Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Ghana Day 20; 8/22/14

We woke up ridiculously early today to get to community to paint our latrines and make sure that the families we were building for understood how to take the best care of it. We were told to wake up at 6am to eat breakfast and be ready to leave by 7am, but when that is said, we all know that it’s not actually going to be the case. At the earliest, we might leave by 7:20, but 7:30 or so is much more likely. The interns and Deanna call it “Ekumfi time” as a joke.

When we got to the community before 8am, there were a good number of kids running around already. One of the first things that we saw was this adorable concrete block on the ground that one of the kids from the house had made:


We then mixed the paint that we needed to make the design that we agreed upon, which was white on top and blue on the bottom, blue polka dots on the white background. It turned out to be really great, and the kids that we’d gotten to know came around and helped us paint, which was really cute.


It turns out that I have a really memorable name or something because a lot of the kids remembered it and came to play as the morning went on, and it was a little crazy to think that there were so many children that we interacted with over just the past three days. I had some time to play with them, and one of the (the same one from yesterday) braided my hair again. Interacting with the kids was really cute today especially because one of the interns was really sloppy with paint and got it all over the rest of us, but the kids started trying to get it out of our hair and off our skin.

Right before we left, the girl who braided my hair asked me to bring her “biscuits” (I think she means cookies) if I come back. Aww.

When we finished the latrine, this was our final product:



We made sure at the end that we could talk to the family we had built for about maintenance of the latrine. It was surprising to see that everyone else wanted to jump straight into the instructions and forgo formalities like thanking the mother for letting us work with her family. After we’d done that, we started explaining to her how to make the most of her latrine (families pay 250 GHC). That included not throwing toilet paper or excess water into the latrine to help the sewage pit last longer, the fact that the waste from the pit can be taken out after 15-20 years when it is full to use as fertilizer, and that Global Brigades will fix anything that has gone wrong for only the first three months after construction. She ended up giving us some watermelon and other fruits as a thank you as we drove away for the last time.

After lunch, we headed to the Global Brigades Ghana office to give our final presentations for the internship in front of some of the key staff of GB Ghana. It was a little intimidating because the economic development interns (Ed, Noah, and Megan) gave a really great presentation about their proposal to create cooperatives in different communities to increase the impact and sustainability of latrine building and the construction of a soap factory in Ekumfi Egyankwaa. I hadn’t ever heard a business proposal presentation before, but it was awesome to hear the business students present because they have skills that I’ve never learned about, can draw on facts and figures, and explain to help a layperson understand. Those are acquired skills, but it was obvious that there was a difference between their presentation and the global health ones.

The nine global health interns decided that we would present in three groups, each of us talking about a different aspect of our internship and our suggestions for it. I think that all the groups, mine included, probably should have spent more time preparing for the presentation overall, but I didn’t think that anyone did a poor job of portraying the general consensus about our stances on different issues.

The thing that made the presentation difficult and stuck with me for a while was the fact that there was one GB professional who was new to the organization and had not yet been briefed about how everything works. Our presentations assumed a basic understanding of what we did and our subsequent recommendations, and he seemed to be very interested in everything and wanted to grill my team especially about our suggestions for the medical brigade portion of our internship. I’d forgotten what it was like to have to think on my feet like that about a topic other than myself (for a personal interview, for example), and it was hard for me to keep on my feet. Though I was complimented on my handling of the questions and the other GB staff members that were directors and other people like that helped answer questions, I felt like I’d left a lot on the presentation stage. It’s not a good feeling, but I guess it reminds me of how important it is to keep up my skills. One of the coordinators asked my group for our presentation via email afterwards, which was really awesome.

Another group that presented made a joke about their coordinator for the public health brigade not helping them, which did not go over well with the GB higher ups. They immediately wanted to know who it was and what exactly it was that he didn’t do, but the group was just joking because he helped more with directing the ladies in his group rather than the manual labor itself. The cultural differences between the presentation group and the audience created the gap awkward situation in which a joke was misunderstood, but I’m intrigued to learn more about humor and how it varies according to culture.

Throughout the program, we were given Coke in a bottle (!) and meat pies, which was a surprising combination. I didn’t particularly like either one, but when in Ghana, you take what you can get.
Afterwards, we had a little bit of a photo shoot:



At night, we split everyone (including the 6-people German brigade that was constructing latrines) into 3 groups to decide what we were going to buy from the market tomorrow to cook for everyone (us and the staff). My group of 6 decided to make banana splits and a fruit salad with an alcoholic refresher, and then I had some time to talk to Kristoff, one of the German medical school students. When we were trying to think of how much of each ingredient we would need, he kept checking if we knew how much a kilogram or liter was, which was simultaneously funny and adorable. It was so fun to talk to him because the Germans in general are so classy. They eat everything with a fork and knife, all know more than one language, are polite, quiet, respectful, adventurous (they’re staying in Ghana for 4 weeks after their brigade!), and are eager to ask and answer questions as they come. It’s refreshing to meet them and be able to see a little bit into their world without the pressure of having to be the expert on America or seeing them as the experts on Germany because we’re meeting in Ghana.


He was saying that he took a year off after high school to work in Italy so he speaks fluent Italian before going to medical school. He’s going to his 4th year out of the 6 that are required for a degree (they don’t have undergraduate/graduate distinctions). He likes to snowboard, and he did tae kwon do and skied before that, but he’s never tried yoga. He lived in the States for a year when he was 4 or 5, and has traveled to both the East and West coasts a lot just to visit. His favorite city out of all the ones he’s visited (it sounded like a whole lot) is San Francisco, which makes sense because it’s not as busy as a NYC or LA and has a certain classiness to it, and he said that it’s probably the closest to Europe that you’ll get in the US. 

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