A Day in the Life

This post has videos and photos from three different days. I hope that its eye opening to what a typical day in the life for a Global impact fellow for Unite for sight is like. If you are having questions about whether you think you can do this or if you want to be a volunteer and want a perspective, I hope that this helps.

Breakfast

Most mornings you wake up around 6:30 – 7am. When I was in Tamale, the call to pray woke me up around 4:30 and roosters woke me up when the sun came up. One of the hard things for me is that most Ghanaians have heavy breakfast, usually the same food that you will have for lunch or dinner. So sometime you have jollof rice and egg for breakfast with a little fish on the side, other times you have waakye a beans and rice dish, my favorite breakfast is bread and egg.

Usually you grab breakfast at the Telecentre if you’re in Accra. If you’re on outreach you will grab breakfast at the nearest town on the side of the road or when the team wants to grab breakfast.

Sometimes the unexpected happens, the next set of videos are from a day where we as a team had to adapt to an unexpected change to the plan for the day:

Dr. Seth Wanye's home

Headed for outreach

A little delay

An unexpected change

This is a perfect example of being fluid with the change of pace each day.

My favorite days however are the surgery days these videos are from a surgery day. I apologize I was pretty sick when I made these. I had that bad sore throat and wasn’t sleeping very well.

Waking up

Malarone

Arriving at the surgical suite

Cataract Surgery

Dinner

Finished for the day

The most typical day is a screening day. You leave to go to a regional outreach to distribute medicine.

Most of the time I left the Telcentre around 7:30-8am. So you can get a good perspective I’m going to switch to writing in first person….

I wake up, it’s pretty dark but the roosters are already up and that means I’m up. I head down the telecentre stairs to the small dining room to have breakfast. Its cocoa, a gravy like porridge that tastes a little like squash soup to me. I fill up a bowl add a lot of sugar and condensed milk. I savor it, cocoa is one of the few breakfasts that I really enjoy. The driver walks in and I finish quickly, grab my bag and walk out of the telcentre door, its already humid as usual. I take a seat in the cramped tro-tro, which is what Ghanaians call these vans,  and prepare for the long drive with my fellow volunteers. On the way there we pick up Dr. Kojo the optometrist for St. Thomas and Ms. Margaret the ophthalmic nurse who distributes medicine.

We arrive at the outreach after a 3 hour drive. We set up the visual acuity station, the dispensing table and the optometrists table for diagnosing patients. I help main the dispensing table. The church we are in has no air conditioning and the fans circulate the hot air and the smell of sweat. We hand out the prescriptions and decipher Dr. Kojo’s handwriting. It takes about 6 hrs to get through the 60 or so patients. As the day winds down, we get to the point I call the slow trickle where one or two people come in every 20 minutes keeping queue at about ten people for about an hour.

After we count the medicine and money we pack back in to the van and get jostled on the roads back to the telecentre. We get home around 6pm. When we get home we relax and chat with the rest of the group about their day. I head back up to my room and take a shower. I write my daily log and climb back under my covers to get much needed sleep and to prepare for the next day. When I close my eyes and finally drift off its around 10:30pm.