Leadership in Ghana by
Building a Global Initiative When Dr. Ramona Curtis first took on the role of Director for Leader Development and Civic Engagement at Baylor, one of her major goals was to create a three to five year project with another country, specifically with Ghana. Because many of the students who were attracted to her leadership programs were prehealth majors, this global initiative developed into a medicine-related mission trip. Late in 2008, Curtis began working with two prehealth students in her program to help design the trip. The father of one of these two students was actually from Ghana and connected them with a community partner, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Curtis took a scouting trip to Ghana in 2011, her first trip to Africa. There, she discussed the opportunities that would be available to her students with Dr. Fred Yaw Bio, the medical director at the university. Curtis wanted her students to serve in the university hospital setting, to look at a community clinic and to explore health issues in a developing country. She also desired for the
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students to engage with Bio and his research on preventing the transmission of HIV from pregnant mothers to their unborn children and to experience the culture of Ghana. In 2012, Curtis led a group of students on the first Leadership in Ghana mission trip. Students are already preparing for the 2013 trip, which runs from May 19 through June 2. For the future, Curtis has begun discussions with Bio about the possibility of Kwame Nkrumah students visiting Baylor and working in the Waco community.
A Different Kind of Medicine The Leadership in Ghana mission trip exposes students to differences both in culture and in medicine. For many students, Ghana is a surprise, breaking the stereotype of a developing African nation. Amanda Rushing, a sophomore chemistry premed major, attended the 2012 Leadership in Ghana trip. Rushing found her experiences shadowing physicians to be extremely interesting and, in many cases, surprising. “There was almost no preventative care,” she says. “People would come in and they were deathly sick. It was mostly emergency stuff.”