Jessica Van Bibber is a 4th year medical student from Kansas City, Missouri studying family medicine. She came to Nalerigu’s Baptist Medical Centre to volunteer for 1 month. Jessica came to Ghana with her mother Kathy and she worked along side of Heidi. They enjoyed examining patients together and taking call together so that they could bounce ideas off each other and pool their collective knowledge of medicine.
I interviewed Jessica a week before she left to get her impressions of West Africa and working at a hospital in a 3rd world country. You can listen to the 9-minute audio interview as an MP3 (3.5MB) using the following link:
Here is an outline of the interview:
- Introduction/What brought her to Ghana
- Differences in med training in US and Ghana (1:29)
- Interesting patients/cases she has seen here (2:39)
- Rounding in Nalerigu vs. US hospitals (3:50)
- Favorite people and places in Nalerigu (4:47)
- Pitch to medical students to serve/train overseas (5:56)
- How she has changed in the 3 weeks she has been at BMC (6:52)
- Closing (8:15)
Following are photos of Jessica or that she took while working at the hospital. Warning: the last couple of images are rather graphic.