Another Scattered Post

August 15, 2010

Hi Bloggies!
I wish I could be like Eva and have a central theme for every post but I am not that organized. This entry will start out talking about the beach and I’m not sure where it will end up. I’m giving myself from 5:45 until 6:15 to write and then I’m going to keep pounding at med school secondaries. So much personal, contemplative thinking—it really is exhausting!! Anyway, today I called one of the doctors I had to interview and he told me to come to a clinic so I took a taxi to go see him. He was very nice. I can always distinguish the doctors who have either studied in the United States or worked with a lot of Americans because they are able to keep up with my pace and they understand my accent so much better. This doctor works in Akwatia, about a 2 hour drive from Accra, and he is the only obstetrician at the hospital. They have about 3000 deliveries every year. He is permanently on call. He didn’t seem too stressed out—not sure why. I think I would be either trying my hardest to get out of the situation or working nights to recruit all the Ghana College graduates to come help out or try to set up community education so that I don’t get so many emergency and eclamptic cases.

So after that, I put on my brown sundress and swimsuit top and Lisanne and I went to the beach. On the 10-minute walk there, we were greeted by about 10 groups of men and 2 or 3 groups of women. The greetings ranged from “hey sexy” to “OBRONI come here!”. We ignored most of them, but the entrance of the beach “resort” is always a little hard to get through. There are almost always Rasta guys there, and they always are much more persistent in getting to know you. While Lisanne was talking to a guy who happened to be going to Holland with his wife later this year, a drunk guy came up and tried to kiss me.

(note: I’m making Spanish rice from a box that Ella’s parents brought her when they came to Ghana and I just put the butter in the boiling water. It did not melt. I would hate to see what Blue Band ‘bread spread’ would do in my stomach. Oh, also about food: I ate a salad at a restaurant 2 nights ago and I didn’t even feel sick. Who says you can’t eat salads in countries with unsanitary water?? Awesome.)

Anyway, the drunk dude isn’t important. In fact, I think that I’ve had that experience in the Diag in Ann Arbor, so it really shouldn’t be on this blog that’s supposed to be about Ghana. So. We got through there and through the resort place and I bought a goat kebab. Personally, I think that the goat kebabs are overpriced—they are 1 cedi (roughly $0.70) and there are like 5 pieces of meat on them, separated by onions. They are covered in this spicy breading and oil and are grilled over a few small coals. You can get them all over the place, and although the Ghana FDA is probably not involved in their production, they all taste pretty similar. I was lucky—only one piece of goat had skin on it. As all you science people know, there’s a layer of fat directly under skin and nonscience people know that skin is tough and rubbery. The gray color doesn’t help either. Other than that, I don’t mind the skin. I am a vegetarian when it is possible and healthy (i.e. in Michigan but not in Ghana) and the wandering goats and (really loud) chickens serve as a reminder of what we are eating. I think people should eat meat only if they are comfortable with actually thinking about where the food came from, and if they would be comfortable killing the animal themselves. I think that would force a lot of people to become vegetarians (thus contributing to a more sustainable food industry). We’ll talk about that later. SO we get down to the beach and I spread out my 2 yards of kente-patterned printed fabric on the beach.

(note: Kente is a word that describes a kind of cloth. It must be woven in strips that are about 5 inches across. The strips are then combined to make a cloth that can be as wide as you want it, depending on how many strips you connect. I haven’t bought any real Kente cloth because I don’t like how it looks when you combine the individual strips. Sometimes they aren’t lined up properly and then they don’t look very good. I’ve bought cloth with the typical Kente pattern but ones that have been woven continuously across for about 15 inches. I like them better.)

So the beach. It’s dirty. I waded in the water a few weeks ago and did not enjoy all the plastic bags floating up and wrapping around my ankles. There are diapers, forks, Styrofoam bowls, you name it.

ARGH it’s 6:25p and I need to go contemplate how I will add to the diversity of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. I’ve tried to explain the United States’s obsession with diversity and how for undergraduate applications, “diversity” is used to refer solely to skin color. Ghana, more so in Kumasi than Accra, is a very homogenous place and it is pretty ridiculous to sit in the medical students’ hostel and think about the makeup of my future classmates in the United States.

(note: today’s proverb hits a little too close to home… I can’t believe I’m going home in 11 days!! SAD.)

Ghanaian proverb: By the time the fool has learned the game, the players have dispersed.