Our health professionals, 3 doctors, 4 nurses, and a nurse midwife treated malaria, hypertension, anemia, infectious diseases and taught health education, antenatal care, family planning and personal hygiene including serving at the local hospital. In one of the villages there was not even a traditional birth attendant (TBA) which may help explain the high infant mortality in this region.

Our last working day was at Kumasi, a city I personally love. It was a very refreshing day at the Upper Room Revival A/G Church where we mixed education and wellness promotion to refresh their body and soul.

For sightseeing we visited the Kintampo waterfalls and Cape Coast castle (home of the slave trade in Ghana), the Silage slave market and of cause, had some “market ministry” at the central market in Kumasi and Makola market in Accra.

May God grant His disciples in Ghana a jubilee in their walk as they celebrate their golden years.

The next site was at Terabor General Hospital in Gokana LGA, Rivers State, a community of about 400,000 people in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria where Dr. Gbaanador was born and raised. There, we joined a group of 45 Nigerian healthcare professionals and volunteers from Pro-Health International (www.prohealthinternational.org)…a faith-based NGO that provides year-round free health care throughout Nigeria and neighboring countries. They travel to rural areas, bringing everything needed to provide medical, surgical, ophthalmologic, dental care and counseling to the poor and needy. They bring everything needed (dental chairs, OR tables, mobile Lab, equipment, medical/surgical supplies and pharmaceuticals along with two generators in the trucks. On the first day it took about three hours just to unpack and set up everything and about the same to break-down, pack, and reload at the end of the five-day project. At Terabor we performed surgery on 90 patients (not counting the dental and ophthalmic operations) in five days! At the completion of the medical mission we were very tired, very gratified and felt fulfilled. We barely scratched the surface of the healthcare needs this community…but we certainly made a difference in the lives of the ones we were able to serve, free of charge. 

I returned to America with a renewed commitment to medical missionary work. I will return to Uganda in 2008 with Dr. Daniel. I plan to work with ACMMI and Pro-Health International in the future. I hope and pray that one day, we can take medical students and residents from Texas Tech University or other teaching hospitals on such missions. I guarantee that the experience will have a profound positive effect on these young healthcare providers in-training as it had on me. The benefits cannot be measured…they are life-long.