Leaving Ghana: Pomp and Circumstance (and more pictures)

Our last few days in Ghana were full of visiting dignitaries and the accompanying flowery speeches. On Thursday we were told that the President of Ghana would be stopping by for a short tour and speech at 11am, so we got all dressed up and were out on the Promenade deck to greet him at 10:45. At promptly 4pm, his motorcade pulled into the port. I missed it, partly because I didn’t actually believe he’d show up and partly due to afternoon napping obligations, but I woke up in time to hear his impromptu speech, which was quite moving – I don’t think he knew exactly what he was coming to see, and he was clearly struck by what Mercy Ships does.

An excerpt: “I am convinced you are a vessel of God, and I’m praying that you will continue to do this work. Ghana is grateful for the work you have done…You’ve come in a way to let us see the goodness that still resides in man.” He also spoke of how in the same way the crew uses their medical and other abilities to help humanity, he believes that politicians should use their power and influence with integrity and for the good of mankind. What a blessing to be able to demonstrate the power of God’s love to the leader of one of the most influential nations on this troubled continent!

The next evening, we were all invited by the Minister of Health to a cocktail in our honor, MC’d by the Minister. We weren’t sure what to expect, and most of us expected it to be painful in one way or another – painfully awkward or painfully long speeches -but it was wonderful. We all dressed up in our best white-man African clothes (I’m sure we looked ridiculous) and waited on the dock until our police-escorted buses came. There were delicious finger-foods and a live band waiting for us at the ministry, and the dancing commenced - again, we looked ridiculous, but that’s why it was so fun. The Minister of Health was a delightful host, joining us on the dance floor and sincerely thanking us for the work that was done by Mercy Ships in the past 9 months. We left with a lifetime’s supply of fried plantain chips, T-shirts and hats to commemorate Ghana’s upcoming 50th anniversary, and again, an overwhelming gratefulness to God for allowing us to do His works in such a way as to win the attentions of and to inspire the leaders of this important country.

‘But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God, and not from us.’ – 2 Cor. 4:5-6

Some stats from the 9-month Ghana outreach:
*639 general, reconstructive and gynecological surgeries; more than 19,000 eye consultations resulting in 1,364 eye surgeries; and 10,211 dental procedures for 5,435 patients.
*A 6,000 square foot maternity ward built for a Tema health clinic (Tema is the region’s largest slum), a 2,150 square foot youth health center, and additional classroom space for a school.
*24 new water wells dug in remote villages with trained local technicians to maintain them.
*Training for Ghanaians to educate their peers on maternal health, basic health and hygiene, and HIV/AIDS.
*Training for 206 poor women to start small businesses, and agriculture training for 23 female prisoners.

Really Long Entry: Vacation

Last week the OR staff was given five days’ vacation to relax and refuel in Ghana before the start of the Liberian outreach. I went on two budget (read: dirty) excursions with friends, first to Ada, a small village to the east of Tema at the mouth of the Volta River, and then to Busua, another village on the beach to the west, near the city of Takoradi. We came back filthy, exhausted, and absolutely in love with the Ghanaian culture and landscape – I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to see more of this beautiful country!


The Transport

Transportation, as always, was a pleasure. We traveled by tro-tro (thus precluding personal cleanliness), Ford Van (a glorified tro-tro, meaning it used to have air-conditioning, now it just has tinted windows), taxi, canoe (to get to our beach huts at Ada), the back of a pickup truck, and foot. The traveling by foot part was actually an accident – we asked a man at the Green Turtle Lodge, the most remote place we stayed, how long it would take to walk back to another hotel in the village, with our massive backpacks. We were told, “One hour. Just one hour. Maybe less.” Twelve kilometers and three and a half miserably hot and sweaty hours later, we finally arrived, and the locals told us we were nuts.

Taxi rides usually provide the most entertainment. One taxi driver, from Takoradi to Busua, was reluctant to take five of us through one of the ubiquitous police stops because he might get fined for “overloading” so he asked Robin and Lucy to get out and walk through the barrier so we could pick them up on the other side, and he could go through the police stop with just three passengers. You can imagine the confusion this caused when the girls informed the police that they were ‘walking to Busua,’ without backpacks or water, 30 miles away, to ‘stretch their legs.’ Again, nuts.

Incidentally, just two nights ago we actually did get pulled over for overloading, this time with seven people in a small taxi. The policeman first asked us to take him to the restaurant we were going to and buy him dinner; we wouldn’t, so he asked for one of us to marry him; shockingly, we wouldn’t do that either, so finally we settled on the equivalent of a $4.50 bribe, which he pocketed before letting us all pile into the same taxi and drive off.

The People

I could write a thesis on the people here, but I’ll spare you and just say instead that they are different. They’re all beautiful for one thing; their skin seems ageless, and their average body fat percentage nationwide might actually be below zero. Typical of West African cultures, relationships are prized over efficiency (infuriating at times, but endearing when you’re not in a hurry), and their concept of time is entirely foreign. Sitting on a bench on the side of the road in the dark in Busua, Lucy and Robin and I spent several hours with one extended family, entertaining them by trying to learn their songs and teaching them some of our own. I remarked to Robin that I felt absolutely no obligation to ever leave the bench, and I think that is quite descriptive of the general feeling of inertia that pervades social situations here. This attitude has even prompted some crewmembers to christen a new time zone: GMT, Ghana Maybe Time.

The Accommodation

In Ada, we stayed in primitive huts made of braided banana leaves on the thin strip of beach separating the ocean from the Volta river – peaceful and picturesque, and I’ve never reveled quite so much in my own filth (lots of dirt, no showers). In Busua we split time between the Green Turtle Lodge, a remote backpacker’s paradise, and a little hotel near the beach in the village where we got to know the owners quite well. The beach is usually cleaner the further one travels from villages as it is mainly used as a latrine and landfill, but it is still quite nice in Busua because of the small but growing tourist presence. Ghana’s first surf shop just opened up there, and we had all but moved in by the end of the week, commandeering the biggest and most beginner of their boards (like small aircraft carriers) despite our lack of proper rash guards (resulting in heinous rashes on our legs), and even pretending to be real surfers in pictures for their new website.

On the morning of our departure, our hotel was being set up for a wedding, with tents and sound equipment. As we were packing, we heard through the megaphone: “Wedding today at 1pm! Best foo-foo in town! All participants welcome!” We were invited to stay and attend, despite never having met the happy couple, but knew that 1pm GMT could mean anything from 3pm to nightfall, and we had to work the next day so we left as planned – I'm sure the newlyweds weren't too upset.

The Food

Emboldened by the dares and blatant peer pressure of my friend Lucy, this trip turned me into quite a connoisseur of Ghanaian street food, meaning anything from little tables set up by the side of the road with various fried or cooked objects, to baskets on top of children’s heads on the side of the highway containing bags of plantain chips or FanYogo (Ghana’s premiere frozen yogurt, in a bag like everything else). This new passion of mine may sound unwise, but I look at it as a competition between my digestive tract and the parasites that commonly afflict Western travelers. So far, my digestive tract is enjoying sweet, sweet victory.

Fried plantains with ginger and peanuts, mangos, pineapples and coconuts (deftly carved by teenagers wielding machetes), omelette paninis, banana pancakes, loaves of sugar bread, rice in a bag with unidentified spicy sauces, white mush of uncertain origin called foo-foo, in a bag with more unidentified spicy sauces, and everything accompanied by newspaper napkins, which I now consider somehow sanitary. I just can’t get enough, and the best part is that it’s difficult to spend more than 50 cents on any one meal. I do draw the line somewhere, though – usually at the fish heads. I don’t like the way they look at me.

The Machete: Ghana's Answer to the Swiss Army Knife

I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw someone using a machete for a toothpick here. They’re used for everything, and everyone seems to have one. On the side of the streets, teenagers can be seen with carts of coconuts to sell, using machetes to carve the top into a point, cut open a hole to drink the milk, chop open the shell, and then intricately remove the delicate flesh for the customer (me) to eat. At the hotel we stayed at in Cape Coast, we were awoken by the sound of a man mowing the lawn – with a machete and a stick. One of the community development ministries run by Mercy Ships is to teach agriculture techniques to the women at a women’s prison. At the beginning of the program, the prisoners were all given (drumroll please) their own personal machetes. For serious. Ha.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...A Biomedical Engineer!!

I’ve been meeting so many closet amazing people here – you know, the type who pretend they’re normal until you ask a few questions, and then they reluctantly reveal their true superhuman identities - that I have decided it would be selfish to keep their stories to myself. Here’s the first one, enjoy!

Carmen Walker is a fiery, talkative biomedical engineer from Florida. She flies in every few months, sometimes in response to a frantic phone call at the last minute, to fix and maintain our medical machinery and avert disasters of all sorts. In her civilian life she runs an anesthetic supply company; I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, so she described it to me: Essentially, when a patient is on the operating table and something goes wrong with any of the machines, she is called in and has about 3 minutes (1 minute for a child) to figure out the problem and fix it. Carmen is smarter than me.

The path that brought Carmen to Mercy Ships is quite fascinating. She took a few years off after college and eventually decided to go to medical school. She was in her final year of residency for cardiac surgery (that’s six and a half years, folks) when she had an experience that changed the course of her life: She had a woman on the operating table all cut up and prepared for open heart surgery, when someone from the hospital came rushing in and told her she couldn’t operate because the patient didn’t have insurance. They had to sew the patient back up without fixing what needed to be fixed. Disillusioned, Carmen walked out on her career as a surgeon.

After looking around for a new profession that would suit her qualifications and abilities, Carmen decided to go into biomedical engineering, choosing anesthesia as a specialty because everyone said it was the hardest. Some years later, she was reading a Reader’s Digest article about Mercy Ships’ chief surgeon, Dr. Gary Parker, and felt an inexplicable compulsion to call the ship. After being passed around from department to department, as one is wont to do when calling Mercy Ships, she finally spoke to someone in a position to help her. She told him who she was and that she didn’t really know why she was calling; he told her that he knew exactly why she was calling – it was because they had just finished a prayer meeting where they were asking God for a biomedical engineer to call.

So, five years later, Carmen is still swooping in to save the day, with her little blue suitcase containing everything she needs to work her magic and keep the Operating in Operating Rooms. Thank God for the smart people!

The Beautiful Game

I am convinced that soccer is the greatest game on earth. I think this for several reasons: (1) it’s the foundation of at least half of my friendships, (2) it got me free trips to Greece for a while, (3) it provides an athletic outlet for people who are useless from the shoulder to the hand and therefore can't play basketball or volleyball or tennis or golf or baseball or most other popular sports (that's me), and (4) it’s much easier to play soccer with strangers than it is to randomly strike up a conversation (hence my first point). So, when I want to make friends in Africa, I find myself using soccer as a crutch for my feeble social skills.

Everybody here plays – the ship’s crew, the patients, and the locals. On a Sunday evening, every flat surface in the country is host to a game or two, or several.
Even the tiniest village has a flat dust ‘field’ with makeshift ‘goalposts’ at both ends. On the ship, due to the international nature of the crew, if word gets out that there will be a soccer game on the aft deck – an open area about the size of half a basketball court – there will be such a mass of players of all shapes and sizes that one might mistake it for a carnival.

Most of the time I spent with the patients on the ship’s ward was on the aft deck, playing soccer (again, mostly because I want to be friends but I’m too awkward to actually go sit by their bed and start a conversation). It was a sight to behold: Hospital gowns flying like superhero capes, feeding tubes sticking out here and there, sweaty bandages sliding off. Those who couldn’t play would sit on the sideline to cheer and keep score.

One patient in particular, Daniel, won hearts of everyone he met, including me. A spoftspoken 11-year-old from western Ghana, he had come for surgery on his shrivelled hand, a result of an accident with hot oil when he was a baby. He was always up for a game, and would sometimes come out to watch the crew games as well. During one of the crew games last week, he tapped me on the shoulder and told me in his adorable accent that ‘I would like for you to teach me every day how to play soccer, please.’ He could have asked me to swan dive into the filthy toxic waste-filled harbour and I would have, so we started private lessons. He was the best student I’ve ever had; every move I taught him he would somehow practice at night (with a shoe or something, he didn’t have a ball in the ward) and have mastered by the next day. He went home last Friday, and we were sad to see him go...

Playing on the Aft deck is all well and good, but the floor is quite slippery and it’s hard to avoid the big wrought iron anchor and varied heavy machinery, so a few days ago I gathered up some fellow football players and went on a mission to find a field that doesn’t float. There were six of us, perfect for 3 and 3, and we thought that if we were joined by some locals then that would be all the better. A taxi driver took us to a large dirt patch, and as soon as we took out the ball we were swarmed by barefoot little kids. It was like something out of a scary movie (or Field of Dreams - if you can kick it, they will come...).

I appointed the biggest kid as the coach and instructed him to pick out a team of 8 (they’re little) to play against us. He did his best, but as soon as the ball hit the dust, the subs rushed the field and we were playing about 387 men down. It was like an obstacle course – sprinting through a mob of moving children should be added to every agility training regimen. One kid dropped his pants and urinated at half field, adding another obstacle to be avoided (I thought I was cool so I was playing barefoot - bad move).

I couldn’t tell you the score, I actually couldn’t even tell you who was on our team because I think some of their players defected, but it was a good time – and we made a ton of friends :)

Church With Pastor Peter

A few Sunday mornings ago (before the ship's internet went down, and then went down again)I went to Pastor Peter’s church. Pastor Peter worked in the OR with us as a translator, so we got to know him quite well, and had been planning to visit his church for a while.

Church started at 9. We were supposed to meet Pastor Peter outside the port at 9:30, he showed up at 10, and we got to church at 10:15. Right on (Ghana) time. Singing and dancing had already started, and we were led in by the assistant pastor to the seats of honor at the front of the church while Pastor Peter joined the team of generator-fixers who were huddled around the machine outside the church hall. This would become a theme of the service; every time the microphone stopped working, Pastor Peter would run out and do something to the generator – pray over it? - so that the sound system was resurrected and the service could continue in deafening fashion.

It happened to be children’s Sunday, which is similar to our children’s Sundays – the Bible verse recitation, cute kids and singing – but with a lot more...coolness? rhythm? Something like that. As guests, we were very involved in the service; we were called to the front to introduce ourselves (Pastor Peter yelled at someone to get a camera and take pictures), then the entire congregation prayed over us, and at the end we were enlisted to help give out certificates to the children.

The sermon was given by a British man who had just arrived to teach at the YWAM base here (Youth With A Mission – a missions organization associated with Mercy Ships), and it was translated into Twi by Pastor Peter. The Twi bits were twice as long and three times as animated as the English version, and punctuated by raucous ‘Hallelujahs!’ and ‘Amens!’. Halfway through, the assistant pastor brought Pastor Peter a towel to mop up the sweat, but the British guy was still bone dry.

The offering – to go towards the children’s ministry - was my favorite part. It was more of an auction. Pastor Peter shouted numbers, people danced to the front to put money in the large offering bucket, and they couldn’t go back to their seats until someone else danced up and matched their donation, taking the original donor by the hand. If you didn’t want to go up during the auction, then you could just wait until the children got good and sweaty during their (really really good) dance performance, and bring up bills to stick to their foreheads. It was perhaps the most fun I’ve had giving money away in my life. Hallelujah and Amen :)



(A note on Ghanaian toilets - perhaps the most interesting toilet I’ve seen in any of my travels is the one in back of this church, shown in the picture: A cement and tile floor, surrounded by a shoulder-high wall with a door. No hole, nothing to indicate where to put one’s feet, etc., no ceiling, and no way to avoid it during a four-hour service during which you’re drinking like a camel to keep from passing out in the heat. Ick.)

We fought crime, and we tied

The Ave Marie Health Farm (they farm health!) is about a mile and a half from the gate to the port, and crewmembers often go there on weekends to swim in the pool, watch the ocean waves from the balcony (high enough above the trash heaps on the beach to make it serene), or get massages and pedicures.

Last Sunday afternoon I went to the Ave Maria with a bunch of Mercy Ships folks, and decided to come back to the ship with three other women at around 6 in order to make it back for a 7:00 service. People often walk from that ship to the Health Farm and back, but it was dusk, and we're female, so we thought we'd take a taxi. Because there is usually a surplus of them driving by, we started walking towards the port with the intention of flagging the next one down.

Thirty minutes later, several taxis had passed us by, it was dark, and the shifting figures in the shadows of the barbed wire-adorned port walls were making me uncomfortable. I remarked to my roommate Sabina that I was glad I didn’t have anything in my bag that I would be too upset to lose should it be stolen (one might call this foreshadowing).

Two men passed us walking quickly, and a few minutes later one turned back and came towards us again. With a big smile, he asked Sabina who we were and where we were going. She answered his questions (she’s a sweetheart), and he abruptly turned nasty, grabbing her backpack. She asked him what he wanted, and he showed her a knife; she let the bag slip off her shoulders, and we helplessly watched him run away. Score one for the criminals. Two minutes later, a Mercy Ships crewmember drove by and gave us a ride the rest of the way home.

Sabina is quite shaken up, to say the least; I’m upset that I ever let us walk home, especially once it got dark and I started hearing that voice in my head saying, “You’re being stupid” (that voice always sounds a lot like my dad...I hate it when he’s right). But it could have been a whole lot worse, and despite the emotional violation of having our lives threatened, we’re physically okay - and we learned our lesson; we won't be walking around in the dark anytime soon without an entourage of card-carrying meatheads.

In the end, when we calmed down enough to sit down and list the things in Sabina’s backpack, we realized that the most valuable item in it was actually her Bible. Score one for the missionaries...?


(To explain my blogging hiatus - I know you missed me - the internet on the ship has been down for a week and a half, and was just fixed today. A lot has actually happened, but I'll just post bit by bit, I wouldn't want to overwhelm anyone with too much procrastination material in one entry...)

How Mercy Ships Nurses in Ghana Have a Good Time

1. Go to the meat market.

2. Buy a cow heart, a knife and a tray, all for around $6.

3. Hide it in the fridge for a few days.

4. Take it to the aft deck at night and dissect it.

5. Throw it overboard.