Lake Volta Boat Trip

I will be leaving for an incredible adventure on the 30th of September. I am going to the Northern Volta to teach HIV/AIDS to 10 villages along the shores of Lake Volta. We are going to borrow a district health boat to travel to villages on both sides of the lake spending a day or so camped at each one. I am very excited to camp and excited to see how much the people know about HIV/AIDS and if they will be open to what we have to say. I will post pictures and let you all know how it went when I return. Site is going well and I am staying busy. We had our first guinea worm case since March and the first of the new transmission season. We will be picking up our surveillance, performing case searches and posting more dam guards starting this month. I hope the case is the last of the year and I still think this next season will be better than the last. The Polyclinic is coming along just fine. There are five of these Polyclinics being built by this company and they use almost the same crew for each. Our project has been coming so fast that we sent the rest of our crew to the other sites for last and this week so the others could catch up. Our big hang up now is our septic tank. Upon digging for the tank we found very large slabs of rock. Our current solution is to build a large fire in the pit to weaken the rock so it can be broken by hand tools. It seems to be working although rather slowly. It still amazes me what we do at one end of the site by hand while at the other we construct a "trailer" (see "cabin in the woods photo") with A/C, flush toilet, heated shower, and a refrigerator all with power tools. This is Ghana in a nutshell-- Western means with African methods.