July 6th and 7th - Sunday and Monday's Crazy Day
Trip Start
Jun 30, 2008
1
4
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Trip End
Aug 04, 2008
Kumasi,
Ghana
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Sunday morning. At about 6 a.m. there
were some loud drums being played. While
this woke us up this did not stop most of us from falling back asleep. When we
did awake, we did some exploring in our dorm.
We found that there is a kitchen area with a sink and two stoves. Neither of the stoves are actually plugged in
and this is probably because it is summer break. We also found where we can throw garbage
away. There is a little room that has on
large trash container. The most exciting
part of our discovery was two basketball courts and well as a nice area to sit.
After our exciting discovers we ran into Joe, one of the
people who looks after the dorms, to turn in our keys before we left. He had asked us why we did not go to
church. We responded that we did not
know the time. He then said that he was more than willing to help us for next
Sunday. Religion plays a very large role
in the lives of many people in Ghana.
There are many stores that have religious sayings like God Bless Hair
Salon. Also, on the back of many taxis there are religious sayings. Many people
say good bye by saying God bless or I hope God makes your trip fruitful. There is really no distinction between church
and state.
We then went to go use the Internet to send the IRB document
for the hospital to Dr. Warrington and Andrew. It was just after 9:30 and we
found out that the internet cafe does not open until 1:30 on Sunday. In fact many places on campus are not open at
all on Sundays. We then went back to our room to work on some other parts of
the project and to try to organize all the photos and videos. Our main posting
of pictures and videos will be Sunday.
After posting and e-mailing at 1:30 p.m. we decided to try
to head into town to buy some dish soap, laundry detergent, and a
basketball. We found a taxi driver and
asked how much to take us to Baboo's Bazaar.
Andrew had told us everyone knows where this restaurant but this taxi
driver certainly didn't. He told us to
get in and he would ask for directions.
We made it into the taxi circle (a parking lot where many taxis and
driver sit) and he asked some fellow drivers.
Only one person knew where it was at.
We started heading towards the downtown area when we became a little
lost. He pulled over to ask again and
then drove for another two minutes. At
that point we just got out and decided that we would walk. We at first did not
recognize anything because almost all the shops were closed. Because of this we
ended up turning the wrong way and just starting walking. Nothing looked that familiar because there
was no merchandise. There was pretty
much no chance of us buying any of the things that we were planning on getting
so we thought that we should just go and eat some dinner. We started walking and trying to find
Baboo's. Soon we were pretty sure that
we were in the wrong area and we might just have to take a taxi back to the
University. Cory asked a lady on the
streets for directions and she had no idea. So we kept on walking. Not too much later we ran into a police
officer who was able to tell us that Baboo's was just four blocks up. We were going in the right way! We got the restaurant and found out that it
was closed :( and found out that we were
less than a block away from where we were originally dropped off at.
We then decided to walk around to see what else was
happening. We started wandering around
and heard some music. We walked towards
the music and found that it was for a "Get Fit Challenge." Not far away from the music was a bar. Mitch and Marcie sat down to have a drink and
enjoy the music. After finishing their
drinks the group decided to go back and try to look for food closer to the
University. We then found that a few
feet from the bar was a food vendor. We
all bought a rice disk and decided to head back to the dormitories in a
cab. The traffic was very bad heading
back to the University and by the time that we had arrived our food was
cold. We heated in up in our cooker and
all ate very well.
The morning in Kumasi can be pretty similar to morning
in Houghton. You wake up thinking that
it will be a sunny, humid day and all you get is a cloudy humid day. It seems that during the raining season
mornings are usually cloudy but the sun is able to burn off some of those
clouds so in the afternoon the sun is present.
This being the case, many people rise very early with the morning sun to
get as much done while it is still cooler.
July 7th we woke up earlier to begin what was
going to be a pretty long day. First on
our list was to stop by the International Program's (IP) office on campus to
talk about our recruitment event. We
found out that many of the undergraduate student had left a while ago, June 6th
and that the only students left were graduate students or students that had
just recently graduated that were finishing up their community service
requirement. We also learned a little
more about how their study abroad office works.
The IP office was just created a few years ago and because of the
limited resources does not handle the majority of the study abroad cases. Most of the students who study abroad do it
through their specific school. The program director for the IP office said that
she would help us to set up meeting with each of the school's deans once our
MOU goes through. An MOU is a formal
announcement of who we are and what we are doing. If the university accepts the MOU then we
have full accept to everything on their campus.
After finding this out, we told her that we would stop by every few days
to check in and also to see how the progress of the MOU is going.
We then went to go check our e-mail quickly to see if Dr.
Warrington had been able to send us an
endorsed introduction letter for the infant heart monitor and that letter was
sitting in our inbox. We could now head
over to the hospital and turn in the IRB information. The only problem was that we would have to
somehow print off these two documents.
So we tried one printing center and they only do photocopies. The next printing center said University
of Kumasi Printing and when we went
inside we found out that they only do mass projects like printing books,
fliers, ect. A nice gentleman asked if
we knew where the publisher was and we had no idea so he was nice enough to
escort us to the right place. Then next
problem came when the file could not be open from the jump drive. The lady working on the computer said that
their was something wrong with the file.
Mitch double checked on his laptop that the files were not saved in
windows 2007 because they only have windows 2003 at the University. This time after double clicking she was able
to open and print the documents for us.
A simple print job in Africa took us just about an hour.
We figured that we should probably stop for lunch before we
go to the hospital. There is a food
stand in the commercial center. (The
commercial center is one of the main areas on campus, it has food, office
supplies, a pharmacy, and the ATM. It is
similar to an union building on most college campus except that this one is
completely open air.) We had to wait a
little bit for the food to be prepared.
In front of us in line was a group of school girls also waiting for
lunch. When we finally got our
lunch: rice and beans for a dollar. We were very disappointed. Everything tasted like we were eating
charcoal. We forced down the food with a
nice cold coke but decided that lunch place would be used for emergencies only.
The way that many lunches are packaged in Ghana at these
food stands is that the woman working behind the counter takes out a plate and
then covers it with a thin plastic bag.
She then put all the food onto the plastic on the plate. This usually includes a very large portion of
rice, a protein, and then spices. After
everything is on, she ties the plastic bag up so your whole meal is
together. Then she puts in a black
plastic bag. All the locals eat the
contents of the bag with their hands. We
Americans get a spork.
After eating lunch we headed to the hospital with our IRB
information. After calling Dr. Ankobea
to let him know that we arrived we showed him the IRB approval from Michigan
Tech. The first thing he then asked for was
where were the documents from the hospital and we had said that we never received
them. He then asked why we didn't email
him over the weekend to say that we never got it. We then rushed down to the IRB office to talk
to John to get the forms and start working on them. John had just sent the forms out this morning
to at 10 a.m. Ghanaian time. Andrew
forwarded as soon as he got it but by that time we were already at the hospital
trying to work out this problem. John
then said that he could put the information on a jump drive. Marcie handed her jump drive over to
him. It turns out that somehow there
were four viruses on the jump drive. Dr.
Ankobea gave John his jump drive and it thankfully worked. We then headed up to
Dr. Ankobea's office to work on it. It
was already 1 p.m.
The next forty five minutes was spent trying to open the
document. Dr. Ankobea's jump drive was
also infected and the documents would not open.
Instead all they looked like was jumble.
Mitch then tried to connect to the internet but it was so slow. Cory and Marcie went downstairs to try to
have John reload the documents on to the jump drive. He said that he could not do that because it
had been in our computers and was now probably infected. He said that he would e-mail it to us. One of Emanuel's friend worked in the
hospital so we asked if we could try to open a document on his computer. When we tried to open it all we got was the
same jumble. We then called Andrew to
have him forward Marcie a copy of the documents. We then called Mitch to tell him our progress
but he had gotten the internet to work so that we would be able to download the
documents. The next two hours flew by as
we flied out page after page. We then
thought that we were done so we decided to show John in the IRB office our
progress. We had misinterpreted one of
the questions so we were back to the drawing board. We decided that we needed to talk to Brooke
who was actually going to be doing the study.
After talking to her for a few minutes, we just decided to send her the
documents. This happened just before
four o'clock. However, at four o'clock the internet in the whole hospital shuts
down. This had pretty much shut down any
hopes of finishing the IRB application today.
We had asked Brooke to look over the IRB with her advisor, Dr. Newman,
and then to send us the IRB with any corrections. They had said that they would be able to send
us the corrected document in a half hour.
We called Dr. Ankobea and asked if there was anything else that we could
do. He just asked for us to leave a copy
of the document with him. By the time we
got out of the hospital it was already 4:45.
Because it gets dark by 6:30, we decided that we needed to get some
food.
We left the hospital to try to find a taxi to take us to
Baboo's Bazaar, a western style restaurant.
We walked for about 10 minutes and could not find an empty taxi. We then decided to take a short cut through
the cultural center. A short trip
through the cultural center would not be complete without buying some
interesting gifts. We made it through
and found a taxi and asked to be brought to Baboo's Bazaar. This was strike two for taxi drivers not
knowing where the restaurant was. The
driver was a Cote D'Voire native and spoke a little English but mostly
French. He asked us if we knew where we
were going and all of us just looked at each other. He stopped and asked for direction and this
cost us another 2 Cedis. The restaurant
ended up being just a few blocks away.
We pulled up in the taxi and all the traders recognized us;
they were very excited to see us. They
all wanted us to buy something from them.
Before we had all eaten dinner we had
all at least bought two more paintings.
While we were eating they were all just waiting for us to come up and
once we did leave the restaurant everyone had something to sell us. Much of the time there were three people all
selling the same things trying to get your attention at once. This allows to get a pretty good deal because
they bid against each other but it can be a little overwhelming.
We finally hailed a taxi and asked to be taken back to
Tech. Only certain taxi's can go into
Tech; they must have a special sticker on them.
Our driver did not have this sticker but because there was no one at the
gate he decided to chance it. He made it
to the next gate where there was a guard waiting. After a brief conversation the taxi driver
bribed the guard to let us through for 1 Cedi.
We made it to the internet cafe where we downloaded all the information
that we would need to then work on the IRB.
Shortly after Emanuel stopped by to see how we were
doing. We had a great conversation about
our past few days and talked about our upcoming plans to visit the
villages. We then got back to work on
the IRB and hope that the next day would go a little smoother.
Comments
viruses
...I should have mentioned computer viruses. Pubic computers are teeming with viruses. Your jump drives will get infected almost 100% of the time.