Rainstorms are Awesome

On Saturday, we held another clinic. This time it was at a local medical center in Larabunga. Of course, there were hundreds of people wanting us to check their vitals; age, sex, HR, BP, RR, SPO2, and temp. If there are any abnormalities, we suggest to the patient to see their physician. Similar to the US, hypertension is a huge problem here in Ghana. To entertain the kids, we painted their fingernails, handed out toothbrushes and toothpaste, and played all sorts of fun games.

We were invited to attend a tribal dance circle for the evening, which lasted about an hour, as soon as we arrived, nearly all the parents and children from the village surrounded our bus, wanting to hold our hands and walk us to the fire, which was in a courtyard of several homes. It's very flattering that we have so many people wanting to be our best friend, but it gets really dangerous. People are fighting over us and what we have brought as gifts, falling over, getting hit with sticks. We handed out glow sticks to those performing.

They had us join their dance circle, which was way fun. However, the heat and humidity already made it pretty unbearable, but then we were surrounding a fire and dancing. The majority of us wore jeans and a sweatshirt because of the bugs. Holy cow was it hot! We sweat buckets!

When it came time to leave, we decided to hand out gifts from the bus. However, due to the high number of kids, we did not have enough gifts for everybody. Our bus was surrounded by hundreds or people, banging on windows and yelling. Of course it's not fair that some get gifts while others do not. But we can only bring up to 50 pounds per suitcase!

Lightning could be seen in the distance, which was awesome. As soon as we got back to the hotel, it started raining buckets. We all decided to sit at the rainforest lookout. The lightning was purple in color and lit up the rainforest for each strike. The thunder was super loud. We played in the rain, talked about life, and enjoyed each others company. So far, this lightning storm was the highlight of my trip. It was a blast!