Maggie Williams

Another on-the-ground post from the delegation traveling through Ethiopia and Ghana this week, this time from Maggie Williams. Learn more about the trip here.

There have been miracle days on this trip.  Yesterday, for me, most of the miracle took place at the Tema General Hospital in Tema, Ghana.  The hospital is a dynamic, living, breathing place, where women and their children are loved and taken care of.  Mothers with HIV find hope and help for both their lives and the lives of their children. Tema identifies women with HIV, gets them into treatment and helps them deliver and care for their healthy babies.  Maybe we just caught the Tema staff on a good day, but they make this very tough work look and feel like a labor of love.

Small simple counseling, testing, and treatment rooms line the hallways. Bigger rooms are used for waiting, dispensing medicine, and perhaps more importantly, for sharing the company of other women.

But particularly seared into my brain are the pictures of the Ghanaian women who are the nurses, doctors and technicians.  These professional women are master organizers.  They are customer service savvy, heavily invested in making things work for their clients.  They understand the emotional and economic challenges these families face.  They are the kind of women who post their goals along the walls and reach them.

I feel honored to have met them.

-Maggie Williams