Day two
Today was day two of the four day measles vaccination campaign in Ghana. Ghana Health Services and UNICEF (and WHO, et al) are aiming to inoculate 4.3 million children, which means that by the time I am writing this we have probably already passed the 2 million mark.
In Mfantseman district, the more rural area we have been profiling in the film (contrasted against Cape Coast), they had aimed to reach 6600 children. On the first day they vaccinated 2700, which means they have three days to finish the remaining 3900 or so.
Today we spent the day first at the clinic in the district that Elizabeth (the community health worker and midwife) works at, then riding in a truck with Elizabeth’s nurse co-worker as we dropped off vaccines and also moved vaccinators around. In Mfantsiman a lot of the district is small villages (there are 17 villages in their catchment area), so vaccinators would spend have the day in one, catch a ride with us, and then get dropped in another.
Akatekyiwa (I have learned this new spelling, which includes an ‘i’) is in the Mfantseman district, which is why we got partnered up with Elizabeth (who is a total character, on top of being incredibly compassionate) in the first place. So today when the truck made its way through Akatekyiwa to drop a vaccinator nurse, we also got dropped with her, to film the process in the village. 
We trailed Kennedy (a young man who had previously been our interpreter when we met the chief) and his Uncle (who is the GHS community health volunteer) around the village as they inspected kids’ pinkies (the pinkie is dyed blue with ink when they are vaccinated) and rounded up any who had not yet been vaccinated.
We filmed the vaccination of the kids, and had 45 minutes or so to talk with Kennedy, his uncle, and several of the parents in the village. Kennedy and his uncle both speak quite good English, so this gave us a chance to interact in a new way with everyday Ghanaians (who otherwise don’t speak English all that well). We talked about tattoos and piercings (the kids noticed Miranda’s tongue ring), about family (someone inquired when Miranda and I would be having kids) and why someone might choose to have a small family, measles, international relations (Kennedy wanted to know why the US would allow harmful products to come to Ghana and I used the chance to highlight e-waste when trying to answer his question in the least complicated but also most honest way possible), and several other things. Miranda and I got some Fante lessons, and we interviewed some kids as to whether they knew why their younger siblings were getting jabbed.
Eventually the GHS truck appeared again and we caught a ride back to the Baobab Clinic in Biriwa (where Elizabeth works). We hugged Elizabeth hello and she brought us some kenkey to try. This was my first Ghanaian food, other than redred. Kenkey is made from corn, basically it is a play-dough sort of corn mash, wrapped in plantaine leaves, and you dip it into a spicy tomato sauce. I wasn’t in love with it (again, more white carbs, the staple of the Ghanaian diet) but it was tolerable and vegetarian. In a show of reciprocity, I gave Elizabeth a Clif Bar (chocolate and peanut butter) to eat, and she proclaimed it was “quite palatable.” Over the next half hour every time we would see her she would remark how “palatable” it was. So either she was being kind and totally hated it, or she really liked it. She shared some with a woman in the waiting area of the clinic, who initially I think ate it out of social obligation but I think found it ‘palatable’ as well (they have imported chocolate-covered biscuits and such here, as well as peanuts — they call them groundnuts — so I figured it was a fairly safe bet as far as flavors go. We don’t have any of the really cool flavors, like Pumpkin Spice with us, or I’d bring her one tomorrow.).
We said our goodbyes and caught a trotro back to Cape. We stopped at Honsal Pharmacy to get some water, since the sachets sold elsewhere can have parasites (Honsal treats theirs with UV, and the pharmacist is quite nice and knowledgable). When we went into Honsal there just happened to be another American in there, although she was quite tan. She is an anthropologist professor at UCC who has been here for a few decades, and we four had a nice conversation about our reasons for being here. Miranda and I explained our measles connection and it turns out the Pharmacist’s brother had died of measles when she was a child. Obviously that was sad to hear, but also heartening to know that we have the power to make that kind of story a thing of the past.
I carried the anthropologist’s 80lbs of sachet water to her car and she offered us a ride to our house, which was quite nice (we had 40lbs of water, so I was happy to not walk).
We got home just in time to meet a girl, Lydia, who lives in our neighborhood who told us she wanted to be interviewed for our film. Actually she told me she wanted to be “among what [Miranda and I] are doing,” which was a cute way of putting it. We live in a fairly nice house as far as this neighborhood goes — it has electricity and plumbing and is made of concrete. Many of the other houses are board shacks with tin roofs, no plumbing, and maybe electricity. She lives in a house that pretty well fits that description, so we thought it would be interesting to profile her and see a bit of what a day in her life was like.
Unfortunately after 30 minutes she didn’t show. We made our way to her house and a woman in that general area told us she was out fetching water (she will walk back with a 20-30lb pail of water on her head). I am unsure how far she has to go to fetch water, but it is probably not an amazingly short trip to the nearest borehole that she can access. So maybe later tonight we will try to find her (it is amazingly hard to shoot in the dark here though, since we have no light kit), or possibly tomorrow.
On our walk home through the neighborhood we chatted with various families and inspected several kids’ pinkies; all of them were dyed blue … such a heartwarming feeling. We also talked with a boy who was around 10 and knew not only of the inoculation campaign but even the age range it covered. He said his younger sister (but he meant older, heh) is a doctor for GHS.
So now I’m knee deep in backing up our footage from the day. I can’t connect to the Internet for some unknown reason, but eventually that will change and I’ll post this update, and then maybe we’ll try to meet up with Dom for a drink tonight (our cellphone service has also been intermittently nonfunctional so we have been unable to call Dom the last few days).
