What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [36]
In the summer of 2008, forty volunteers, student interns from Dartmouth College, teachers, artists, and retirees headed to Ghana, under the auspices of WomensTrust, to bring their skills to Pokuase. “We like to call it the overground railway,” she said.
“Dana’s gift is as the visionary who empowers people to make connections, get things done, and let it go where it wants from there,” said Lisah Carpenter, the executive director of the Nurse Practitioners Association of New Hampshire. After hearing a luncheon presentation on WomensTrust in Wilmot, she asked her organization to consider how it might help. Before she knew it, the group’s president, Linda Messenger, was en route to Pokuase to do a health-needs assessment that focused on the village’s high maternal mortality rate. There, she met Victoria, a nurse who is the sole care provider for the village’s twenty thousand residents, responsible for everything from acute care to infant checkups and home visits to the elderly. Because of the high rate of anemia, caused by pregnancy-related iron deficiency, one in five women in Pokuase die during their childbearing years. (Strictly speaking, maternal mortality is when a mother dies within six weeks of childbirth. In Ghana, that rate is 550 per 100,000. The rate in the U.S. is 14.2.) Messenger, with the help of two nurses from the University of Massachusetts graduate school in nursing at Worcester and a nursing student at Colby-Sawyer College in Andover, New Hampshire, screened 150 babies and 750 women in 2008 and dispensed a six-month supply of iron-infused vitamins. Of course, that is hardly the only health-related issue. The village is also plagued by poor sanitary conditions (because the hard-packed ground makes it difficult to dig proper pits), a lack of clean drinking water, and a high incidence of hypertension.
Sometimes even Dana is surprised by the responses her talks generate. After she spoke to students at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, several students secured funding to visit WomensTrust in Pokuase. Virginia native Desmond Ang returned after graduation in 2008 and was drafted into the position of “interim chief operating officer” in Ghana. An informal talk Dana gave at a church in New York resulted in a $10,000 grant from the United Nations African Mothers Association. But when Dana and former executive director Kraeger finished speaking before Country Squires, a group of highly successful men based in New London, New Hampshire, the response was not promising: “What about the men?” one of the Country Squires asked.
“We’re doing nothing for the men except improve the lives of the women,” Dana shot back.
WomensTrust received only two contributions totaling seventy-five dollars, and Dana was discouraged. But the next day, Bo Grove, one of the group’s members and a seventy-one-year-old retired U.S. Air Force general, called to volunteer to help Pokuase’s women learn business planning. Grove created a curriculum to teach semiliterate women the basics of income, expenses, and profit, and flew to Pokuase to teach it. Seventy men and women attended his classes. On his next trip, after seeing firsthand that most had difficulty with basic math, he added classes on arithmetic and using a calculator. “It’s impressive how much can be accomplished by one person with the will and motivation to start and sustain a program like this,” he said of Dana. “It’s impressive that someone would decide I need to do this and go out and do it.”
Others have been similarly inspired and brought their ideas and skills to Pokuase. Exhorting, “Kami ami! [Keep it loose!],” Jackie Abrams, a basket artist from Brattleboro, Vermont, taught a group