Love in Abgloga

We are on way back from my second outreach. Today we were in a village called Abgloga in the Volta region. Mepe from yesterday was in the Volta region too. Dennis (one of the ophthalmic nurses we work with) said that we do a lot of our outreaches there because there is not a single ophthalmologist for a population of over 2 million people.

Today I worked at the visual acuity station. Testing people for the accuracy of their vision is actually really easy.

After work the women of the village cooked for us what they call akple and we call banku. In Ghana there are hundreds  of different dialects of tens of different languages. Nearly every village has their own dialect, making it very difficult for people to communicate. In Abgloga, they speak ewe. The food was delicious, and we ate it with our right hands which was a little awkward for the leftys in the group (only me..)

I got some really great footage of two girls playing slide (a hand slap game we all played when we were little). Then i got to play the game with one of girls. It's pretty amazing that a game that I learned growing up in a suburb of Arizona is also played in a remote village 

in the middle of Africa.

I loved all the children, but there were three that especially stood out. One little girl who could not have been more than nine held her baby sister on her back for nearly the entire day. Children here are given a lot of responsibility, but not a lot of respect.  As with most cultures outside of the US, respect comes with age and children are better seen and not heard.

The other two were a smiley pair of twin girls. Adorable.

It's difficult to get them to smile in pictures. They usually just stare, but modeling agencies should do their recruiting in Ghana if they are interested in tall, thin, beautiful women with high cheekbones and a fierce look.

As I was testing peoples visual acuity, a young man who seemed to be about 17 asked me for my email address. He wanted to know if I could get him a job in America.  A lot of the people see us as their way out, their ticket to a new life. Sometimes we get marriage proposals.

When we got back to the Telecentre we went to Highway View for a Star.

Another perfect day in Ghana.