A big ‘thank you’ from the Guild to Roger Morley and his friend Keith for another fun musical afternoon in support of our charity – it raised an amazing £228. This forms the major part of our donation to the charity, Jacob’s Well, whose work Elizabeth Lyle supports in Ghana.
APT (Appropriate Paper Based Technology) in Ghana
As many of you know I visit Ghana to help with training people to make equipment for disabled children.
This all started when my friend Helen retired from working as a Paediatric Physiotherapist in 2015 and wanted to volunteer abroad. I’ve long been connected with a Beverley based charity, Jacob’s Well Appeal, which sends medical, educational and agricultural aid to some of the world’s poorest places, and had recently taken a more active role in supporting their compliance with medicines legislation. At that time Jacob’s Well had a project worker in Northern Ghana who arranged a placement for Helen at Tamale Teaching Hospital.
Helen was shocked by the historic treatments offered to patients and especially by the lack of facilities and equipment for children. Cerebral Palsy is the leading cause of disability in Ghanaian children. Helen found out about Cerebral Palsy Africa, a Scottish based charity that runs training courses in using APT to make equipment for disabled children from cardboard boxes, newspaper and flour and water paste. Helen arranged for the first Tamale APT training course in February 2017 with Marian, a Dutch Occupational Therapist who regularly volunteers for CPA as the Course Lead and also persuaded me to come along as the helper.
Our first group of students were a mixture of parents, nurses, physiotherapists, teachers, a Pastor, social workers, two students from Ghana’s first Occupational Therapy training course in Accra, and a medical student sponsored for his course by a former VSO teacher now back in the UK. The interpreter for the local language failed to show up, the chairs, tables and projector were whisked back to the medical education centre for a Ministerial visit, the electricity went off for long periods and the hospital ran out of water. Despite the challenges the students proudly received their certificates and four children got made to measure individualised supportive chairs, allowing them to feed more easily and develop faster because they can see the world around them instead of just the ceiling or sky.
Since then the group has continued to make more chairs and learnt to make frames. Earlier this year Helen and I successfully ran a course in Wa. We are going out again on 17th October to run the second part of the course in Wa and another course in Tamale for new staff and more parents.
I am immensely grateful that the Guild have chosen to support our work this year and look forward to telling you more about it at their meeting in November.
Elizabeth Lyle