Well we finally found an internet cafe and some time to upload some photos.

Its hard to know where to start, and you must know this is only one perspective but things seem to be going well.

We had an uneventful but hideously long 33 hour trip from Sydney to Accra so we arrived tired and smelly but were met by the charming and friendly staff from SYTO (our host organisation). The next few days were spent in orientation and included dancing, cooking, drumming and language lessons, tours and general introduction to Ghana. On Sunday we travelled to Agona Swedru to meet our host families, along the way we stopped at an orphanage that SYTO supports. The children were beautiful and desperate to be held or cuddled but otherwise well cared for despite the poverty.

From there it was on to our villages to meet our host parents and settle in for some homestyle cooking and lots of sharing of photos and gifts. Ghanians eat three enormous meals per day and we are all too thin (even the chubbier members of the group are too thin by Ghanian standards.

Monday saw the start of the clinical placements in our three hospitals or rather it should have but 1 hospital seems to have misunderstood why we are here - so as a result Sally, Leah and Scarlett will be working at the Salvation Army Rehabilitation Centre instead of the hospital.

Some of us have had mild tummy upsets and one person has a cold but otherwise we are all well and starting to adjust to the heat, humidity and "Ghanian time" - everything is at half the pace of Sydney, no make that a quarter of the pace.

Hopefully the next entry to this blog will be from one of the students

Tricia