Progress on Service Day and Now Opening a Fundraiser!

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,

Colleen