A group of Belmont faculty, students and alumni from the College of Health Sciences & Nursing are in Ghana this summer for a pilot medical service trip they hope will blossom into an annual mission for the University.
“This is really more of a relationship-building and fact-finding trip,” said Physical Therapy Professor Renee Brown. “Our goal is for it to become an interdisciplinary and an annual trip.”
Physical Therapy Associate Professor Kathy Galloway, Assistant Provost for International Education and Study Away Maggie Monteverde and third-year physical therapy students Sarahann Callaway, Mollie Carver and Hannah Peck also are on the 10-day trip.
Callaway visited Kpando, Ghana two years ago to carry out health initiatives, host community talks on malnutrition and diseases and work in a pharmacy.
“Even with the stress of PT school… the memories of Ghana still dance across my mind. I must admit sometimes during a lecture or two I have been known to daydream about my return,” Callaway said. She approached Brown about creating a Belmont University mission trip to the developing country, and she immediately approved. “To make a long story short, over the past year and half Dr. Brown and many other people have been working very hard to make this trip possible.”
The group plans to visit the country’s capital Accra, Kpando and Cape Coast. There they will work with the physiotherapy department in a Kpando hospital as well as tour clinics and physical therapy academic programs at local universities. They also will work with Standing with Hope (http://standingwithhope.com), a nonprofit organization founded by Belmont University alumni Gracie and Peter Rosenberger that provides custom-made prostheses to amputees and teaches them how to use their new limbs (http://forum.belmont.edu/umac/archives/014271.html).
Follow their ventures in Ghana on their blog.
