Bolga: Day 2

Today I got my first taste of what field work entails. And lemme tell you--it's not easy driving down bumpy roads, going from community to community. I commend everyone who does this, day in, day out. By the end of the day, weak little me was so tired, so hot, and so hungry...

I, along with 2 CRS project officers and the driver, traveled out to Navrongo, which is a town just outside of Bolga. People who have donated the funds that have helped make possible the projects CRS-Ghana is undertaking are visiting from the U.S. on Friday. We went to three of the communities to make sure everything was ready and in place for the visit.

I've never realized just how much I take running water for granted. Clean water at that. We put our dishes in the dishwasher, indulge in long, hot showers, and drink from the tap without a second thought. But here, the water situation couldn't be more different. Even in cities like Accra, water isn't guaranteed to flow out the faucet when you turn it on. And in rural areas, where I visited today, people, mostly women and children, walk miles to a water source that, in many cases, isn't clean, infecting people with diseases such as Guinea worm. (Please don't Google Image this. I beg!)

The first community we visited featured a water pump built by the donations of CRS based in Seattle. Since the water comes from deep down in the ground, it's clean and safe to drink, even cleaner and safer than tap water. I was able to drink some and it did taste good. Here it is in action.



Up until now, I've underestimated the power of witnessing things firsthand. While watching this boy collect water and bring it back home to his family, it really hit me that such a simple mechanism can save the lives of so many. And it makes you wish that every community that needed this had one. But it's so much easier said than done.

After that, we went to the Nokang community. This is the CIMACS scoreboard that tracks the progress the community has made:

The picture on the left shows a woman delivering a baby at a clinic, and the right shows a woman delivering at home. Currently, this community has a 90% success rate, meaning that most women deliver at a clinic. This is no small feat. That the clinic is often miles away from the community and that most deliveries happen at night makes going even more difficult than it already is. As I mentioned in my last post, CIMACS provides motorbikes, raincoats, and rain boots to link providers so that they can quickly get a woman in labor to the clinic.

With the help of CIMACS and its volunteers, this woman


was able to deliver this healthy (and cute!) baby.



I wanted to end this slightly gloomy post on a happy note. With the image of a calm, sleeping newborn in my head, I'm off to bed! I've discovered that so many people say "Yoooooo!" as a farewell. And all this time, I thought it was just something weird my mom said before she said bye on the phone, but it's quite widespread here. So now, I shall say it too.

Yooooo!