Leadership Externship in Ghana

March 24, 2014
by Clarissa

Externships International

In the Spring semester of your second year, we take a Leadership Capstone class, where we learn how to be leaders and advocates for our beloved profession. This class includes a 2 week leadership externship where go to different sites to learn the necessary skills that aligns with their goals. Thus, it’s a very personalized experience. It’s also different from fieldwork in that we’re not trying to learn clinical skills — we are building that extra set of skills to help our own careers as well as OT flourish.

As you can imagine, the externships can look very different — I know people who have gone to the American Occupational Therapy Association’s headquarters in Washington DC to learn about legislation and another who went to New York to learn the administrative side of running a private practice. Some stayed local in Los Angeles while some went abroad.

I chose to go to Ghana! International advocacy and improving my cultural competency has always been an interest of mine. Ghana is a great program and is organized by a USC OT professor, Dr. Bonnie Nakasuji. There were 32 students that attended and 11 practicing therapists. We stayed at a boarding school for children with disabilities and we came up with vocational activities for them to determine which vocation in Ghana is best matched with their strengths — we focused on sewing, woodworking, and leatherworking. This was so valuable because I learned how to gear activities to a low-resource population — we used rocks and sticks that we found at the school for some of these activities. Here’s a picture of me and one of my assigned kids Francis doing some woodworking!

Another role that the students had in Ghana was to pair with Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) workers. These were students at the local university whose job is to go into the community, identify those with disabilities that need intervention, ensure they access resources, and also encourage them to follow through with therapist recommendations at home after discharge from therapy. We educated them about the scope of OT and taught them basics in assessment and treatment. It was great just making new friends too! I did some student ambassador work off the job and gave them some OT buttons so they can spread the word about OT!

The externship occurs right before our spring break so I had some time to travel with 5 of my close friends. We flew to Northern Ghana and spent time in a national park, where we saw wild savannah elephants up close. Disclaimer: these elephants are not mating — that is a baby elephant playing with its friend!

I learned so much about myself on this trip. I’m still missing the kids in Ghana and am hoping that I’ll get to see them again.

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