Nathan & Megan’s Blog

Monday was an extremely busy day.  I helped with Peds again.  We rounded on all the kids in the Peds wards then went to clinic.  For about 1-1.5 hours it was Dr. Chuck (the almost 80 yr old pediatrician volunteer), a med student from the UK, and me seeing patients.  The med student (who’s been here a while and is pretty good) got called away after the tea break, so for the rest of the day it was me and the pediatrician.  At the end of the day, we counted up and realized we had seen 192 pediatric patients just in clinic.  And of course that doesn’t count any of the 40 or so that we saw in the wards on a.m. and p.m. rounds.  It was crazy!  On evening rounds in the peds ward we watched one child die.  He was just too malnourished.  Tuesday was a lot better, though.  We had 3 of us seeing Peds clinic patients, and we only saw 88 patients.  It felt really slow.  Monday was so busy because it was when the clinics had been closed over the weekend AND it was market day. 

We finished early Tuesday, so Nathan and I went down to the Operating Theatre to see if we could help with things.  I removed a sebaceous cyst, and Nathan removed 2 cysts/tumors.  Then we offered to help Matt, the surgery resident, do a skin graft. We’ve never even seen a skin graft before, so it was pretty crazy.  The guy was sick and had been drinking and fell into a fire.  He had extensive burns over his upper chest, left cheek and nose, and left eyebrow.  He’s actually pretty lucky to still have an eye on his left.  We ended up taking maybe 1/4 of the skin off his thigh and grafting that over his face and chest.  It was kind of wild!  We helped do everything, including sewing down the grafts on the face.  I didn’t really start the day expecting to do that!  All we can do is pray that the skin grafts will actually take, but if they do, then we gave that man a new face. 

Sunday we got to go to one of the only local tourist attractions–the Escarpment.  It’s kind of a sheer cliff face that drops off into this huge plain that stretches below you.  It’s something like 20 or 30 miles from both Burkina Fasao and Togo there.  We didn’t exactly realize what we were getting into when we agreed to go, but I’m very glad we went.  Eight volunteers piled into a pickup truck driven by Dr. Hewitt, a missionary who’s been here for something like 20 years.  4 volunteers rode in the cab and 4 in the back.  Nathan and I volunteered to ride in the back (it was nice out).  Eli and Andy sat on a bench against the cab of the truck while Nathan and I settled into fold out lawn chairs braced against the back corners of the bed of the pick-up.  Yes, fold out chairs in the back of a pick up.  We thought we’d probably feel reasonably secure, but we didn’t exactly take into account all the potholes in the dirt road.  At one point Nathan’s chair bounced up into the air, at least a few inches off the bed of the truck. At that point we both decided to hold ourselves down with at least one hand at all times.  <grin>  It made for tired arms by the end of the ride!

The trip itself was lovely, though.  The weather that afternoon was actually quite nice. I remembered to put on sunscreen so didn’t get burned, and the scenery was great.  We drove through small village after small village of clay huts.  At least half the people yelled and waved at us.  (I’m sure they don’t see a truck full of 9 white people drive by every day out here.)  We got some good pictures on the way and thoroughly enjoyed the trip.  The view from the escarpment itself was great.  We climbed our way to the top of a large rock formation, scrambling our way through “Fat Man’s Squeeze”, one of the first obstacles of the little climb.  The view was worth it, though.  I think the worst part about the whole day was that Monday I realized I had a horrible, itchy red rash on the backs of my arms.  Everyone else had it afterwards, too, so I think it’s from all the tall grass we walked through (something like chiggers).

I’ve had a little bit of difficulty posting pictures on the blog site, so I’ve decided to just post all the photos on Facebook.   If anyone wants to look at pictures from our first week, please feel free to look up my page on Facebook and look under Ghana.

We miss you all!

Love,
Megan