Cecile Dinh INMED Blog

First Impressions

I’ve made it to Ghana. I haven’t traveled this far since the COVID pandemic started, and while international travel still feels the same, it is noticeable that things take longer than it used to as various COVID regulations are in place depending on where one is traveling to. This is good for practicing my patience as I make my way back to the African continent, this time to West Africa, where things run at a much slower pace than in the United States.

To give a little more background about myself: prior to medical school and residency, I worked in the public health sphere with different African cultures. I taught HIV education to rural villages around Arusha, Tanzania, during the summer after my freshman year of college. I worked with a Somali refugee family who was settled in Tucson, AZ while in college at the University of Arizona. During public health graduate school, I did research with a group out of Emory University who conducted HIV studies in Rwanda and Zambia. After getting my MPH degree, I then lived in Lusaka, Zambia for two wonderful and glorious years while working for the same group. I left Zambia in 2013 to pursue medical school and residency, which now brings me to Ghana for a short trip to explore how I can effectively combine both my public health and family medicine training.

A couple similarities I have noted so far upon arrival and taking a walk down the street from the guest house I am staying at in Accra:

  1. The scent. It sounds strange, but the smell of burning trash is nolstagic for me. It reminds me of my first trip abroad to Arusha when I was young and idealistic. I distinctly remember smelling it again when I stepped off the plane in Ethiopia on a layover in 2011, and feeling excited to be returning to live in Zambia for a couple of years. Today, I smelled it again on my walk, and it was an acknowledgement for me of how far I’ve come in my career.
  2. The friendliness. I love being able to walk down the street and be able to greet everyone I pass with a simple hello and a smile, and have that greeting be returned in kind.

A couple of observations from today:

  1. Kotoko International Airport has jetways. Many of the other African countries I’ve flown into in the past, with possibly the exception of South Africa, did not have jetways, rather had outdoor stairs that you walked down to get to your gate.
  2. I’ve forgotten how to act like a local to get a better price. I accepted the services of the first taxi driver who approached me outside the airport terminal today. I bargained for a better price than what he initially offered, but still ended up paying about 4x what it should have cost, according to the guest house host.

I am excited to be in Ghana. My goals are to learn as much as I can about tropical diseases and to participate in as much obstetric care and newborn delivery as possible while I am here. A month is far too short for an experience like this, but hopefully, there will be many many more months to come after I finish residency and establish my own practice. Tomorrow, I am off to Kumasi and the Methodist Hospital in Ankaase!

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