My own African Compound

Akwaaba to Ghana (Welcome to Ghana)!

** Warning - this is my intro post so it's just mainly descriptive and might be boring to some of you. Later posts will hopefully be more exciting. I'll make shit up if I have to!**

San Juan, Puerto Rico - I went from this...

To this...Kenyasi, Ghana
(a suburb of Kumasi)

Whelp, it's been quite a week already and it's only been 3 days. Traveling to Africa is already quite the shock on one's system but leaving the beaches of Puerto Rico to come to Ghana was another level. The trip was relatively easy despite 24 hours straight of traveling on 3 airplanes. I slept practically the whole 11 hour trip from NYC to Accra and the rest of the time ate salty overcooked plane food and watched a movie. I even ended up getting two seats to myself  since it was a fairly open flight!

Heather, my colleague at IntraHealth was at the Accra airport once I got through immigration and customs, we found a place to change my money and off we went to the domestic side to catch our flight to Kumasi. At check in we ran into our other colleague, Dr. Ojo, who would be co-running a training with Heather at Garden City University College (GCUC) (I'll get to that later). We arrived in Kumasi and had a driver from the school pick us up from the airport and that was it! It was probably the easiest sequence of traveling I've ever done.

Before I left I didn't really know where I was going to be living so I was a bit surprised to find out that I have my own African compound. Like a boss. The school, GCUC, is putting me up at their guest house, generally reserved for faculty. It's a big concrete estate, with a tiled empty gazebo and large empty porch in front colored in pinks, oranges and reds. The house is absolutely huge and I actually haven't even seen all the rooms because half of it is locked up. When you enter you're in the living area, sparsely decorated but welcoming with 3 couches, coffee table, working tv, and rug all colored in red, cream and pink patterns, which adds some nice color to the black and white tiled floor and very white walls. To the right is the part of the house that's locked away (I'll get to that later). You then enter a small dining area that is only connected to the kitchen through a small window, below which an ironing board is set up for all my ironing purposes (ha!). 

My African Compound

Front of House

Turn left from the living room before you get to the dining area, go down the hallway and you've entered the other half of the compound. There are two bedrooms, each adorned with their own bathroom (one working, one not...I have the working one albeit full of spiders and cockroaches..yay). Then another bathroom in the middle (which I've adopted since it seems to be bug free and has a cool LED light on the shower head when the water's running...shower party!). My room is also large and sparse, with 3 floor to ceiling cabinets with locks, a chair and a rock hard bed (apparently an African thing I had forgotten). 

Gazebo
(gonna try to find a hammock to
hang since it's cooler outside
than inside most of the time))

Downsides of the housing #1 - it's hot and stuffy and has no air circulation. Each bedroom and the living room at least has one ceiling fan and I'm working on figuring out how to get the air circulated. However, as many of you read on FB the other day, every 3 days for 12 hours, Kumasi runs scheduled power outages. Since my only source of air run on electricity, the house is pretty unbearable during these stints. This brings me back to the other part of the house being locked. I found out yesterday that the Head of the Nursing Department who generally lives here, locked up her side of the house when she left for South Africa, where she'll be for 6 months. All fine since the house is so big except the fact that she A) locked away the stove so as of right now I have no place to cook B) locked away the shelves of the refrigerator (who does that???) and C) locked away THE ONLY PART OF THE HOUSE WITH AIR CONDITIONING. So I'm a bit bitter.

Downside of the housing #2 - it's in Kenyasi, which is actually a suburb of Kumasi and has really nothing around it and nothing within walking distance so I'm pretty isolated from the actual city. Downtown, which I have yet to visit because I've been at work every day so far, is about 20 min away, though thankfully it's only a $3 cab ride.

What am I doing here in my isolated African house in the suburbs of Kumasi? Good question! I'm here as part of my summer internship for my Masters in Public Health at UNC Chapel Hill. I am a Summer Fellow at IntraHealth International and through a mix of funding from them, Center for Global Initiatives and Health Behavior department at UNC I came here to work on a USAID project called CapacityPlus. As mentioned above I'll be working at GCUC, a private not-for-profit university focusing on nursing, business, IT and soon, midwifery. CapacityPlus has been working with the school for about a year as a pilot project to develop school management tools that the school will use to increase capacity and produce higher quality and larger amounts of health workers. I am going to be conducting a qualitative study and interviewing people throughout the school that have been working on this project as well as others that the project affects (like students) to document the process by which the school has been working with CapacityPlus in developing these tools and beginning to implement the school management plan.

My first few days at GCUC thankfully involved getting to be a bystander of Heather and Dr. Ojo as they trained the staff at GCUC on one of CapacityPlus's tools. I was able to work on my human subjects review application so I can start my study soon.

Dr. Ojo running the training
 (yup this is Africa and they have a
really awesome computer lab
with great internet!). 

IntraHealth Crew for the Week

OK this was a long post and I'm getting bored of this myself (next one will be about my adventures to Lake Bosumtwi) but I'm going to end you with this picture:

My new friend Rex found out I could drive manual and decided to test my skills on the potholed roads of Kenyasi. I totally owned it. :)

Bye bye for now!

Obruni Ariana (White person Ariana)