The C Ward

I know it has been March since my last post and I am very sorry for that! Kpando is my home now and all of the things which were new to me and seemed to be strange at first are now totally normal parts of my days! I have adjusted to life here and I feel as if nothing I write about will be that interesting!

I just returned from Ho, which is the regional capital of the Volta Region. It is about an hour and a half drive from Kpando. In Ho there is a “nice” private hospital called Trifaga, which has a very good ART (anti-retroviral treatment) department. One of the children at the HardtHaven, I will call her T, is VERY sick and another volunteer and I had to spend the past 3 nights in the hospital with her!

In the developed world, I love children’s hospitals because they are so bright and cheery and the sick children get so much attention. At children’s hospitals in America they have people who are literally toy specialists. The main objective is to make children smile while they have to be brave and fight an illness, get surgery, undergo chemo-therapy etc.

The children’s wards in African hospitals are nothing like their cheery counterparts in America or Europe. They are downright depressing, save the sparse paintings of animals that decorate the walls. One boy next to us was in the throws of cerebral malaria…when the malaria parasites reach the brain stem. He was seizing and foaming at the mouth. And all that could be done for him was an injection every 4 hours and an I.V. Another child had a burn all over her body, with only a bandage covering it. Since the resources at hospitals here are so limited they can only give minimum care to the sick children.

In fact, the doctor who was looking after one of HardtHaven’s children does not work in the children’s ward, let alone enter the children’s ward. He was treating T as a favor for Edem and he said he absolutely hates coming to the children’s ward because there is usually only sad news coming from it.

Another frightening tid bit about the children’s wards in Ghana is that oxygen is seen as too valuable to give to young children. I don’t mind being in a hospital in America, it brings me a since of security because I know that there are great doctors and people are getting better inside the walls. In Africa, or at least in this particular part of Ghana, I HATE being in hospitals because a hospital is where people go to die. I can’t count the number of times I have seen mothers, brothers, daughters wailing on the grounds of the hospital because they have just lost a loved one. The statistics are alarming. Something like 50% of people who go in for surgery do not make it through.

The one thing I do like about the children’s ward in African hospitals is that during visiting hours family members, priests or ordinary people come in and the ward is filled with song and prayers. One woman who came into the hospital while T was there did not know anyone who was sick, but she just wanted to come in and pray over all of the sick children.

T is doing a little bit better but has a long way to go. Please keep her in your prayers!