Godless Baboons and .PPT Presentations

I haven't had the cold or flu in about two years and I managed to catch one here in Ghana in the middle of July where the temperature rarely drops below 80 degrees or 90% humidity. Ugh.

Anyway, it's been another full week. The rest of the team showed up and the second half of the trip began, which entails public health field research. There are several teams studying things like infant mortality, elder health, micronutrient deficiencies, and oral history, among other projects.

I am on the "Research Dissemination" team, which entails going out every evening to different villages and presenting last year's findings to the community members. My teammates and I have worked for the past three months or so on the .ppt presentations as well as a leave-behind brochure that distills the main health messages from the research. It was a great exercise in really figuring out what matters most from the research and trying to communicate how the findings are relevant to the villagers. Most of the messages weren’t earth-shattering (wash your hands, water from boreholes is the cleanest, take your children to the clinic if you recognize these symptoms, etc) but reinforcing the education efforts already underway is an important part of preventative / public health.

I fast learned thought that no amount of flashy technology or good intentions replaces a motivated and passionate translator. Thankfully we have all of the above. Upon arrival, my teammates and I were told that we didn’t have a dedicated translator for our team and that the responsibility was going to be split between some people who already have quite a bit of other management responsibilities. I knew immediately that we needed to find someone else and thankfully I had met Daniel from the sex education presentation. He’s a community health nurse at one of the clinics where we did clinical hours a few weeks ago.

Daniel is the epitome of community health nursing and I’m lucky to have seen him in action. He’s passionate, knowledgeable and caring. He already does outreach clinics in many of the villages, so he knows the people and their questions. We’ve been asked some pretty tough questions (how should you do exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months if the mother dies in labor? Or is it safe to eat the vegetables in the market if they are known to be grown with fertilizers and pesticides?) and thankfully he’s right there to answer them in Twi (the local language) and translate them to us for our final report.

I’m hopefully going to borrow someone’s GoPro camera and film one of the evenings just to give everyone a sense of what I’m doing. It’s pretty good fun, lots of randomness and excitement and lots and lots of waiting around for some unknown person or reason. I quite enjoy it.

The other highlight from last week were the godless baboons in Mole (pronounced like the Mexican sauce), which is a big game reserve in the northern region of Ghana. It was created in the late 1950s after years of big game killing threatened to dramatically reduce their numbers. African sleeping sickness was rampant at that time, and people believed it was caused by the flies biting the animals and then biting people, so people went on a killing spree that decimated baboon, elephant, lion, and other large mammal species, according to our tour guide. The government created Mole as a reserve to save the animals and to provide a tourist attraction for the local economies. It’s a beautiful, rustic place with minimal amenities, which I’m into.

But the godless baboons, I am not into. These baboons have become so habituated to humans that they have no fear and will literally jump on your back to steal the bananas or mangos out of your hand. It’s one thing to have the small monkeys bare their teeth at me (which they did when I shooed one off the breakfast table) but it’s quite another to have a large baboon with big canine fangs jump on your back to steal a mango (which it did to a Danish girl who made the mistake of carrying the food between her room and the table). It was disconcerting during the “safari” orientation to be told that the baboons have learned to target women because we carry around food and only shriek when attacked instead of hitting or throwing stones at the baboons as the men do.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I armed myself with rocks and took it upon myself to chase the baboons away from all human-infested (sorry, inhabited) areas, yelling and waving my arms about their need to be a taught a lesson in feminism and manners. One of the other students commented that the baboons will probably talk for years about the feminine looking man with the crappy shot, but I don’t care. We pick our battles and that seemed appropriate for a weekend “safari.”

There’s plenty more to write and I suspect I’ll fill in gaps when I get back to a normal internet connections speed. As it is, I have a few things I need to upload back to the States to finish nursing classes, so I can’t spend too much time blogging. Know that I miss you and cheese very much. Look forward to seeing you soon.