Unexpected Inspiration

Having just returned from a meeting with Dr. Gyapong, about a million thoughts are running through my head about my research project, and I keep thinking back over how I arrived at this topic.  I wouldn’t say it was fate, but a few chance happenings led to the experience that led me to ask questions about what has become my focus for the rest of the semester.  It all started about two weeks ago, when the option of going on outreach visits came up at work.  We would be taking turns going out with the community health nurses at My Place to provide health services such as weighing and vaccinations to young children.  Only one person could go on each visit, because of limited space in the car, so we pulled names out of a hat to see who would go that Friday.  I ended up with the little piece of paper with an “O” on it, so I got up early Friday morning and set off alone down the road to My Place (side note: this was the first time I was going anywhere alone since being here-you could say the three of us are a packaged deal of sorts).  In the car on the way there, one of the nurses (whose seat I was sharing), kept insisting that I needed to get out when she did and come to her outreach site.  I readily agreed, and hopped out with her initially.  However, the other nurses had apparently already agreed that I would be going somewhere else with another nurse, so they emphatically insisted I get back in the car.  To me, it didn’t really make a difference where I was going, but that was about to change.  The outreach visit with Cynthia, the nurse, went really well, as I previously described.  It was something that happened as we were packing up our scale and medical supplies that struck me.  We had been set up right outside of a school in Otsebreku, and about twenty minutes before we left, a woman arrived in a cab.  It quickly became clear that she was there to bring food for lunch at the school, since she pulled a large plastic bin full of rice from the trunk of the car.  As all of the children, lined up with bowls and cups to have them filled, I noticed that the bin contained ONLY rice-no vegetables, no meat, nothing supplementary in any form.  Although the diet here in Ghana does primarily revolve around starches-cassava, yams, rice-I immediately knew that a lunch provided for school children should consist of more than plain rice.  Apparently Cynthia and a few nearby community members had the exact same thoughts.  They angrily began discussing the situation with each other in Dangbe, and were clearly trying to figure out how they could correct the obvious deficiency in this lunch.  I asked Cynthia if they were talking about how the lunch was insufficient, and she confirmed my suspicions: “how can the children go back into school and learn with nothing but rice in their stomachs?”  I asked her who paid for the lunch to be provided-the government (what I later researched to be the Ghana School Feeding Programme, providing one hot nutritious meal to students in primary schools each day to improve childhood nutrition and increase school enrollment).  Clearly, the meal didn’t fit the “nutrition” part of that objective.  As people got on cell phones to call local assemblymen, Cynthia and the driver heatedly discussed the clear implication of such a simple lunch being served-where was the extra money that should have been used to pay for vegetables and meat to go with the rice?  Into whose pocket was it going?  These were the questions everyone kept coming back to, and I sat there quietly thinking to myself about this whole issue.  I had been floating around various research topics for a while, and the wheels had really started turning.  Could this be a completely unlikely and unplanned source of inspiration?  Looking into such a large project like the GSFP and visiting many schools and talking to many people at each school could be quite challenging, so I kept this idea in the back of my head but formed other research options to present to Dr. Gyapong. 

The following week, as we sat with her and Sheila trying to get a good direction on our projects, I brought up some other ideas I had been working on, but kept the school nutrition idea to myself, because I wasn’t really sure what the response would be and if it would even work.  As we were finishing the meeting, I decided to at least try it out, especially since time with Dr. Gyapong is precious (she is the director of the DHRC and isn’t around every day), and related the story of my outreach visit to her.  Her eyes immediately lit up, and suddenly I knew what I would definitely be researching.  After our second meeting today, we have decided that I should stick to the nutrition side of the issue, rather than dig too deep in terms of other more political (i.e. controversial) aspects of the program.  So, I will be doing a case study of the nutritional needs of primary school children at the Dodowa New Town D/A Basic A School.  I will look at the food provided for lunch as part of the GSFP, but also get a larger picture of the nutritional status of randomly selected kindergarteners by going to their homes and seeing what is eaten in a full day.  Focusing on just one school gives me the opportunity to talk to the many stakeholders involved-the students, the teachers, the head of the school, and those who prepare and serve the food at the school.  More detailed discussions also will be had with the children who are followed home, and if it works out, I would also like to be able to take simple anthropometric measurements.  I’m extremely excited to embark on this project, and I can tell Dr. Gyapong is very enthusiastic about it as well.  I was most flattered when she said that she had been discussing my idea the previous evening with her husband, who teaches at the University of Ghana School of Public Health.  They’re pretty much a Ghana health power couple, and that they were even briefly talking about my idea was pretty cool. 

So now as I’m reflecting on all of this, I realize how a few random occurrences led me to come up with this research area-happening to be the one to go on outreach that day, ending up at Otsebreku instead of another site, having the lunch arrive before we left for the day, mentioning the idea on a whim to Dr. Gyapong.  I love having a project based on an experience I had first-hand, instead of an area of interest I just researched online or someone told me about, and it already has made me extra enthusiastic about getting started!  It will be a bit challenging getting proposals written and commented on, since UNICEF field work has pretty much everyone out of the office this week and possibly for a few subsequent weeks.  That means that Sheila, Irene, Oti, VU, EL, Solomon, etc. (basically everyone we interact with on a daily basis, and many of the people from whom we will need feedback about our project proposals) are all gone for now, so hopefully enough people will be here next Monday so we can present proposals and get things submitted for IRB review.  Despite this, optimism is running high amongst all three of us (Hannah and Erin are collaborating on an awesome project that Dr. Gyapong is really excited to have them do, because it directly fills a need of the DHRC-they’ll be looking at conditional cash transfers to pregnant women through an ILO program and evaluating what is going on with it, because no one really knows right now).