Happy Late Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We had an African Thanksgiving, which included a fried turkey that was killed and prepared personally by a couple of people in the group. We also had sweet potatoes with marshmallow peeps that were sent in someone's package from Halloween, and we had our own version of plantain chips and salsa. The feast was great, filled with dancing and no learning, and everyone was beyond stuffed!

I apologize for not updating sooner, but we've been doing so much, so I'll try not to leave anything out! So we are still in the training phase, where we are learning our target languages and also a lot of cross cultural lessons. We just got back this week from site visit, where we all visited our respected sites that we'll be at for two years after we're finished with training. The trip was very eye opening and I was nervous to go because I had to go in with the mentality that this place was going to be my home for the next two years. The trip started out with a 13 hour bus ride to the Upper West, where I sat in a seat that had absolutely no leg room, so my friend Michael and I took turns sprawling our legs out into the aisle. I got to visit the hospitals that I would be working at and met some of the District Health Management Team that I'll be working with. I also got to meet some of the people in the NGOs that I'll be working with, such as JICA and Unicef. All in all, I'm pretty excited about my site and I'm especially excited about the projects that I'll be involved with. My primary project will be working with Adolescent Health and trying to raise awareness in malnutrition. My other project is to be working with the District Health Management Team and trying to get them going. My town has recently became the District Capital, so all the other towns its foreseeing has clinics that need a lot of assistance, and that's where I come in. I have some secondary projects too, which involved HIV/AIDS awareness and also School Health Lessons. My town is pretty rural, a population of under 2000, and majority Muslim.

I forgot to mention about the field trip we had a month back. The three sectors: Small Enterprise Development (SED), Environment, and Health/ Water Sanitation (that's me) went to various regions to visit active volunteers in our respected sectors to see the work that they are partaking in. My group went up to the Northern Region, where it is the least developed, which means the roads are unpaved. So 16 of us sat in a van (which would never in a million yrs meet Safety Standards in America) for 15 hours trying to get to our destination, and when we finally got there, we were all covered in dust from head to toe, which made us look like oompa loompas. To create a lighter moment in a tense situation, we started doing the oompa loompa dance and took crazy pictures, that I will NOT be posting for everyone to see. But just imagine me in my previously white Mariners shirt stained brown and a spray tan gone wrong. (I'm pretty upset about my Mariners shirt because it's beyond ruined!) Besides the travel part, the experience was amazing. We got to follow volunteers that have primary projects involving Guinea Worm Surveillance and Eradication. Guinea Worm is pretty endemic in the Northern Region, and there are strong efforts to eradicate it, and organizations such as the Carter Center (founded by Jimmy Carter) are working hard to rid of it, by providing free nets to every household and education about it. The nets are highly effective and so easy to use, they filter out the cyclops that harbor the guinea worm, it's basically a piece of cloth with a netting in the middle, that goes over the water barrels. So after people fetch water from the dams, they put the water through the net and it catches all the cyclops and is 100% effective when used. We got to partake in the surveillance action, in which we went to each household and checked their nets to make sure they were still viable and if they weren't, they are given a brand new one. The efforts are really paying off because a couple of years ago they reported about 1000 cases of Guinea Worm, but this year there has been less than 500, which is great progress!

Ghana has their Presidential elections on December 7th, which is so exciting for us to be in another country that will hold a major election. There are great campaigns for a peaceful election, since there has been quite a few incidents of political violence, and because of this the Peace Corps is pulling all 150 volunteer all over Ghana 2 days before and after the elections together in a town called Bunso to make sure of our safety. The elections here are pretty heated and tight, there are 8 major candidates competing for the Presidency.

Well I hope everyone is well and I hope that many of you are not affected too much by the economic downfall that's taking place. Please take care!