July 8th - Back to Hospital
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Kumasi,
Ghana
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Today, Tuesday July 8th, was another very long
day. It is only 7:30 p.m. but it feels
like it is much later. Today we decided to sleep in until 9:00 to be ready to
leave by 9:45 to print out of IRB documents.
We thought that printing this document off would not take longer than 15
minutes (this included the walk to the place.)
We were quite wrong. We got to
the publishing printing place that we had used the day before. Mitch decided to use his jump drive
today and see how that would work. The man working the computer/printer plugged
in the jump drive right after turning it on.
The computer then proceeded to "freak" out a little with all kinds of
different scenes flashing. We all looked
at each other because we knew what computer gave Marcie's jump drive a virus. The man shut down the computer to reboot
it. This time we were able to print
out our consent form, 3 pages, and the first two pages of a 13 page document
before the computer "freaked" out. It
was then rebooted and thankfully the third time was the charm and we got the
other 11 pages printed out. Our total
time: 1 hour . Total cost: 95 pesewas.
It was 11 o'clock once we got into a taxi. We were able to haggle down to 6 Ghana
cedis. After a short drive to the
hospital, we walked up to go see John and hand in our IRB for him to look
over. Just as we were heading up the
stairs he was heading to a meeting said that it would take one to two
hours. In Ghana time that meant that it
would at least take two hours. We called
Dr. Ankobea to show him the project and found that he was busy and we needed to
wait to meet with John. We decided to spend the next two hours walking down to
the market area.
On our way to the market area a little girl grabbed onto
Mitch and wanted to go with him. Her mother called her back a few times and
when we passed her mother, she grabbed the girl so she would let go. It was
very cute. We then continued on to check out some of the shops. We went and
browsed through a soccer shop for some jerseys and decided not to get any today.
Then we went to a more Americanized shop. It had some very nice Africa Cup 2008
shirts. We decided to get some because they would be great souvenirs. However,
there sizing system is a little different (a large t-shirt is more like a
small).
By the time we had finished at the shop, it was time to head
back to the hospital. It had also started raining during this time. This meant
that by the time we got back to the hospital we were pretty wet. Once we
arrived at the hospital we went straight to John's office. We told him that we
had Dr. Newman look over the document so he told us it would be fine so we
began our adventure to get more copies. This proved to be very difficult
because we were asking for ten copies of a thirteen page document. We brought our
own ream of paper but the first place we went to did not have enough ink to do
the copies. They showed us to another office to try and get print them there,
however, we evidently lost the files of the documents from Mitch's jump drive
when we printed the first time on KNUST campus. We decided that photocopies
would probably be the best option from here so the secretary brought us to
another office with a copy machine. However, the first office she brought us to
was having a problem with the toner and the lady in charge did not want to make
the copies anyways. The secretary then brought us to another office and the
people were very happy to make the copies for us as long as we gave them our
ream of paper, which we were glad to offer to them since that was what we
bought it for. After about a 15 minute wait the people brought us our copies
and be brought them to John. He told us that the committee would be meeting
next Thursday and we will hopefully have clearance two weeks from then. This
really dropped our morale because we went through all the work to get it in
quickly only to find that it would take another three weeks for any results.
We then met with Dr. Ankobea to tell him the bad news and
give him a copy of the IRB and a MTU hat. He asked us to write a letter to the
dean of medical studies at KNUST for the IBV team. He said this would hopefully
allow the IBV team to start there tests quicker. He also informed us that he
would try to push the committee along to assist in the process as well. Then we
were done at the hospital for the day and went and hailed a cab to go back to
the University.
