Day four
Today was the fourth and final day of the Ghana measles campaign. We left the house and noticed right away the sky was a semi-ominous gray. I use the prefix semi because in Ghana they have some serious rain storms, and although it didn’t look like a storm was on its way, it did look like we might get wet.
Sure enough, in the taxi on the way to Biriwa it began to rain, and by the time we got to the clinic we found ourselves dashing for cover to avoid our equipment getting soaked. It was 7:40am, and we set upon some wood benches inside the open air clinic.
An hour passed. The rain abated, then resumed. A woman came in with her child to be vaccinated.
We had wondered how many people we would see at the clinic today, whether the vast majority had already vaccinated their kids — and with the rain we had our answer: not many.
I shot some time lapses of the empty clinic, and waited for more kids to arrive. There were a few patients here for maternity services and they waited patiently for their appointments. My buddy the rooster made another appearance as well.
A group of mobile vaccinators left for the field, but their truck was full so we couldn’t join. The word came down that a second truck was coming, but was stuck in a petrol line. So we waited another hour. In Ghana they use the phrase “I’m coming,” to mean many things, it is essentially a nebulous way to inform someone that you will eventually return, finish with your current task, or otherwise attend to them. So in that sense, the truck was “coming.”
Eventually the truck arrived and we squeezed into it. We had extra vaccinators we were going to drop at some fixed vaccination sites, so Miranda and I had to share the front bucket seat (plus squeeze our camera gear onto our collective lap).
The health volunteer in Akatekyiwa had called one of the members of the mobile vaccination team to tell them that he’d found a couple of kids in Akatekyiwa that still needed to be jabbed, so that’s where we headed.
We arrived in Akatekyiwa to find a funeral in full swing. Ghanaian funerals are intense, that is basically all I’ll say. The village was teaming with people (many from surrounding villages, I am sure) dressed in black, congregating in the open square while a preacher shouted in Fante. We found the volunteer and he started rounding up the eligible kids. (Pictured at right: measles campaign poster in Akatekyiwa and two women in mourning.)
Our vaccination team immunized four kids, gave them vitamin A, dyed their left pinky nails purple, and we moved to another part of the village. Here there were two kids to jab, and almost right away Miranda realized one of the parents was deaf, so we (well, she, since I was holding a camera) had a brief chat in ASL with her. I truly enjoy stumbling onto ASL practitioners in Ghana, it’s been one of the greatest surprises of the trip.
The rest of the day was basically spent as in Akatekyiwa — we drove around to the various villages in Biriwa’s catchment area and mopped up the few kids who had as yet escaped the needle. Some took the jab very well, with no fuss or issue, and others freaked out entirely.
I’ve yet to find a clear pattern as to predicting the mannerism of a given child during vaccination, and I always feel a little bad if they are totally freaking out. Overall though we mostly see 10-15 seconds of soft crying followed by a few sniffles. The kid in the photo at left didn’t even flinch, he just stared intently at the needle as it went in.
By the last village Miranda and I were beat; it’s tough work shooting this stuff in the sweltering West African heat with a heavy camera on my shoulder and an even heavier backpack on my back much of the time. Miranda took this final photo in the last village we vaccinated, as the kids were showing me their freshly dyed pinkies. The children began spontaneously singing “Obruni gayelsa,” over and over — which translates roughly to “white person, our fingers.” Hah.
We vaccinated about sixty kids today, which is probably the lowest number I’ve witnessed of any day of the campaign so far, but we had to work to get these kids. A village with a single kid might be a 5km drive up a rutted dirt road … and in fact in one village we showed up and the single unvaccinated kid had gone with her mother to a different village for a funeral (we saw multiple funerals today) and we had to then go there to find her. So the day was replete with hard work, but the campaign ended just as I’d wanted it to — the kids we worked with in Seattle raised enough money to symbolically vaccinate two large villages, we adopted Biriwa’s surrounding villages for our film, and we spent the day with GHS health workers making sure no child in our new home was left unprotected against measles.
We did some interviews at the clinic after all the vaccinating was over and then had a late lunch of kenkey and eggs (predictably Auntie Elizabeth wouldn’t take no for an answer).
Unfortunately we’d begun to run low on Ghanaian funds and needed to go to the foreign currency exchange in Cape Coast, which is only a Cedi ($.70) trotro ride away, but the only Ghanaian bill we had was a 20-Cedi note (something the trotro operator is unlikely to make change for). Miranda scrounged up some coins from the depths of her purse and was only 30 pesewas ($.20) short.
She asked Elizabeth if we could borrow the 30 pesewas and Elizabeth shoved a 2-Cedi note into her hand and told her to keep it. After Miranda protested that she couldn’t take her two Cedis, Elizabeth took the note back and then shoved a five-Cedi note into Miranda’s hand, proclaiming, “now you get five!”
Miranda would later point out to me that although this seemed absurd to us, it was a rather logical ‘punishment’ for Miranda’s recalcitrance about taking the two Cedis — the last thing Miranda wanted (and thus a fitting punishment) was to take even more than two Cedis. And this is how we ended up with four Cedis after our trotro ride home.
I really don’t know what to do about Elizabeth: she has been the kindest most giving person in a string of kind and giving persons, and in just a week’s time I have grown immensely fond of this woman; a compassionate grandmotherly type who works seven days a week and gives more than it would seem possible. I don’t know what it is that we can bring her, what we can do for her, to express our thanks and admiration.
