It’s been quite a day, beginning with a 10-hour flight from New York and ending with the longest bus ride in recorded human history (at least it seemed that way). Our unofficial welcome to Africa and Ghana came in the form of a beautiful pink sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean while we were cruising at 30,000 feet and a Ghanaian woman singing tribal songs to herself in the seat next to me. It was quite an introduction.
Before I knew it, we were descending through heavy clouds and watching the outside air temperature quickly climb to about 80 degrees; winter in Boston was a distant memory. Accra materialized slowly through the murk as a low-slung town of red-roofed buildings separated by wide swaths of open, tropical-looking land. Smoke from trash fires dotted the horizon.
Our big jet landed easily, and when the captain announced his welcome to Accra, many of the passengers who were returning home to Ghana applauded. We stepped onto the tarmac at around 8 am local time to humidity and warm air, but neither were as bad as I’d been expecting.
The hallways leading to customs were papered with posters for the Africa Cup, a continent-wide soccer tournament that took place at the soccer stadium here in Kumasi from late January through the beginning of February. They were posters we saw throughout the remainder of the day on billboards, buildings and anywhere else space could be found.
Once through customs, we made our way out to the front of the airport, where a giant blue flatbed truck waited to be filled with our many (many) bags and a gloriously air-conditioned bus waited to take us on the final leg of our journey, here to Kumasi.
In my previous post, I said it would be a five-hour ride, but it ended up being nearly seven hours (including a stop for lunch) on bustling and bumpy roads. Needless to say, we were glad to finally get off the bus here at the Rexmar Hotel and ready to be done with travel for the time being.
Despite being longer than any of us would have liked, the ride was fascinating. Everywhere I looked I saw women carrying huge plates or bowls on their heads filled with items for sale. Radiant yellow fruits were stacked pyramid-style, waiting for buyers. Babies were strapped tightly to their mothers’ backs in brightly colored slings. Buildings seemed to be either in a state of construction or disrepair, with many of them looking utterly abandoned. People slept in random places and random positions (one man I saw was actually slung, sound asleep, between two horizontal poles on the back of a moving truck). Goats, chickens and geckos were almost as numerous as children. Large items, like couches, TV stands, bed frames, custom-made doors, coffins and large metal gates for driveways were for sale along the streets nearly the entire trip. Almost none of it was covered, and I wondered what they did with everything when it rained.
Check out a few pictures from our trip.
Two interesting parallels between the U.S. and Ghana: they’re also having a presidential election late this year and one of the issues being debated is whether the country should provide universal health care coverage to its citizens.
The people of Ghana, a lot of whom seem to speak English, have so far been incredibly friendly. I expect to start getting to know them a lot better tomorrow, when members of the Children’s team head to Komfe-Anokye Teaching Hospital to set up the operating room and intensive care unit. At the same time, cardiologists will begin evaluating children to determine if they’re good fits for cardiac surgical repair, the first of which is expected to take place this Sunday.
Check back in later to hear how things went on the first day in clinic and an overview of the project the team is here working on.
Farewell for now from Kumasi.
– Matt Cyr and the rest of the team from Children's Hospital Boston
PS - The slower Internet connection here is making it difficult for me to include photos. I'm working to get the problem sorted out and hope to have a gallery up and running tomorrow.
