The second work week here in Dodowa
has found us settled into a routine and continually discovering the many
interesting cultural differences that Ghana has to offer. Two nights ago for dinner, Charity made us
banku and okra for the first time. We
had been eating rice or yams with egg stew for most meals, options that are
much closer to the types of food I am used to eating. I’m always interested in trying new food,
especially this semester, but I was definitely apprehensive about diving into
what basically looks like a ball of raw dough in soup. My overall assessment? It will take some getting used to, but banku
and okra are sure to grow on me. Eating
something with such a different consistency was the main challenge, especially
because the portions we are served are always so large! Next time I will try to eat a little bit more
of it, as well as try to improve my eating technique (we were sitting at the
table with Auntie Esther, and she was laughing at us because we were not very
good at scooping up the soup with the banku-it kept falling back into the bowl
before we could reach our mouths!).
We also just picked up some new
clothes that we had made! I got a wrap
skirt in a yellow and dark purple batik fabric, as well as a dress in a green
and purple fabric that looks very Christmas-y.
We all also have a third pattern of fabric with Milicent, the seamstress
that Charity’s family knows, and she is making us all sundresses! It’s pretty cool to pick from many different
patterns and styles to basically get something custom made for you-I’ve never
really experienced that before but I’m sure that now I will treasure these pieces
forever. And I’ll definitely be getting
some more clothes, both for myself and for some perfectly timed Christmas
gifts!
At the research center, we attended
our first of the Monday morning weekly staff meetings, where representatives
from each department presents their progress with work for the past week. We were also asked to give a brief summary of
what we had learned during our first week here.
It was exciting to see familiar faces in the meeting and remember names
of the many people we were introduced to on our first day, and hearing reports
on all the projects was great for us as we start to come up with paper and
research ideas. We had already talked to
a few people about commRDT and INESS, two areas with studies in malaria, but
hadn’t heard about some of the other projects.
One thing that came up was a study that will be starting shortly related
to maternal and neonatal health. It is
called EMBRACE (Ensure Mothers and Babies Regular Access to Care), an
initiative that aims to develop a feasible and sustainable package of
interventions to improve maternal and neonatal health in rural areas and to
evaluate the impact of these interventions.
To do this, they want to establish a continuum of care both in time and
in place. The time dimension would be
from pre-pregnancy through pregnancy, childbirth, and the early years of the
child’s life. The place dimension would
link various levels of care in the home, family, community, and health
facilities to ensure that the mother gets full care. This program started from a partnership
between the Ghana Health Service and the University of Tokyo, and basically
Ghana was chosen as the African experimental country to see how this could be
implemented. They are about to start
doing feasibility studies, and three of the five categories of the formative
research will be the focus of the DHRC.
The three areas are barriers to continuum of care from pregnancy to 6
weeks postpartum, challenges and incentives to community health officers, and
assessment and improvement of care by professionals.
I was very excited to hear about
this research area, because maternal and child health has always been something
I was interested in focusing on during this experience abroad. All three of us sought to talk to V.U., who
presented on the topic during the meeting, afterwards to speak in more detail
about exactly what it is. She was able
to give us the research proposal for EMBRACE, and told us that although they
were running a little bit behind on some things, they should be getting started
next week and that our help would be most welcome. It was very exciting to hear that we could be
directly involved in this, and hopefully will be able to formulate research
topics based on this project, especially since the timeline of the research
being done corresponds almost perfectly to our time here. I am eager to have a role in what could be an
extremely important and influential study to maternal and neonatal health in
many other African countries.
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