Day 16: Good Demo, Great Food, Fantastic People

Monday - August 23, 2021

Our first full day in Tamale started bright and early at 7 am, as we all tried to fit in breakfast before heading to the Vector link office at 8am. Once we arrived to the hotel restaurant for breakfast we must have sat for 20 minutes trying to figure out trying to figure out how breakfast worked. Eventually we realized we just needed to During breakfast Rebecca got bombarded with a ton of calls regarding logistics for our time in Tamale. As a night person, she certainly was not having it 🥱.

We then got into our respective vehicles and drove to the PMI office. One important thing to note is that during the previous day, we had a good long conversation with our driver, Hardi, who gave us a ton of food recommendations to try in Tamale. He told us that the best meal to try is Tuo Zaafi (also known as TZ), which is a corn flour served with a soup and your preferred meat. The soup that is served with the dish is Ayoyo and it seems like the locals prefer Guinea Fowl as their meat of choice. Due to Hardi’s recommendation, Spencer, Janis, and I tried TZ the night before. I was so excited to sit next to our driver Hardi in the morning to thank him for recommending the Ghanaian dish.

After updating him, Hardi and I went on to talk about healthcare system in Ghana on the drive to the PMI Vector Link Office (some slight work for the geriatric project ). Hardi told us that they believe in this concept of a nuclear family, where the family stays together and the children are responsible for the care of parents. In most situations the whole family help the elders with basic chores and other Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), which works out very well for the geriatric population. Additionally, they still have a lot of independence in their homes and remain active in the day to day household activities. I’m not going to lie, American culture is kind of “screwed” in that sense (wanted to use a word that really captures my frustration but we are on our best behavior over here 🤓). It is much more normalized to send our older family members to nursing homes that cost an arm and a leg or let other assistance programs take care of them. We might have to make another blog just on this because it is a juicy topic.

Once we got to the Vector link office we quickly went up to the office to meet with the team (Frank, Jerry, Chris, Louisa). Unfortunately, Sylvester wasn't able to get a flight up to Tamale with us, so he missed this initial meeting. We then proceeded to show our demo and got amazing feedback. In general, the feedback between Uganda and Ghana has been similar, which has helped us create some concrete design criteria for future iterations of the device. We cannot emphasize enough how much we learned from everyone, and how kind they were to take so much time to explain everything to us. We definitely have a lot to work on in the coming months, but with the new insight from of all of our collaborator, we should be prepared to make a great system. The highlight of the meeting for me was when Christian asked how does the algorithm identify mosquitos and sweet Spencer responded with “magic🧙‍♂️.” I was about to drop to the floor with laughter.

After the meeting, the team showed us around the building. We got to see where they do sorting and analysis of parity, which is the analysis of mosquito ovaries. We also got a tour of the ELISA lab from Louisa, who explained the whole process of how they test the mosquitoes for infectivity.

We then concluded the tour with this fresh photo of the team. So photogenic amiright 😩 📸.

We had the rest of the days to ourselves so Christian and Louisa kindly took us out to this wonderful restaurant called “Luxury.” Here I found the dankest sauce called “shito,” which is kind of like a spicy hot chili sauce. Needless to say, I downed the whole cup with my meal. Spencer would say that it is quite the gut grinder and I can attest. our team is very thankful for Pepto Bismol. Please sponsor us 🙏.

Writing this made me research the history of pepto bismol (worth the read). Dropping the link here.

ANY WHO BACK TO THE DAY

After lunch we still had the afternoon to explore a bit! We asked Louisa and Christian what we could do around Tamale. Luckily, they decided to join us on our mini adventure! We first went to an art exhibit very close to the PMI office called, A Diagnosis of Time: Unlearn what you have learned. This exhibit brings together contemporary art from around the world. After we visited this exhibit we went to another one in Tamale that was built by the same artist, Ibrahimed Mahama. At the second exhibit we got the chance to meet him. We ended up having a long conversation ranging from why he built the exhibits to revitalizing local economies.

Overall, this day was certainly one of the most memorable ones of the trip. It was heart warming to get so close to our partners by the end of the day even though we had just met them in the morning.