Kwei Quartey's Blog, page 20

LFG – wrap-up of the week, Part 1

Monday April 12: Went to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) to visit a friend and ex-classmate who is now the medical director of the hospital.

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I needed to tour the Pediatric Division to see how it's been coming along. Hint: DI Dawson's boy Hosiah has congenital heart disease and as it gets more serious, admissions to the children's hospital may become more common. Unfortunately, even though my friend the medical director had tasked someone to see that I got my tour, the attempt was thwarted...

LFG – the real Dr. Biney

Readers of WIFE OF THE GODS may remember a character Dr. Biney, who is always on hand to do Darko Dawson's autopsy cases. The character is loosely based on a doctor here in Ghana called John Nkrumah Mills. Dr. Mills, a general surgeon by training, has been director of the Volta River Authority Hospital (VRAH) for two decades, but he has been engaged in much more than that, including multiple humanitarian medical missions into the hinterland, visiting surgeon at multiple hospitals in Ghana...

LFG – hangin' out with the street kids

Friday April 9, I went out with two of CAS's field workers, Michael and Theodora, to make contact with street children. This was a particularly exciting prospect for me. After all, they are the central subject in the title of the second Darko novel, CHILDREN OF THE STREET. Lots of more "politically correct" terms are in use now as an alternative to "street kids," such as "out-of-school youth" or "urban poor youth," but "street children/kids" remains for me a vivid and descriptive term that I ...

LFG – Quartey meets Darko Dawson

I met a real live Darko Dawson yesterday. Hanson Gove is one of ten or so homicide detectives in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), which is a branch of the Ghana Police Service (GPS).

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He's a charismatic, thoughtful and hip guy who was wearing a Western style jacket and crocodile boots when I met him. Detectives in CID are the brightest of the police, having scored very high on various police entry exams. His desk was piled with folders and documents, the way all homicide detective ...

LFG – Street Academies & Refuges

DANIDA, the Danish International Development Agency, supports an education program called Street Academy (SA) in Accra, providing didactic teaching in math, English, social studies, and crafts training for urban poor children from the Jamestown area of Accra. If the program meets certain set goals, DANIDA may continue support beyond 2012.

The urban poor children may come to SA with no education whatsoever. The best of them do well enough to go on to public primary school and then junior...

LETTER FROM GHANA (LFG) – now for some smiles

After all the grimness of the previous posts, I thought it was time for something of a lighter flavor. Note that you can click on any of the pics to get a magnified view. The best thing about digital cameras is the ability to show people the picture you just took. Everyone crowds around to examine the result and look for themselves and others in the photograph. You always make friends that way. However, as a general rule, Ghanaians do not like being photographed by visitors to Ghana without a...

The Road to Somanya: update

I was told this evening that the Tema General Hospital ER (similar to large urban general hospitals all over the US) is equipped to handle trauma cases such as these, so let us hope and pray that some of the accident victims, if not all, survive. Depressingly, I was also told by two independent sources speaking from experience that an uncaring attitude is pervasive among overworked, underpaid doctors in public hospitals. Again it was the "you no money, I no care" story. Not that Ghana would b...

LETTER FROM GHANA – The Road to Somanya (with a warning)

WARNING: THIS BLOG IS OF A SENSITIVE NATURE AND INCLUDES THE DESCRIPTION OF A SERIOUS VEHICLE CRASH WITH ASSOCIATED INJURIES AND FATALITIES. IF YOU FEEL YOU WILL BE ADVERSELY AFFECTED BY THE ACCOUNT OR YOU ARE SQUEAMISH ABOUT SUCH MATTERS, I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOUR CONTINUING TO READ THE BLOG. I WAS NOT INVOLVED IN THE COLLISION, BUT I DID ADMINISTER ASSISTANCE TO THE INJURED.

I got in touch with some old family friends, Grace and Linus, who we knew in Ghana years ago when we lived here, and...

LETTER FROM GHANA – meeting street children

Early this week I had the pleasure of meeting Joana Ofori, who runs the Street Academy for urban poor children from a district of Accra called Jamestown. These kids generally have a place to stay, even though they spend part of the day involved with trade on the streets. This is in contrast to children who do not have a home to go to except the open street. The Street Academy is supported primarily by a grant from the Danish, and it concentrates on teaching children math, English, their...

Roof over my head

Having shown you where some people live, a quick snapshot of where I am. My lodgings are off a street called Spintex Road in an area that typifies the urban sprawl of Accra and to some extent, lack of urban planning. Buildings go up at a breathtaking rate, sometimes without accompanying road infrastructure. So although the place I'm staying at is quite reasonable (with a few reservations), the getting there in a car is like riding a bucking bronco.

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Grounds kept scrupulously clean by the...