Ghana

Here I am in Ghana. It's deepest darkest Africa, with red-dirt roads cutting through sparse jungle, heavy pre-rainy season clouds hanging like fluffy chandeliers, villages of dusty wooden/cement block buildings, women balancing loads of wood on their heads with young children swaddled onto their backs and bunches of plantains for sale on the road side.



My work environment (see above) is a utilitarian series of structures around one edge of the 2 massive holes in the ground that are the mines, with the processing mills and refineries providing the backdrop to the clinic.



The temperature stays a reasonably steady 26-33 degrees Celsius and the humidity hovers around 90%. This necessitates drinking your body weight in water daily.



I work 5.5 days a week from 7am to 5pm seeing a few patients, doing a few referrals, sorting out a few administrative issues, doing a bit of continuing medical education, nothing at all out of the ordinary; it's the reassuring thing about medicine, you can be anywhere in the world and the general principles remain the same.