UBC Okanagan Clinic in Ghana

Since 2001, UBC Okanagan (formerly OUC) has offered the opportunity for 4th year nursing students and faculty members to travel to Ghana to provide nursing care in both city hospitals and rural outpost health clinics.  

Over the past few years, UBC Okanagan has connected with a rural community in Ghana, Chanshegu, a rural village of approx. 500 people (50 orphans). This community has asked for help over the years in an attempt to improve the lives and futures of the people of their community. In the past few years, UBC Okanagan Nurses have provided the money for all the orphans in the community to have school uniforms to attend school and we have provided them with water filtration units to clean the water the women carry to the community. 

One of Chanshegu's biggest concerns has been the high mortality rates and lack of medical care available to the tribe. Severe injury, childbirth, infection, HIV/AIDS, and other communicable illnesses cause high rates of mortality in Chanshegu and neighbouring villages.  

Currently, the community of Chanshegu only has access to medical care 2 times per year (once for vaccinations and once when UBC nursing students travel to the village). In cases of medical emergency, members of the community have to walk over 20 kilometers to attempt to get medical help.

Chanshegu and surrounding villages have the desperate need for access to healthcare. Something they can only get by having a health clinic in close proximity. 

In 2012, UBC Okanagan nursing students fundraised money to begin the building of a health clinic.

In March 2013, work began on the construction of the health clinic in Chanshegu. 

Building of the clinic is well underway and the community is very excited! The clinic walls are beginning to go up, bricks have been prepared and villagers are helping build. 

The hard work is not done and we need your help to finish it.

100% of donations received go directly to building the health clinic and supplying it with medical supplies and equipment for the citizens of Changshegu and surrounding communities.

Any amount you can share helps! 

Thank you from all the nursing students at UBC Okanagan!! 

** In previous years, UBC Okanagan has provided tax receipts for this fundraising project (and our other Africa fundraising efforts) unfortunately this year UBC is not able to provide tax receipts due to the workload that this places on the financing office at the university. We apologize for any inconvenience that this causes. **

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Update: October 8, 2013

We skyped all the way to Ghana today to talk to Sinbad (one of the villagers) about the clinic we are fundraising to build in Changshegu. It was so heartbreaking to hear about all the deaths that this village is experiencing right now due to malaria (lots of heavy rains) and malnutrition (poor farming season). Lots of loss of children this month. It has made the villagers all that much more excited and thankful for the clinic that the UBC Okanagan Nurses are working on getting built there. People from all over rural Ghana are talking about "the clinic" that is coming. Hearing today that families in Ghana are saying that they will "give everything they have to help us finish this clinic to save their babies." It was absolutely heartbreaking to hear, but boy has it ever motivated us even more to get this clinic finished. I just want to say a big COLOSSAL thank-you to people who have donated so far.

This clinic really and truely is going to change so many lives and each and every single person that makes a donation is doing an absolutely amazing thing. It has been a very humbling day - I find myself painfully aware of all the amazing privileges I have and devastated at the same time for a community losing innocent men, women and children.

This 4 month countdown to leaving for Ghana, just isn't moving fast enough.

- Samantha Waller