Heyyy Everybody!
These past few days have been really great. The universe has really come through for me after dealing me a, more often than not, shit deck for the past few months.
I mentioned in my last blog that I would be traveling down to Accra (capital city) to work Operation Smile ( http://www.operationsmile.org/ ) with some other volunteers. I have to say it has been one of the most rewarding experiences in Peace Corps thus far. The story is kind of long but it’s a good one so try and stick with it.
A few months ago Peace Corps sent out a small article in the monthly newsletter requesting volunteers to help with running the event. I’ve always heard of it and thought it would be a fun experience so I signed up and so did my closest Peace Corps neighbor Jake, who found possible surgery candidates in his own as well as the surrounding villages.
Thursday rolls around and it’s time to travel to Accra. Jake loads up the 2 possible surgery candidates (and their guardians to take care of them in case they do end up getting surgery) into the first tro…around 5am. One is a girl who about 7 years old who had a cleft pallet and her mother as a guardian. The other was a 17 year old boy named Ekow and we were supposed to be meeting his Uncle in Takoradi to act as his guardian. Ekow has epilepsy and is a burn victim. This kind of patient doesn’t exactly fit into this mission of Operation Smile but we were in contact with the organizers and were told to bring him anyway, if nothing else just to get him checked out by a doctor for the first time in his life.
On the way out of the village (which he has mostly likely never left) he is so stressed out and panicked, he has a seizure. He gets to the tro station and he is basically unable to move but in order to get to the hospital where he’ll get on the bus to Accra, he has to get on another 2 tros. Problem. So we call his Uncle, who is meeting us in Takoradi, to ask what we should do for him and the seizure. He answers, says he has no idea and says he’ll see us at the hospital to go to Accra. However, at this point we still have no way to move him to get onto the next tro. Luckily, my housemate David is a Godsend. He has a work truck and offered to drive all of us over to the hospital to meet the bus. We all pile in (no easy task) and get to there the bus is supposed to be. We were scheduled to meet at 8am and we get there just before. This is Ghana, and nothing is early, so there’s no way we missed the bus. We wait for about 4 hours for both his uncle and the bus. Neither show. And now his Uncles phone is turned off. We’re all thinking that it would truly be a shame if Ekow goes through all this stress to get to Takoradi and he ends up having to go back because his good for nothing uncle doesn’t want to honor his commitments and help his family. It’s decided that we are going to take him sans guardian and make the best of it. After that we call Auntie Vida, assembly women in Cape 3 Points and an elder in the community. She’s a tough old bat who gets stuff done. Long story short with that…she basically threatens 3 people into coming for him.
We get to the site Thursday night, and everything starts Friday. Patients come from all over and 99% of them have never seen a doctor before…some of them not even when they were born. Its chaos. More than 300 people came out to be screened for possible surgery. What happens is the patients line up with and there are medical stations that they have to go through…dental, anesthesia, speech ect to determine if they can even have surgery. I was at the last station called gatekeeper. What I did along with a nurse what to look at the patients file and determine if they qualified for surgery….and then I had to tell them! Try telling a mother that her child will never qualify to get his cleft pallet fixed because of a heart defect…through a translator or in broken Twi. (on a funny side not…this one guy come in and he had a chunk missing out of his bottom lip and on his chart the reason that he gave for the missing part of his lip was “human bite-zombie”…direct quote) Anyway, the nurse that I am working with is chatting with me and she says that during this Op. Smile mission they are not going to be doing burns. My heart sinks for Ekow.
I’m going to skip over some details because if I go into every detail about the insane past few days this post would be 7 pages long…nobody wants that.
Again, long story short there is a plastic surgeon that just happens to be traveling through Ghana and is friends with another surgeon working for Op. Smile and has agreed to do Ekows surgery for him. I don’t even know where to begin to express how it felt to know that we were responsible for changing this guys life.
Before the surgery starts a doctor pulls me aside and says that he would like to write a story for a medical journal on Ekow and would like me to help him to get the details on Ekow. We all sit down and his Uncle tells us his story. When Ekow was 6 his mother went to go fetch water at the bore hole and left him home. While she was gone he had an epileptic seizure and fell, face first, into the fire that his mother was using to cook on. Since she was gone, nobody was there to pull him out. As a result a god portion of the left side of his face melted. After that his family disowned him and refused to take care of him anymore. They said they didn’t want anything to do with someone who has the juju that made him put his face in the fire.
Skipping ahead….his surgery was yesterday…AND I GOT TO GO INTO THE OPERATING ROOM!!!! My knee jerk reaction was decline for fear of barfing in public of passing out. But after I thought about it for some time…I will never be in an O.R. conscious. So I went! I saw the machines and the blood and the doctors…it was kinda cool…not to mention how cool it was that I didn’t barf.
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| Jen and I before we went to watch Ekows surgury! |
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| Ekow on the table |
So right now I’m at the office in Accra but I’ll be leaving tonight to go to a friends house since there aren’t enough beds. There are 12 beds at the office for volunteers and last night we had 20 people! That’s Peace Corps for you…I would rather sleep on the floor then pay for somewhere to stay.
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