I’ve been in Ghana for two months now. Kintampo, the centre of Ghana and the universe (as a monument in town boasts), feels like a second home. I love hearing the “obruni koko maakye” (good morning white-red person) song from adorable children wherever I go, I like groundnut paste better than peanut butter, and I’ve never met friendlier people than here. I’ve even grown used to the power and water outages, inescapable blaring Celine Dion power ballads, and excruciating internet connection.

My internship involves working on an epidemiological study of malaria in pregnant women and their children at the Kintampo Health Research Centre (the Birth Cohort Study). It’s a baseline study monitoring malaria in a cohort of pregnant women and their children through to two years. Over two thousand women and their children are enrolled.

For the first six weeks I worked in the Birth Cohort office and accompanied the fieldwork coordinator to field sites—villages in the Kintampo North and South and Nkoranza districts of the Brong-Ahafo region. Almost every Kintampo district site has a field-worker who lives in the village and visits the participants daily to ensure the babies are healthy, and most Nkoranza sites are visited daily by mobile teams. In the case of illness, the babies are referred to the hospital or clinic for treatment, the cost of which is covered by the study. The fieldworkers also administer questionnaires and take peripheral blood samples every trimester for the pregnant women and monthly for the babies. The samples are sent to the centre’s lab for haematology and parasitology analysis.

The fieldwork coordinating team, JC (an American summer intern from Michigan), and I checked in with fieldworkers and supervisors (who visit the field sites daily by motorbike), as well as with study participants who had concerns. In my next couple of posts, I’ll explain some of the issues that arose, but for now here is a picture from the field (and maybe more if the internet improves).

Me, JC, and AB (senior field supervisor) with a group of children from a study village

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