July 13, 2012
Hello hello!
I have good news to report for my work this week. Lauren and
I have been able to make a lot of progress on our service day project!! Since I last wrote to you, we have visited the
hospital administrator two times, and visited the head nurse and the wards as
well. The hospital administrator is a ‘big man’ as you would say here, meaning
that he is very important. (He is actually quite small in stature!!) The first time that we went to meet him was on
Monday, and we had one of our local staff members to accompany us. It was quite
a challenging visit, as he asked us all types of difficult questions about our
organization. I was pulling answers out of thin air!! Haha. It seemed to go
okay though, and he asked us to write a formal letter to the hospital stating
our objectives and the items we would hope to donate. We headed back to the
office and whipped up a nice formal letter. Tuesday afternoon we hand delivered
it to him in an envelope, which are surprisingly hard to come by! He said he
would send our requests around to the wards, and we would hear back from him on
whether they would like to work with us. I spoke with him on the phone
Wednesday, and Thursday, and finally today (Friday) we were able to go back and
visit! We met the head nurse, and she had us taken around to both the children’s
ward and maternity wards. Based on the
needs requested and what we have seen, this will be our service project:
*gather all of our Mamas, staff, and
volunteers early Saturday morning (7am) to do a clean up of our two adopted
wards. We will bring our own brooms, mops, and soap to clean all the screens
(which they have in place of windows), the floors, and even cut the grass
outside with cutlasses.
*donate yards of batiked cloth, that will
be sewn into curtains. We will hang these colorful curtains in the maternity
ward for the women, so that they can have privacy when giving birth!
*donate small snacks and juices to the
childrens ward
I am very excited about the opportunity to work in the
hospital, due to my interest in global health and women’s issues. As Americans,
we are so accustomed to going to the hospital to give birth, and having
everything there that we will need for safety and comfort. Here in Ghana, even
the district hospital is lacking basic comforts like curtains between beds. The
expectant moms and recently delivered moms + babies lack privacy during this
very important time, which seems so unfortunate to me! Many beds are lined next
to each other, and the women are in close quarters. As of now there is no air
conditioning, and there was only one fan for the entire ward, which has now
rusted.
My colleague Lauren and I are really dedicated to this
cause, and we would like to be able to donate enough curtains to cover all of
the windows and hang between beds. The cloth that we have is quite lovely, but
it costs $4.40 a yard to cover the cost of the cloth + the payment to the woman
that batiked it. (This is a discounted price for volunteers from the usual
$6/yard price). When we visited the ward today, we took measurements for all
the curtains that are needed. They need a total of 36 yards, in order to cover
all 44 windows and 12 large room dividers. The total cost of that much cloth
comes to $554.40!! So, Lauren and I want to run a fundraiser this next week, to
see how much money we can raise toward this donation. Our organization, Global
Mamas, doesn’t have much margin to donate the cloth, and we don’t want to
completely burden them either. SO, I am going to donate $50 to getting the
curtains for these mamas, and would like to extend the opportunity to all of
you as well!! Absolutely no pressure of course of course. There are pictures below of the two batik cloths that we will have made into curtains. If you are interested
in offering any small donation, you could send me a note at my email colleenfulp@gmail.com. I would
absolutely love it!!
One of our staff members here will donate her time to the
sewing for the curtains, and we will unveil them at our service day after the
clean up, next Saturday, July 21. I feel so honored to be able to partake in
such an event, and am so humbled by the great appreciation the nurses have
shown towards our efforts already. Yayyy Global Mamas Service Day!!! J
In other news, we will travel this weekend to Kakum National
Park, which is about one and half hours north of Elmina. Here is some info- http://kakumnationalpark.info/1.html.
We have rented a driver for the day,
Kweku, who is the same man that brought Lauren and I from the airport in Accra
our first night. He is very nice, and has a car with air conditioning, so we
will be riding in style! It will be Lauren, Katie, Erin, and myself, all
volunteers that live in our Elmina volunteer house. Kakum National Park features a beautiful
canopy walk through the jungle, and we leave by 7am to arrive before the crowds.
We will also stop at a monkey sanctuary, and Hans Cottage which I hear is a
cute little restaurant on stilts. It should be a great day. Stay tuned for
pictures of the canopy walk!!
Have a great weekend all!
Xo,
