I have been waiting for what seems like forever to use this title! The pile on my living room floor has managed to squeeze into my backpack but by the looks of things we are going to have to do some sweet talking to get them to let us take our bags as carry on!!! Lindsay and I met up today to go through our packing lists one last time and it is safe to say that we are both paranoid that we are going to forget something!! The other item that is left to do today is to make flashcards which will help us learn the African language of Fante so that we can communicate with our patients a little bit while we are in the hospital. Sadly our busy schedules have left no time to learn the language up until now but hey! thats what the plane ride is for right? We also found time in the last couple days to get our Canadian flag patches sewn on to our packs! We thought we were absolute geniuses buying iron on patches but it turns out the fabric of our bags is not so compatible with irons so we spent an enjoyable 2 hours stabbing ourselves with needles trying to get those suckers to stay on! The finished product was rewarding! And we also discovered that Lindsay has a knack for stitchery (see first picture for more details). In 22 hours we are making our way to the airport!!! Stay tuned! -K
This title promises a far more interesting story than I can actually provide you at this point but it does indicate that after a couple of trips to the pharmacy, Lindsay and I are fully prepared to tackle any trouble that can fly our way, as long as it only requires some bandaids, a tensor bandage, a handful of gauze and the travellers diarrhea meds we have on hand. Okay, I am selling us a little short. I spent the better part of an afternoon putting together a fairly comprehensive medication and first aid bag for us to take on the trip which only reminded me that WE ARE LEAVING SO SOON!!!!! It is coming down to our final days of packing, whirl wind trips into the city for forgotten items, and our goodbyes. It is hard to believe how fast this day is approaching. Stay tuned as we finally start putting stuff into our bags- something which is promising to be an adventure in itself as I watch the pile of "must haves" on my bedroom floor continue to grow!
Well folks, time seems to be speeding by here… One minute it was Halloween and I was carving an elephant on a pumpkin and dreaming about Africa, the next we were getting immunizations to make us immune to the world and now we’re 15 days out from the big adventure.
With the thought that we’ll be in Africa in like 2 weeks, we’re trying our hardest to tie up all the loose ends that come with leaving the country for 2 months. With our passports back from Ottawa and in our possession, we are theoretically ready to go, but I don’t think we’re mentally there quite yet. For one, Kiri is still trucking through her last week of clinical and I’m trying my hardest to study for a couple more finals before I can officially say I’m done with university for the year.
In regards to our post-Africa adventure… I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty much a blank map. We have a general outline, and a list of things we want to do, but nothing too concrete, other than Kiri’s intense desire to go on a cat canal cruise in Amsterdam. I’m not joking. It exists. And apparently we’re going. Even though the public health nurse said we’re not allowed to pet the animals abroad because we were too cheap to get the rabies vaccine, it looks like we’re going to take exception for a bunch of stray cats who live on a canal boat.
And so, with 15 days to go, we thought we’d send out a huge thank you and quick update for anyone who has supported us. We are completely blown away by the donations to help us out with our Africa leg… if you’d told me 3 months ago that we would have over $5000 fundraised, I would’ve told you to stop teasing me. From the bottom of our hearts, Kiri and I want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who has donated… whether you made a perogie with us, spent an afternoon on a bottle drive (or drank the bottles that you then donated to us!) or supported us with monetary donations, we are immensely grateful and hope to do you proud in Africa!
-L
ps. Here is a picture of my elephant pumpkin… I’ve never actually put effort into pumpkin carving before and was quite sad the day it rotted.
If you happen to be one of the 33, 000 St. Albert Gazette readers you might have seen that Lindsay and I made the paper this Wednesday!!!! We thought this was pretty exciting, last week we headed into the St. Albert Gazette headquarters and got ourselves interviewed (no big deal or anything). But in all seriousness the St. Albert Gazette was kind enough to help us promote our trip all over Sturgeon County! We have already had a few people contact us thanks to the extra advertisement!! If you haven't seen it yet check out the link below or flip to page 14 and 22 to laugh at the picture that made Kiri cry about her face for 3 hours. Kiri wants everyone to know her face isn't usually that fat. And her boyfriend Ian says that it was probably stretched out to fit the newspaper layout. I think thats probably the most likely answer. Anyways we are still excited about the paper, and if you read it online you can actually scroll down enough that the picture isn't visible while you are reading! So thats a bonus! Check out out our article by copying and pasting the link below :)
With the clock running down we arranged an unconventional shopping trip with a long time friend of my dad's who is the general manager of Alberta Paramedical, an ambulance service in Alberta! A few months ago he agreed to donate as much medical stuff as we could carry to take to the hospital in Takoradi. We started our adventure at Tim Hortons.... as per usual... and headed off with our large steeped tea double doubles and our toasted everything bagels with plain cream cheese. And yes, if you are wondering, we have identical Tim's orders. We headed over to the warehouse for Alberta Paramedical armed with 4 MASSIVE bags. We spent over an hour packing hundreds of IV needles, isolation oxygen masks, tracheostomy tubes, catheters, glucometers and glucometer strips, air splints and many other supplies into our bags. We spent a lot of time laughing about how much customs would love us as we packed needle after needle into our "sharps bag", future us won't find it nearly as funny I'm sure. This being said after reading that the hospital had to use broken needles on patients because of their supply shortages we are more than happy to cry our way through customs (its not a ploy, if we get pulled aside we will cry for real). We spend tonight sorting through our bags and getting them all set to put on the plane- and tried our hand at walking in air splints. 30 days and counting...
There is just something that feels fundamentally wrong about sliding your passport, your most official piece of ID that distinguishes you as a Canadian citizen, into an envelope mailing it to Ottawa. However, that was the case last Thursday as Kiri and I rushed back and forth between both of our houses to gather all the documents that were required to apply for a Visa to get us into Ghana in oh, you know, about 35 days.
Between flight itineraries, terrible passport pictures, and a handwritten application completed in quadruple, it took Kiri and I about 3 hours to get everything together before trudging into our local Canada Post office in the back of a Shoppers Drug Mart. A wonderful Canada Post worker took one look at our terrified faces, as we gripped our passports with white knuckles, and quickly spouted off a number of mailing options. We picked the most secure way (obviously…we’re scared of scammers) and she began walking us through the steps for filling out the envelopes with utmost care. And then, when Kiri and I stood beside each other at the counter, trying to talk ourselves into sealing the envelopes, she smiled at us and once again went over the procedure of tracking our passports in their delivery to Ottawa.
After finally sealing those envelopes (thank goodness for that Canada Post employee... she deserves a gold medal when it comes reassuring people), we hopped back into my car and drove back to Kiri’s house where her dad made us waffles. Pretty solid ending to a stressful couple hours, if you ask me. So now the waiting game ensues - we’re expecting our passports back soonish and it’s not like it’s stressful or anything…
In other news, Kiri and I were interviewed by the St Albert Gazette today… so anyone who lives in the city and surrounding areas should keep their eyes peeled next Wednesday when the new issue comes out! It should be a good read... and probably an opportunity to laugh at the picture that Kiri and I tried our best to look natural in. Anyways, we're really stoked about being able to get the word out of what we'll be up to in Ghana and can't wait to read the article!
I have written only to confirm that our excitement level has not lessened since our last post. We have discovered that an unwatched clock will run a marathon and so, with less than 39 days to go the only thing we can think about is how little time we have left to get ourselves ready! That and what we should pack. Anyone who has watched Lindsay or I try to pack for a weekend trip will understand why this is such a large problem. The fact that there are 6 countries on the itinerary combined with about 15 different common weather patterns multiplied by colour pallet, accessible footwear and functionality means that there is only about 433,000 different clothing combinations for us to consider while packing the backpacks that are going to be our best friends for 2 months. Oh, and it needs to fit in carry on. We might need therapy after this. We have also decided that it would be wonderful to read the Divergent series on a beach in Ghana or a bench in Paris or even in a rustic hostel in the Isle of Skye. Since we can't seem to wrap our head around what to pack this has kept us surprisingly entertained! -K
Well folks, panic mode has set in. We successfully completed our perogie day fundraiser and we are so grateful for the generous donations we were given today! (There are some pictures up under our fundraising tab!). Tonight we went and watched a hockey game between the Edmonton Firefighters team and an NHL alumni team which was pretty cool! Decked out with our Tim Hortons we were feeling pretty patriotic, which sent us into a bit of a panic about being Canadians abroad in 46 days! We have finally decided that sitting at home and trying to plan doesn't work out for us because Vampire Diaries and PVR coexist therefore we headed off to Tim Horton's to steal their WiFi and attempt to figure our lives out! Tonight we have gotten a jump on our Visa applications, the last thing on our checklist for our stay in Ghana!!!
-K
I am not proficient in the art of selfies
We were here so long we acquired decorations for the table.
When your car has a flat tire and it’s -34, there’s not a lot to do, so I thought I’d provide a quick update on our trip for everyone who is interested! We got a little distracted and really neglected this blog throughout the Olympics (we are the type of people who watch the games to see the Molson Canadian beer commercials that make us cry) so now that they’re over, we are back on track and hoping to make some progress!
The fact that we’re leaving in 60 days is giving us heart palpitations, so that goes to show how excited/terrified we are of jetting off to Ghana! We’re in the process of finalizing EVERYTHING possible right now-Africa is completely good to go, but our journey afterwards is throwing us for a bit of a loop. It’s one thing to say “we’re going to Ireland” but another thing to actually figure out what we plan to do in Ireland. Regardless of this, we keep getting really distracted every time we get together for “planning sessions” so that’s something that we need to work on. The last time we sat down to “plan,” we ended up spending 2 hours looking at clothes/recipes/cat pictures/ghosts on pinterest, another hour pretending to do the insanity workout, and finished it up by watching some good old “Say Yes to the Dress” episodes while googling pictures of Amsterdam.
Anyways, on the one day last week that we actually were productive (and by productive, I mean we went shopping for clothes), I decided to do a practice pack and get an idea of what my bag is going to look like for our trip. It is our sincerest hope that we can make everything fit on carry-on, so packing versatile items has become a necessity.
With the last half of our school semester kicking into high gear, our Europe planning time has been cut in half. We are hoping this will provide appropriate motivation to get some stuff figured out on Tuesday, where we plan to sit down and have a massive planning session! We will, of course, keep everyone posted with how that goes!
As promised we went on adventure downtown and got our immunizations today!!! With Hep A, yellow fever, typhoid fever and meningitis under our belts (and our skin) we are one step closer to being ready for Ghana!!! And now, according to the health nurse, our Valentines Day will most likely be spent with fevers, aches, sore arms, and headaches. So thats great. We discussed a lot of the health risks associated with going to Ghana which was cool but pretty scary! We are in a high risk malaria and yellow fever zone... so basically the second we feel like we're getting a fever, we need to BOOK IT to the hospital to get some antibiotics. And if we begin to feel the symptoms of rabies coming on, it's game over and we need to get our butts on a plane back to Canada within 5 days or else we'll probably die. I'm not sure what the public health nurse thought about us when we burst out laughing at the thought of getting all these crazy symptoms and side effects but we promised her that we'll take everything seriously.
We also learned what the side effects of anti-malarials are. Most include intense hallucinations, dizziness, stomach upset, diarrhea, and sensitivity to sunlight. So basically me (Lindsay) being the redhead is screwed and I'll probably end up with skin the colour of my hair (which I've experienced once before and never want to relive). And the fact that Kiri has a track record of getting the rare reactions from the flu shot means that chances are she'll be the one experiencing hallucinations while vomiting blood and everything. Which will be GREAT to deal with.
Anyways, in conclusion, we offer you a piece of advice. When you get shots, move your arms around. Especially if you're getting Typhoid vaccine. Because let me tell you, trying to pick up a glass of strawberry smoothie or type a blog post on the computer, will make your arm HURT LIKE THE DICKENS.
-K&L
Trying to look scared for the camera hahaha I nailed the stoned look instead
We have been quiet on the blog for a little while but we have made a lot of progress in the mean time! After several trips to the bank we finally created an account specifically for our Ghana fundraising and were able to set up a way to take online donations on our fundraising page....something which has been really exciting!!!! To be able to do this we had to actually create a 'business' so The Adventures of Lindsay and Kiri is pretty legit now!!! Last week we were also interviewed by the St. Albert Gazette and we have started to reach out to other newspapers and companies for fundraising which has started to really get the ball rolling!
When we were reading about the hospital in Takoradi we discovered that they are so short on supplies that they end up using broken needles to start IV's on newborns, something which is drastically different from our medical culture here. It really motivated us to gather relief supplies to take with us on our trip. Through connections my dad had we were offered a very large amount of medical supplies to take- our main problem at this point is now how we are supposed to transport this much cargo all the way across the world! Our goal is to take as many basic medical supplies as we possibly can with us, we haven't decided if we will carry 6 checked bags along with us or try to arrange for a pallet to be transported separately. Either way its a extremely exciting for us and we are so glad we are going to be able to help out the community we are travelling to, even if its only a fraction of what they need!!
Stay tuned for updates as this dynamic duo braves the travel clinic tomorrow for our immunizations that we will be needed for the trip!
Well after an uneventful evening of looking like twins and drinking a very small amount of wine Lindsay and I formulated a game plan for today.
The day started off my phone call from the UK which confirmed my placements in the hospital in Ghana!!! As per usual, Lindsay and I are doing the exact same thing... if you read her post the other day you now know that we will be spending just over a week in Labor & Delivery, a week in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a few days in an HIV outreach clinic and a few days in a child and reproductive health clinic. The lady we both talked to in the UK told us a bit about the regional hospital we will be working at which was really cool to hear!
The regional hospital, which is the largest hospital in the western region of Africa has 11 beds on its Labor and Delivery unit. Despite this they don't turn expecting mothers away so its is fairly normal for women to give birth on a mattress on the floor of the unit. Another huge cultural difference there is that when mothers are giving birth it is expected to be natural (including episiotomies -I cringed when I heard this) and not only this they are expected to be silent when giving birth, and when they are not silent they are slapped or struck. They warned us about this because it can be an eerie culture shock for some nursing students! It was quite load of information to wake up to this morning!
As for the rest of the day, we intend to get some business cards printed off to leave with our donation box and drop it off at Johnny's store. Our next plan of attack is to get 4 passport sized photos taken to send with our visa applications so that we are actually allowed in Ghana. After that we are heading off to coffee with our well travelled friend Amy who has been giving us brilliant insight into where we should be going in the UK and how to get there! If that wasn't a productive day enough we are going straight from there to our 4H project meeting where we will be taking our group skating!
-K
Each of these wine glasses can fit over ¾ of a bottle of wine. Best invention EVER!
This afternoon, Kiri and I decided to be really creative and attempt to make our donation box for fundraising! Like most of our craft nights, nothing really went as planned and it took about 3 and a half hours to decorate a box... we got a little sidetracked when we found about a billion pictures of us growing up in my basement. Anyways, after a walk down memory lane where I basically regretted every piece of clothing I owned between the ages of 13 to 18, we pulled ourselves together and got to work. And for once, we're actually really proud of the finished product! We will be placing it up at Johnny's Store for anyone who would like to help us out with our Ghana leg! If you would like more information about our fundraising plans and where the money is going, check out the new fundraising section of this website!
-L
We tend to overestimate how much crafting supplies we need
Ecstatic doesn’t even begin to describe how crazy excited I am right now for this trip! This morning I was laying in bed, flipping through pictures on instagram when my phone started ringing with this crazy 15 digit phone number on the caller ID. I answered it because I was curious and sure enough, it was the UK calling to discuss my clinical interests for Ghana. You see, the program that we’ve chosen to take us on our international nursing experience is based out of the UK, so every time a question pops up we get to talk to someone with a really sweet British accent. And so, this was my situation this morning as I sprung into action, grabbing a pen and some scrap paper to make notes while the lovely Charlotte from the UK asked me what I was interested in.
After discussing the options in the program at length, it was decided that making the most of our time in Ghana was a must. Therefore, I’ve agreed to spend about a week and a half in the labour and delivery ward, where I will get to assist nurses bring beautiful babies into the world! Then, after expressing my interest in the neonatal intensive care unit, Charlotte signed me up to spend a week there. No doubt the NICU will be the most difficult part of the placement; most of the babies in the NICU are there as a result of malaria. Despite the government’s best efforts to stress the importance of taking pre-natal anti-malarials to prevent the transmission of malaria from mother to fetus, it still happens. Lots. Which seems completely crazy to me because they have ways of preventing it. After the week in the NICU, I will get to spend a few days in the Child and Reproductive Health Clinic. I’m basically beyond STOKED for this, because I’ll get to do some community outreach! How sweet is that?! I’ll get to help weigh babies, take blood pressures, AND administer immunizations to kids to keep them healthy!! I’m really excited for this, although it's not a lot skill-wise, it's still very hands-on and it can have a big impact on the patients’ lives. Lastly, I’ll get to spend a few days working in the HIV clinic. HIV is unfortunately one of the first things that spring to mind when you think of Africa’s health problems, and I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to see what healthcare providers are doing to help treat and manage those who are living with the disease.
Of course, moments after this phone call ended, I texted Kiri, who was still sleeping. After spamming her for a bit, I gave up and decided to take my dog for a walk. I headed outside, only to be greeted to temperatures of -27 degrees celcius. Needless to say, it was a very brisk walk but by the time I got back, Kiri was about half awake and calling me in a sleepy (but excited!) haze. Being that we’re basically the same person interested in all the same stuff, Kiri is hoping to do the same things that I’m doing while we’re there. Her phone call from the UK should be coming on Friday morning, so stay tuned for her blog post about how everything is finally feeling real for her!
Speaking of that, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’m actually going to be getting on a plane to Ghana in 90-something days. And that I need to figure out a way to pack my entire life for 2 months into a bag that I can fit on carry-on because I’m paranoid that the airlines will make a mistake with checked luggage and I’ll end up abroad with nothing. I think the biggest thing is really coming to terms with the fact that we’ll be gone for 2 months… it still seems beyond crazy to me.
Since "going live" we haven't managed to get up another blog post to keep all of our diehard fans entertained (Hi Mom!!) but we have been working on the next stage of our trip.... which revolves around affording it. Unfortunately adventures cost money so we have decided that for the Ghana leg of our trip we are going to try and raise some money to cover the costs of the volunteer program we are doing! We have calculated that between Lindsay and I we could potentially raise $11, 000 to put towards our volunteer program because of flights, our actual placement and the money we need for transportation to get from the Work the World house to the hospital every morning. The planning started out with a big brainstorming session with my dad which involved thinking of pretty much every local group who would be willing to sponsor our trip and evolved into drafting up letters to send off in hopes of getting a few donations. We have decided to put a donation box at Johnny's store for any community members who are interested in donating as well. Probably the most exciting thing that has come out of our fundraising planning though is the Perogie Bee we are planning to do (fingers crossed) at the end of February! For a drop in fee of around $10 we are going to provide all of the perogie dough so whoever is interested in coming just has to bring their favourite perogie filling, some cookie sheets, a rolling pin and a killer apron. It is still in the planning stages so stay tuned for updates on the Perogie Bee but trust me when I tell you that channelling your inner Ukrainian is always a good idea so we hope to see you there!
Due to the cold weather we have had in the last little while we decided to live vicariously through Google and find out how warm it is in Ghana. At a balmy 30 degrees Celsius (38 with the humidity) we have become aware of how entirely unprepared we are as Canadians for the weather we are going to experience. When the two of us put our brains together we can usually come up with some fairly good solutions to our problems (cue about a million stories about how we fail at life).... todays genius idea being a trip to the sauna with our onesies. With a strict sauna/onesie regimen we are expecting to see exponential improvement in how we cope with heat. Stay tuned.
Well folks, the good karma we've had in regards to how easy it's been to plan this trip had to end eventually. Tonight, Kiri and I set out to complete some minor tasks to finish our flight confirmations and quickly discovered that sometimes airlines change stuff without telling you. Like the fact that our flight from London to Accra was cancelled. And that we couldn't find any information on how to verify our flight to Paris. Even when we tried to buy malpractice insurance for our time spent working in the hospital in Takoradi, the online purchase page was "closed for maintenance."
Despite all these "setbacks" not all hope has been lost! It was only after a MINOR panic attack on my part that we realized that the airline that cancelled our flight booked us on another flight to connect us to Accra and even upgraded our seats! That's right folks! These two starving students will be flying business class (not much for some people, but to us it's basically the closest we've ever been to first class and it's REALLY EXCITING). So I suppose that the title of this post is slightly inaccurate because our lives aren't actually in shambles... we just have some phone calls to make tomorrow morning to confirm all the changes.
The only really new update I have in regards to the trip is the fact that we are beginning to the test the waters with some fundraising ideas for the Africa Leg... this wouldn't be a Kiri and Lindsay adventure if it didn't involve making perogies at some point, so for those of you who live in the area, keep your eyes peeled for signs of a perogie day fundraiser. We're also reaching out to some local organizations to see if they'd be interested in supporting us as we go abroad to assist with delivering babies in Ghana! As we put together a more definitive fundraising plan, we will definitely keep updating this blog, hopefully on a more regular basis! We're pretty good about talking about our website, we're just bad at remembering that it's something we need to update, so this is something we hope to change!
In other news, the excitement level in anticipation for this trip is growing by the moment... not a day goes by that doesn't involve at least 7 caps-locked text messages about how "WE'RE GOING TO HAVE THE TIME OF OUR LIVES." In fact, every text message that gets sent between us somehow comes back to the trip...
Tonight marked the first night that we seriously sat down to discuss and research where in Europe we really wanted to go and what we really wanted to see. And by sit down and discuss I really meant that we poured ourselves an oversized glass of wine (courtesy of a wonderful Christmas present from the brothers) and set up camp on Lindsay's bed with a battery of computers and travel books. We quickly discovered that taking a month to delve into Paris, Luxembourg, Amsterdam and the entirety of the UK was ambitious..... but not ambitious enough to scare away this dynamic duo!! We have begun to narrow down which cities are going to be the most important and what attractions we absolutely need to see- one of the ones I am most excited for so far is the London Eye, we discovered tickets that let us go around once during the day and once at night! This has proved thus far to be the most challenging planning stage, save for maybe the 10 minutes we spend hovering over the purchase button when we were buying our flights... having an irrational fear of getting scammed sometimes slows us down. If anyone who has travelled in any of these places and has tips, tricks or places we need to go PLEASE feel free to comment or even give us a call and help put a few pins down on our map!
Let December 2, 2013 at 9pm be a moment that goes down in history! Yes folks, that moment marks the official start of our adventure because... WE BOOKED OUR FLIGHTS!!
It's real now... we are really flying out to Accra, Ghana on May 2, 2014! And our flight home is scheduled from Dublin, Ireland on June 24! There's no going back - we're spending almost 2 full months abroad next year whether we like it or not.
Of course, booking flights wasn't that simple; nothing is ever quite as simple as Kiri and I think it will be. First of all, Kiri's 10 minute drive to my house turned into a 30min adventure thanks to a wonderful snow storm that hit Alberta... although we weren't complaining; it gave us both the day off school! Then, once she got to my house, it took about 4 hours of mad googling on 5 different computers just to book the Africa flight (my brother has pictures to prove it). And being the incredibly skeptical people we are, hitting the "purchase flights" button took a solid 3 minutes of us talking each other up to it (we're convinced a lot of the time that everything is scam haha). But once we did, we quickly saw all the confirmation numbers and then the REAL excitement kicked in. At least, it did for me... Kiri was surprisingly calm. She kept telling me to "play it cool man" (she even put on some music by Bastille to try and calm me down) but there was no playing it cool last night WE ARE OFFICIALLY GOING TO AFRICA!
Once we overcame the hurdle of booking the first flight, everything else got much easier. We were much calmer (and by we, I mean mostly me) and we were finally feeling like everything that we've been talking about for the past 8 months is real. This thought is mostly exciting, but slightly terrifying because now we have to figure out a lot of things... namely, how we intend to get from Ghana to Ireland in just under 2 months.
Fun fact: The longer you stare at the word 'backpack' the weirder it looks. Anyways, it was another exciting day in the world of Lindsay and Kiri! It would be relatively hard to backpack across Europe without an actual backpack so we set out to remedy this for Lindsay. We headed straight for Mountain Equipment Co-op all set to brave 'Black Friday' crowds which apparently don't exist in Canada (No complaints here! Although with no crowds came no deals so there may be a slight trade off there). We managed to narrow it down to a couple of packs with the help of Lindsay's preliminary google searching so we got busy stuffing the bags with weights to test them out in store. We had a clear winner! She has refused to take it off thus far so expect to see more of it in future posts!
Flights are expected to be booked by MONDAY!!!! Woohooo!!!!
Considering that we’ve known about this trip for about half a year now, I thought it was finally time to pull myself together to write a “real” blog posting. Having never written one before (and having never really even read a blog before), I have no clue what that actually means but here it goes…
When we first starting talking about Africa, I don’t think either of us really considered all the work that goes into planning a trip. There is a lot of stuff you need to know… and finding that information is stressful. For example, locating a program to take two nursing students to Africa was hard. We had to get our google on and try to comb through companies that we thought were a scam and find ones that sounded legit. We found a program that seemed pretty sweet and we decided to just go for it. Kiri and I jumped right in, not fearing the least when a scary waiver form told us all about how the company was not liable for any events of civil unrest, terrorism, volcanic eruptions, natural disasters, or kidnapping. We basically died laughing at the idea of us getting caught in a war in Africa and signed the waiver without giving it too much thought. 4 days later, on a sunny morning in May, we received a phone call from the United Kingdom saying that we’d been accepted to a 3 week nursing placement in Ghana! This resulted in many caps-locked text messages, screaming, and leaping up and down, thus marking the beginning of this crazy journey.
So where are we at today? Well, we’re just under 6 months away from the biggest adventure of our lives and we’ve been planning up a storm. Yesterday we went on an adventure to the humane society and Kiri adopted another cat. Being animal lovers, we spent about an hour and a half playing with every animal in sight. I fell in love with a dog that I’m not allowed to have and almost cried because he was just so full of love (I’m a big softie when it comes to dogs haha). We also visited every single cat and I attempted to befriend the feline population again (I haven’t been successful yet; cats just don’t like me… they’re solely Kiri’s domain). Anyways, I promise all this has relevance to Africa because after adopting Casper, we went home to Kiri’s house and did some research about the immunization requirements for Ghana. We had a serious in-depth discussion about whether we should get rabies shots or not. I thought it was funny at first, and joked about turning into rabid animals but have you ever read what happens to you if you get rabies? YOU DIE. THERE IS NO CURE PEOPLE. And after being forced into watching that awful Old Yeller movie in elementary school, rabies just seems perfectly terrible and I don’t want it...but the rabies vaccine is expensive and we’re a couple of starving students who can barely afford our Tim Horton’s addictions, let alone some pricey immunizations. So this might just be an “I’ll take my chances” kind of deal… Which I know makes us sound like the world’s biggest hypocrites, especially being nursing students and all, but we’re just not sure yet.
Last night we also made some headway into what our journey is going to look like post-Africa. We’ve decided that if we’re already on that side of the Atlantic, we might as well make the most of that opportunity and do some travelling before making our way back home to Canada. Trying to decide a route through countries has been tricky… There are just so many places in the world to go and see, and they’re all on our list! I don’t want to reveal all the details of where we’ll be just yet, but please note that I have high hopes of reenacting Braveheart in Scotland, so the UK is definitely on the list :)
Well folks, 1 year to plan has turned into 5 months and 23 days, and for anyone actually counting, 21 hours, 11 minutes and 23 seconds. We have started finalizing plans for our trip! With booking flights, creating itineraries and google searching in full swing we are finally feeling like this trip is real. Stay tuned for updates!!!
I think its safe to say that excitement was running a little high this morning. Today, May 28, 2013 our placement in Ghana was confirmed. Needless to say, many many caps locked letters later Lindsay and I have confirmed that IN 341 DAYS WE WILL BE EXPERIENCING THE ADVENTURE OF OUR LIVES!!!!!! We have been brainstorming ways to fundraise the Ghana portion of our trip and have come up with a bunch of gooders... stay tuned!!!