Today we visited the village Buduburam in central Ghana. It is always so interesting and exciting for me to discover these villages. The driver seems to suddenly make a sharp turn off the road of a busy street and slowly winds us through small shacks until the landscape gradually becomes less populated with fewer vendors and large buildings; ultimately leading us down a dirt road —riddled with potholes— and eventually we arrive at the smaller villages.
This time I met three boys:
Ericksen, age 14
Faith, age 13 and
Winnei or “Shamuel” (was his school name), age 8
They spoke nearly perfect English and were in school learning many subjects that are common in the U.S. When I asked them what they do during the day, Faith replied, “We read our books and sometimes when we are finished, grandma comes out and says we can play.” Eriksen added, “We have a computer in our home. My father bought it for us if we wanted to do our homework.”
I asked the trio what they wanted to be when they were older and they all immediately straightened and patiently waited their turn to share their aspirations.
Winnei enthusiastically exclaimed: “I want to be an engineer!” He continued, “I want to build… a car” and his brother excitedly added, “and ships!”
Faith explained that he wanted to become a pilot and Eriksen told me that he "wanted to be a pilot for aircraft carriers as a soldier." (Similar to a U.S. Air Force pilot).
As I visited these boys during my breaks from helping patients, we talked more and more. Faith asked me when I was going to return to the village, and asked me if “when I returned I could bring a notebook for him so he could bring it to school.” I walked over to my backpack, ripped my journal pages our of my journal and handed it to him. He looked me in the eyes and in a gently and polite voice, said “Thank you.”
(We also had lots of fun pushing each other around in their wheelbarrow!)
As I was helping patients with vision testing, I noticed a young boy, Destiny. He was almost completely blind in one eye, had cognitive disabilities and we were having struggles helping him indicate which ways the E’s were facing on the chart. I decided to implement a trial of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) therapy, commonly used for those with special needs, to see if he could complete the task. I found a positive reinforcer and offered the after every correct response, he was praised and allowed a toy frog to play with. We then pointed to different E’s on the chart so that he couldn’t memorize the patterns and tried the trial about 10 times. It ended up taking about 10 minutes to test his functional eye, but I believe we got a more accurate reading than we had previously. With creative thinking and teamwork, we were able to determine that he was able to see much farther than we initially thought and that was such a powerful experience.
Later, as they were leaving, his father looked me in the eyes and thanked me. I felt so much peace from this interaction. I hope I can spend the rest of my life doing work like this.
