up getting on the flight we were supposed to get on from Accra to Tamale in Ghana, only that instead of sleeping the night before in Accra, we arrived at 2 am and left at 6 am.  We were allowed into the domestic terminal and shared benches with several sleeping guards.    One of the cooler parts of the trip was seeing H1N1 signs in English, Arabic, and French.

The hospital compound is pretty nice.   When we arrived they were in the middle of clinic, and it was a little daunting seeing several hundred people waiting to be seen.  The hospital and guest houses are pretty nice.  We actually have hot water, a fan in our bedroom and plenty of purified water which is nice.

Tomorrow we start rounding on hospitalized patients in the morning and after a few days of getting aclimated to the hospital I think we’ll be given more independence.  Sounds like a lot of malaria is being treated here.  Everybody so far has been really nice, and we think we’ll have a great month here.

We’ll post some pics and more comments as we go along!

Nathan and Megan