Lake Volta Boat Trip (the real adventure)

So, I have made it safely out of the Volta and off the boat with only minor injury(to the boat, but I'll get to that). After a short planning meeting, I left to embark on a true Peace Corps adventure with a few other volunteers. I set out for the Northern Volta to travel by boat to remote and isolated villages to teach HIV/AIDS awareness and offer free testing. The District which the villages were in had a health boat used for such excursions as this as well as other health outreach services. We hired a boat driver and navigator to get us to the communities and the district HIV coordinator to conduct the counseling and testing. He would only "recommend" coming to the Hospital to those testing positive to confirm the positive test. I don't know how I feel about that, but it is an all together different story. In all we were 5 P.C. volunteers (Caitlin, Adam, Andy, Maria and me); and 4 Ghanaians (boat driver, navigator, HIV coordinator and translator). Our Program would kick off with me explaining what HIV/AIDS is, how they are different and some basics about the immune system. [One quick side note, at most villages our translator needed a translator as our program needed to be in 4 languages to reach everyone.] Next, Maria would explain how the the virus attacks the body by playing a game called lions and elephants. It is played as follows: 1 baby elephant (human body); 5 adult elephants (the immune system); 1 lion (diseases); 1 hunter (HIV). The Adult elephants would surround the baby elephant and the lion would begin to try to "chop" (a.k.a. eat) the baby elephant. Then the hunter would kill off the adult elephants until there were none left and the lion could easily get to the baby. Then Adam and Andy talked about the means of transmission and played a game showing cards with activities such as eating with an AIDS patient or having sex with out a condom. The cards then had to be categorized as "high risk", "low risk" or "no risk". Next, Caitlin would talk about prevention methods. In Ghana they like to use the "ABC's". "A" for abstinence - "B" for be faithful - "C" for condom use. She then played a game called "narrow bridges"where volunteers would have to try to cross a wooden plank and avoid falling and being eaten by crocodiles (diseases like HIV). Then a second bridge is brought out representing the use of condoms to support us as we cross the bridge of life. At the end of the program Andy gave a condom demonstration using a wooden penis, which received much laughter from the crowd. Throughout the program our HIV coordinator was offering the testing and we had at least 1 person test positive in each village. We arrived at a village one evening and greeted the chief to tell him about our program. The next day we found out something very interesting. It turns out that this community had two chiefs and two tribes who were quarreling over the fate of a thief. One chief wanted him killed and the other did not. This proved difficult to gather the entire village to hear our program. After our 7th or 8th village we were headed for the day's next village and while in the middle of Lake Volta we hit a partially submerged tree. After we hit no one seemed to do anything. I could see we were taking on water and began to bail using a nearby bucket. This clued in the rest of the crew that there was a possibility of sinking and we began heading for shore and the others began to bail as well. Once on shore we assesed the damage and saw an extremely large gash in the boat. It was clear that we were not going anywhere on that boat. After finally finding an alternative boat we left for home 3 hrs away. It was actually a beautiful night and we got to see an amazing sunset over the lake and watch a storm roll across the lake and eventually drench us on the 2 mile hike back to Caitlin's house. Andy, Maria and I traveled a couple of days later up through the Volta Region to get to Tamale. In Tamale we got some much needed rest and I got sick again, threw up every hour for 12 hrs and spent the night in the hospital on a IV. What a Trip. Some of the pictures should help explain how things went.

-Cam

Also check out our friends blogs to hear their side of the story and see pictures:
http://adammartyn.blogspot.com/
http://marlakarla.blogspot.com/