Hello!
I am currently en route to Ghana. The very beginning of en route--I'm sitting in the Salt Lake Airport, waiting for them to call for boarding. I have three flights today--LA to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake to Amsterdam (where we'll technically arrive at 9 AM tomorrow morning) and Amsterdam to Accra, Ghana. And then we'll drive to Kumasi, the city where we'll be doing research.
There's a bunch of different groups in the program--I'm with the craniofacial team, studying cleft palate treatment. We're interviewing parents and caregivers of children with cleft palates and other facial anomalies, asking them about their barriers to finding treatment. Then hopefully we'll be able to interpret the results and make treatment more accessible! Other teams include dermatology, antibiotic resistance, and maternal nutrition.
I'm very excited. A little bit terrified, but it's ok. It's just a heightened version of how I tend to be all the time. And exhausted, because I had to leave my house at 4:30 this morning to make it to the airport in LA. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep on the plane.
I'm armed with the necessities--multiple copies of my boarding passes, a passport with the Ghana visa that I had to apply for back in April, my "International Certificate of Vaccine Prophylaxis" (which you get when you get vaccinated for yellow fever. So if any of you had plans to infect me with yellow fever, you won't be able to. However, I think it's quite unlikely that any of you are bioterrorists, so I'm safe).
I've met some interesting people so far, wandering around the airport for the past few hours--a former lobbyist going back to school to be a hospital Child Life Specialist, a girl my age going to visit a foreign exchange student in Germany, a family going on a family history trip (only in Utah), and a young mother from Baghdad wearing a shirt with text entirely in German (I asked her what it said, and she had no idea). Her daughter was lovely too--she was around four, and told me all about why Belle was her favorite Disney Princess.
Anyway, I'm about to board my plane. I promise this will get more exciting when I actually do something besides sit in an airport. As for now, I'm off to read articles from the PanAfrican Medical Journal about cleft palates. I'll write again soon!
I am currently en route to Ghana. The very beginning of en route--I'm sitting in the Salt Lake Airport, waiting for them to call for boarding. I have three flights today--LA to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake to Amsterdam (where we'll technically arrive at 9 AM tomorrow morning) and Amsterdam to Accra, Ghana. And then we'll drive to Kumasi, the city where we'll be doing research.
There's a bunch of different groups in the program--I'm with the craniofacial team, studying cleft palate treatment. We're interviewing parents and caregivers of children with cleft palates and other facial anomalies, asking them about their barriers to finding treatment. Then hopefully we'll be able to interpret the results and make treatment more accessible! Other teams include dermatology, antibiotic resistance, and maternal nutrition.
I'm very excited. A little bit terrified, but it's ok. It's just a heightened version of how I tend to be all the time. And exhausted, because I had to leave my house at 4:30 this morning to make it to the airport in LA. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep on the plane.
I'm armed with the necessities--multiple copies of my boarding passes, a passport with the Ghana visa that I had to apply for back in April, my "International Certificate of Vaccine Prophylaxis" (which you get when you get vaccinated for yellow fever. So if any of you had plans to infect me with yellow fever, you won't be able to. However, I think it's quite unlikely that any of you are bioterrorists, so I'm safe).
I've met some interesting people so far, wandering around the airport for the past few hours--a former lobbyist going back to school to be a hospital Child Life Specialist, a girl my age going to visit a foreign exchange student in Germany, a family going on a family history trip (only in Utah), and a young mother from Baghdad wearing a shirt with text entirely in German (I asked her what it said, and she had no idea). Her daughter was lovely too--she was around four, and told me all about why Belle was her favorite Disney Princess.
Anyway, I'm about to board my plane. I promise this will get more exciting when I actually do something besides sit in an airport. As for now, I'm off to read articles from the PanAfrican Medical Journal about cleft palates. I'll write again soon!
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