Chicken, Chicken, Goat!

 Wednesday May 20, 2015

This week I am with St. Thomas again. Mary Ellen, Annie, Richard, Jerry and myself left for the Eastern region in the morning. The first town we were in was (I cant remember, oops), but it means “all you need is Salt.” Implying that it is very fruitful and has everything that you need to live. I love the Eastern region, it is so lush here! There are more bugs however, I’ve gotten more bites here than my whole trip thus far combined. Most of the bites I think though are ant bites, not mosquitoes. They have these super tiny ants everywhere that you cant feel when they crawl on you but I couldn’t feel any of the bites I got. I definitely slept in my net though. 

They love it when we "snap" photos of them.

The kids here are wonderful! We love teaching them games to play like frisbee, missionary tag, and a modified form of duck, duck, goose just with chickens and goats (we figured it related to them better). Chickens roam the streets like squirrels here and there are more goats then dogs in Ghana. We played with a big group of kids in Osiem who were so cute! They caught on quickly with the concept of chicken, chicken, goat but they didn’t understand that you had to beat the other person to the empty spot. But it was still fun haha. I of course threw my frisbee around as well, the kids are always fascinated with that and fight over who gets to throw it next. 

Today we were in a town called Bogoro and there was a school next door the the church we were at that was playing music and singing really loud. After we had finished with all the visual acuity Annie and I walked over to see what was happening. Some of the students were practicing for a dance competition. The girls were practicing their dance number and the boys were on the drums. There were kids everywhere! After a short while one of the dance teacher came and grabbed my hand and pulling me in said “Come. You will dance.” It took me a minute but I picked up on the few dance moves they were doing. All the kids were laughing and cheering me on and would get especially loud when I got a certain dance step haha. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures or footage of me dancing. Maybe that was for the best to save me from any embarrassment back home. 

My dinner at our hotel. 

After the outreach we were told of a small waterfall nearby that we could hike to. We finished early so a local woman took us. It wasn’t what I expected but still really cool. The waterfall was more of a trickle than anything but I am sure it looks pretty good during a huge rain storm. 

Our hotel was pretty nice as well. The rooms weren't as good at the ones at the Telecentre but we had a restaurant right in the hotel that made pretty good food. I had a big Tilapia fish with fried rice that was really good! And at 35 cedi a night for my own room it was a lot cheaper than the telecentre as well. 

One of the volunteers, Richard, the medical school graduate from London has been doing his own partial examinations at the outreaches. I shadowed him for a while each day and learned a lot about different diseases and conditions. He is very smart and knows more than he should about eyes because they don’t focus too much on Ophthalmology in med school. I get to use the Ophthalmoscope and everything, its pretty awesome!