Barefoot Gait Training!

It was a rather uneventful day at the hospital. Ghanaians are still celebrating the holidays so I guess they stayed home. One of the patients who I was seeing in the ward, but now has returned home has gone from hardly being able to sit by herself to walking 20 feet with hand held assist. She is a very proud lady and was dancing as she walked today! I love her spirit! I think she had sort of given up hope of walking again after her stroke since they tell her she is an old lady. I helped explain to her family and her that even if she is old she still has potential to walk and be independent in her home! If I have more patients like her I will feel like this is a successful trip!

Another interesting thing here is that everyone wears flip-flops or walks barefoot. I would never allow one of my patients in the US to wear flip-flops during our treatment session. While I love flip-flops, they are not safe shoes for gait training or anyone with balance problems. However, I don’t really have a choice here so I am embracing barefoot gait training! Haha! I just hope there is no broken glass around when we are walking on the dirt outside their homes. There is something to be said about being barefoot in that I’ve noticed very few foot deformities. The foot deformities I have seen have not been due to shoes. Most of my middle age female patients in the US have some sort of hallux valgus, bunions, or corns due to improper fitting shoes.

One way I keep myself from getting bored after work is sitting around with Millie, Grace, and Patience watching them cook dinner. They have gas for the stove so they are cooking some of the food inside again; however, they still use the little charcoal stove for the more traditional foods. I described them a little but I will try and go into more detail now. They eat a dough made out of various things and dip it into a soup with their right hand. You do not chew the dough. You just swallow it whole. I have now tried the following doughs: fufu, bamku, ackbale, kanke (I know none of those are spelled correctly). Fufu is made by boiling cassava plant (a type of root vegetable) and plantains then pounded until they turn into a raw dough. Bamku is made from some sort of yam flour (I think) that is boiled with water and then stirred into a dough. Ackbale and Kanke are made from corn flour and again are boiled and stirred into a dough. I do not have a discerning palate yet and so they all sort of taste the same to me. Also, since you swallow the dough to me it seems like a lot of calories that you do not even enjoy tasting. Kenneth told me that I should be embracing all the African foods so I’m trying! He doesn’t know yet how picky of an eater I can be. Haha! Luckily, nothing tastes bad. It’s just that none of the more traditional foods are anything that I would crave. Maybe, by the end of this trip I will love them as much as the Ghanaians!!

I’m starting to miss American food. I have been slowly eating a few of my snacks I brought along. I’m only 3 weeks into this so that is probably a bad thing! Oh well! They feed me very well so I know I will not starve. I can’t help but feel guilty that I will probably gain weight here, and there are Africans that are starving.

Love, Kari