This is Ghana.

My internship is starting to get more and more interesting now that I feel like I'm getting to know the people better.

I'll start with a little intro to everyone. There's my supervisor, Naa, who I never really see because she's so busy that she rarely has time to eat. She's both the CEO of WAAF and the head doctor for the clinic. Then there's Jennifer, who is my other supervisor, and I work with her the most. She just moved back to Ghana from the States, where she went to grad school in Illinois. Her husband actually lives in Madison now, which is pretty cool that she has that connection to where I live. Jennifer's pretty much my favorite, so I hope she can come see me if she's ever visiting the US.

Then there's Eddie, who is super confusing, because he has an extra-british sounding accent, but has lived in the US for a really long time, and the other interns and myself can't figure out whether he's married to Naa or not, but no one wants to be the one to ask. Everything about him is a mystery.

Then there's the miscellaneous other staff, who get yelled at by Eddie every 10 minutes for not getting stuff done.

Eddie's interesting, though. He freaks out constantly, but at the same time he's a pretty nice guy, and very personable when he's in a good mood because he's obsessed with networking and stuff like that. So one minute he's storming into the office ranting about the people in the office next door because they apparently never get any work done (he always blames Ghanaian culture for that. He'll rant on and on about the lack of productivity, and then just angrily conclude, "well, this is Ghana…") and then he'll just apparently forget about it, sit down, and start chatting excitedly about the proposals we're doing to start up some corporate wellness programs around Accra. Today he was dealing with some major crisis in the office and yelling at the accountant really intensely for some mistake he made, and then just plopped down in a chair across from me and got excited about networking again. He definitely has some occasional mood swings, which sort of puts everyone on edge. It's not that he's mean or anything. He's just very, very intense about a lot of things.

Speaking of the "this is ghana" comment…it's been really interesting to be working with Ghanaian people like Eddie and Jennifer who have lived in the US for years and have returned to Ghana. They definitely have a lower tolerance for a lot of things that most Ghanaians just seem to quietly tolerate. For instance, Jennifer just moved back here from the US just a few months ago, and she talks about how hot it is more than anyone I've met here. Today she gave me a ride to the trotro stop because she didn't want me walking that far in the heat. It's only like a 10 minute walk, and I was perfectly fine walking since I'm just kind of used to it now, but she insisted. I really appreciated it though.  She also went on a rant one day about how much she hates all the potholes on the roads here, and that the thing she missed about the US the most was driving on roads without any potholes. She also really misses Red Lobster.

And as I mentioned how Eddie's pretty intense about things, he seems to have a severe lack of patience with Ghana as a whole, and is always comparing it to the US. Today he was talking about how he heard about a little girl who died of malaria because her doctor gave her the wrong medicine, and then that turned into a rant about the medical system here. Which this time, he ended his angry rant with "ugh, but this is Ghana, you can be perfectly fine and then just be dead the next minute."

Well, shit. Ghana may be a developing country, but it's definitely not that bleak.

I hope he doesn't make comments like that to all Ghanaians, because I'm sure he offends people a lot by saying stuff like that. He says ridiculous things like that all the time around the office. I mean, of course it's true that Ghana has a lot of problems. But it still has such a long way to go in the development process and he just has so little patience for it. Which I guess in the long run, maybe it'll be good for WAAF that he won't tolerate any of it, because he's been really pushing people to do certain things like improve the technology they have access to, which can help move the organization along much faster. But anyway, I guess I just find it interesting how differently they feel about Ghana after having lived in the US. I think they both still love living here though. Or at least Jennifer does. Eddie, I have no idea.

But I really like the people who work at WAAF. And I'm really learning a lot from them about non-profit work and healthcare advocacy and outreach. I can't tell you all how happy I am that I switched, because this is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to learn about with this whole experience.

While I'm on the topic of my internship though, if anyone reading this has any sort of organization or group that would maybe like to help me organize a fundraiser for WAAF, please let me know. It has come to my attention recently that the organization's budget is extremely tight and there's not much extra money to do a lot of the outreach things that they want to do. For instance, we just had a health fair this week that was supposed to be a big thing, like with lots of booths with information about preventative healthcare and free screenings for HIV, but because they didn't have enough money in the budget for promotion of the fair, very few people came and it was kind of a flop. One of my responsibilities has been researching funding opportunities like grants, but from what I can tell, there's really not much of that out there. So if anyone wants to help out in any way, send me an email and let me know! (hcgoodno@gmail.com)

On an unrelated note, I've been feeling so loved today. It's just been such a good day. As far as interactions with people on a day to day basis go, some days can be a little irritating, like if I get called an oburoni one too many times by perfect strangers, or if I'm in crowded areas where salespeople won't stop grabbing my arms or something like that. Other days just warm my heart, like today.

It all started early in the morning on my way to WAAF, when I stopped to buy my favorite dough balls for breakfast and the woman gave me two instead of one. Then, because I ate two I was feeling kind of chunky for a while, until Jennifer told me that I needed to eat more so I can gain weight and then I felt a little bit better. Like I said, she's my favorite. And then she gave me a ride to the trotro stop after work.

Then, I got home a few hours later and got a call from a customer service representative from the airtel phone company, because I apparently didn't fill out a form correctly for the SIM card for my internet modem. And the lady only took about a minute to get the information she needed from me, but we were on the phone for a good 5-7 minutes because she just kept chatting and asking me about what I'm doing in Ghana and what I'm studying and how school's going and other random stuff. She was super nice.

And then later I went to get dinner from my favorite crazy little lady that sits on the side of the road selling food and calls her little enterprise "tantalizing." Every dish she makes she describes as "tantalizing." And she has t-shirts with her own face printed on them. She does make really good food though, I get dinner from her a few times a week now. So I went to go buy dinner and she asked me if I was the girl she talked to whose mommy was coming to visit tonight. And I just said, "no, I wish! I miss my mommy." She just said "oh no, then I will be your mommy. Then any time you miss your mommy you just come to me, okay?" So I told her I'd call her Maame Louise. And then she threw in an extra bag of salad with my dinner. Win.

It was a pretty good day. Everyone I talked to just made me happy. Except maybe Eddie. But he was in crisis mode so whatever. You can't have it all.

Festering wound update: still kind of festering (?), but I think it might be on its way to healing...I hope. I don't know anything about burns or infections or what it's supposed to look like at this point in the healing process. I know this is a stupid thing to request, but if anyone is a doctor or a nurse or knows someone who is and can look at a picture and tell me whether or not I need a leg amputation, I will pay handsomely. Not really. But I'll take a picture and send it, because I really would like to know if I should go get more antibiotics from the doctor because I ran out yesterday and now I'm nervous about getting a fever again. I would ask the nurses who sometimes change my bandages, but I don't know if I really should trust their judgement sometimes because one of them told me it was fine when it was clearly at its worst and needed medical attention. That was when I had a fever.

Tali and I decided after this whole little ordeal that at some point in the near future we need to take some sort of first aid class or an EMT course or something so that this kind of thing never happens again. If I had known anything whatsoever about first aid, I probably wouldn't have to worry. But unfortunately all I know how to do is put on a bandaid.

I think I've rambled enough for one day. Here's another music video! It's another really popular one called "Lapaz Toyota." Lapaz is a place near Accra. I'm not sure what it has to do with toyotas. But here you go.