Save A Life: Give Blood This Christmas.

Last Friday I read about the Korle Bu Blood bank's sorry state: They have only 80 units of blood left and are contemplating closing down (They need a minimum of 200 to run properly). The Christmas Season in Ghana usually sees an increase in accidents and as such this period is the worst possible time for the National Blood Centre to be low in stock. Having them close down means families with emergencies are going to have to look within themselves for eligible donors, or pay people to donate.

The sad news about the people lining up to sell their blood at the blood centre is, they are usually the ones with blood communicable diseases (ala HIV, Hepatitis etc). They are not a SAFE bet.

I decided that this year, I would donate some of my blood. For years, I was too low on Haemoglobin/Iron and too skinny (I once weighed in at 43kg with my 5'8 frame) but now I am of a healthy weight and for the past year, my HB levels have been excellent. I asked on twitter if anyone was ready to go with me to give blood this Christmas and after talking to Blogging Ghana, StACC-Ghana and the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, I am proud to Announce the Save A Life Christmas Blood Drive!

Join us on 22 and 24 Dec at the Korle Bu Blood Centre and 27-28 Dec at the Noguchi Memorial Institute and give some Life Saving Blood. Time is from 9am to 2pm for each day. The break in-between is to allow the staff of the National Blood Service to take their holiday break.  These brave men and women deserve the two days to catchup with family.


Donor cards will be ready for all who donate their blood two weeks after the exercise. In order to make things easier, there will be attendance lists for all who participate to facilitate pickup/delivery at a convenient location when the cards are ready. The advantages of having a donor card are:

1. They allow for speedy location of your donation records.
2. If you or a family member ever require blood, you will be first in line for what is available in storage (You get points each time you donate). Since the number of regular donors in the country is low and the bank is always operating at a minimum, it's only fair for regular donors to be given dibs whenever they have an emergency.

Not sure if you're eligible to Donate?  Here's a link to some information from the StACC-Ghana Facebook Page. You can also sign up for the event here. We need to have an estimate of the number of people attending so some form of snacks can be provided.  It is important that donors have something to drink and nibble on after giving blood. So your clicking join on the facebook event page will be very much appreciated.

I will be recording my experience on Saturday 22nd, regardless of whether or not I am allowed to donate. The blood stored in the bank only lasts for 35 days. I am hoping that my experience (and other bloggers') will encourage others to go out and give blood on the regular.  You never know when you, or a loved one may need blood. It would be a shame for the bank to be empty if you should ever be in need of some.

This is the time of year when most people choose to give back to society.  This year, let's do something different.  Grab a friend and head over to Korle Bu or Noguchi. Even if you can't donate, you can help out with serving drinks and snacks. Oh and did I mention it's an opportunity for free confidential medical screening? Let's give a little blood which will go a long way to saving lives.

Now I want to hear from YOU:

1. Have you donated Blood before? What was your experience?
2. Never donated? I want to know if you would consider giving blood.

~Daixy~

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Earth Child: Naptural Woman

A few months months ago, I made the decision to transition from relaxed hair to natural hair. I began my transition with braids; I sat for hours (with lots of breaks in between) while a frustrated hair dresser twisted my hair with extensions and turned me into an earth goddess. A couple of months after my first braid, I sat in my bathroom with a pair of scissors, contemplating whether or not I was really going to go through with it. To help things along, I grabbed my hair into a ponytail and snipped it off at the base. The photo is of me after the initial snip. You don't want to see what my face looked like after the reality of my actions hit me. Tears do not look good on Mz Daixy.
 

A week of recovery later, and I took the snippers to my hair once more and found a lace scarf to use as a headband.

 Mz Daixy's a school girl again!

I eventually went to the barber and got the last bits of permed wisp taken off.

Ignore the ginormous smile on my face.  

Luther Vandrosss and Teddy Pendergrass were whispering sweet nothings in my ear that morning.

My natural hair is a pain to take care of.  I've been relaxing my hair since the 4th grade, after my mom got tired of breaking combs in the tangled mess of kinky curls. My foray into napturality has brought back best forgotten memories of hot combs burning my scalp and combs and brushes snapping like twigs. It's impossible to comb this hair when it's dry, it won't lie down no matter what you do to it and I've had to say goodbye to afternoon naps (cuz I can't tidy it up afterwards without getting it wet).

I've considered locks and passed. Locks are gorgeous, I'll admit but knowing that the only way to get rid of them is to hack off my hair has me balking. I'm going to let it grow out and bring back the afro for a bit while I work out natural ways of making the hair soft and easier to manage. Still, I'm enjoying the fresh look and am sticking to switching up between the natural fro and braids. I even posed for this gorgeous pic.

Transitioning may very well be the best thing I've ever done for myself. Becoming an earth child is wonderful. I've begun cutting out chemicals from my diet and have also been removing checmical lotions and such from my beauty regime. In future, I will be sharing some of my homemade recipes for skin care (trying to find the best one for treating my acne prone and scarred skin) for those of you who are looking for natural alternatives also.

I apologise for my absence on here (I've no real excuse other than that life's been pretty demanding the past couple of months). It will not happen again. Thanks to all who moved with me from my old blog and are still here despite my truancy.

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BVR

Yes it's an Acronym.
No it does not stand for Beyond Visual Range.

BVR or Biometric Voters Registration is a newfangled system of registration that the Electoral Commission of Ghana has undertaken for the 2012 Elections. Basically, the old voter's register is being tossed out and a new one taking its place.  The cool thing about this new register is that it won't just have your demographic data and a simple photo like the old one.  Oh no,  This register is bigger and better than that! It's going to have your biometric information.

What's biometric, you ask?  Such a big word for a simple thing, really.  Biometric information is simply your physiological information.  In this case, the EC is taking fingerprints and high resolution photographs of voters for storage in a giant database.

Perhaps I watered it down a bit too much. What the EC is really doing is scanning your fingerprints on a sensor (it's not placing your fingers in ink and pressing them on paper for some archaic forensic expert to go inspect with a magnifying glass) and storing the resulting computer image for later matching. Even better is the facial recognition aspect of the registration process.  Yes, those high res images of you are not for nothing.  They're so that a computer programme will be able to match your facial features to that of the image.  Pretty cool, huh?

One thing that has to be made clear right off the bat is that there isn't going to be biometric voting this year.  There isn't any such thing.  Rather, what we're going to have is a biometric registration (collection of your usual biodata and fingerprints plus facial image) and on the day of voting, biometric verification.  That means, that on the d-day, the EC is going to check to make sure that the holder of the card is truly who they say they are.  Your fingerprints won't disappear (unless you end up losing your fingers in some freak accident or go to war with some local gangs) and unless you're tossing acid in your own face or planning some major reconstructive surgery, your face won't either.  So, instead of having someone look at your card and say you've gained too much weight so it can't be you in a photo or that your id card has faded so they can't be sure that it's you, the EC is going to let the computer do the talking. And the resulting ID Card?  Why, surely it's going to have a microchip that will contain all your information, just like a biometric passport. 

*cough cough* That's what you would get if we lived in a CSI world. It's all one big misconception! I was really excited when I heard about the BVR and being somewhat of a forensics fan, I ran through several possible scenarios involving computer algorithms and highly trained agents.  That, my friends, is not the case in this BVR.

See, I have various issues with the ongoing BVR.  Eight hours in a queue (and only because I was ushered into the express lane on account of I had been there the previous day).....hours in the baking sun; tired and hungry and afeared for my safety on account of the arguing and browbeating that is oft to occur in heavily populated areas like mine,  and what I experienced when I finally had my turn was a smudged substandard fingerprint scanner which I had to insist on cleaning myself. I figured it was very clear.  Just as you can't see out of your spectacles with streaks of oily prints on your lens, the scanner will be hard pressed to capture a lone print with several overlaying it. Perhaps I should mention that the scanner being used is an optical one. It behaves as a camera (and therefore an eye) should.

Even after wiping down the scanner, it couldn't pick up the prints on my last two fingers.  Mind you, I'm not a wrinkly old woman.  I have not lost any fingers.  It took someone else holding my fingers down for them to finally get all my fingers scanned. And the photograph? Eugh they shouldn't have bothered.  My last one (a black and white photo) of me unwashed and sleepy cuz I'd been dragged out of bed at 4am was much clearer than the image these search and peck typing Agents captured.  There is no way in high heaven that the image they captured can be used to identify me later on. 

And then we can talk of my new card.  My word for it is not recognised by the oxford learners' dictionary.  SHOCKPRISED!!! That's a mixture of shock and surprise. In this case, I was also extremely disappointed.  In the first place, It was a flimsy sheet of paper produced by a simple HP OfficeJet printer. A lady waaaay at the back cut it out (crookedly) for me with a pair of scissors and laminated it.  I have shaky hands.  I have never been trusted with a pair of scissors (least not more than once) and I can assure you that I would have done a better job than she did but I digress.

This ID card is the flimsiest I have ever had.  My university of Ghana ID was way better. The same can be said for what the National Service secretariat gave me. Even the previous ID card was more sturdy than what they gave me.  There is no magnetic strip and after speaking with someone, I discovered that the cameras being used for the facial images and supposedly to permit facial recognition are simple 2 megapixel cameras.

Really? 2MP cameras? My 10MP camera would not allow for 50% accuracy.  What on earth makes them think that a 2MP will do the job? There is a Barcode, however.  Perhaps that will be used? I shudder to think what would happen, if they attempted to use these dodgy gadgets to identify people before letting them go join the queue to the ballots boxes, come election day but that will be discussed in another post. The idea of a scan-able card sits better with me than the idea of them trying to match the data they collected, seeing as how dodgy the equipment has turned out so far. When the EC Chairman spoke about the exercise back in February, he was not really clear about how they would verify voters.  I quite got the impression we were on the same page.  Ah well...We'll just wait and see what happens.

Dr Kwadwo Afari Gyan, the current EC Chairman stated last year, that we were not ready for BVR.  The politicians called him a fool.  They insulted him left and right on every platform they could get a hold of and so here we are, a nation undergoing an exercise which in my humble opinion, we are not ready for.

None-the-less, it is an exercise being undertaken nationally and without participating, one would not be allowed to vote, come December 7, 2012. 

As discouraging as the registration process has been so far, Ghanaians have impressed with their turnout. The EC claims that about 6.5 million out of the expected 12million Ghanaians have registered so far, and that was after 16 days into the exercise.

Hopefully the rest of the eligible population will also come out to register. Yes, the queues are long and the sun blazing.  Yes, it's going to feel like a waste of time but one thing should get people out to register.  It's the same thing that had me stick in the queue, and that's the fact that no responsible and eligible Ghanaian should abstain from the exercise, no matter how tedious it is. It is up to US to choose our future leaders. Sitting on our thumbs and letting others choose for us, then complaining when they install someone incapable is unacceptable behaviour. 

We live in a democratic society. We have been given the right to choose our leaders.  It is our responsibility to exercise that right and no amount of frustrations should stop us from doing just that!

I'm still excited about the idea of biometric registration. I can't wait for a time when we will be able to vote by simply scanning our eyes and swiping a single finger to get access to a polling booth. Perhaps that's more Star Trek than CSI but hey, a girl can have high hopes for the country she loves. 2020 elections perhaps?


~Daixy~

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Dealing with Scoliosis: The Foot Chronicles

From the very moment I was diagnosed with scoliosis (back in high school) two things were knocked into my head. One, that I should get used to the constant pain and inability to stand straight, and two, that I should forget about wearing high heels. It really didn't bother me much, not being able to wear heels, and as I've always been a "tall girl" and was going through a sort of tomboyish phase (can't be a real tomboy if you're not sporty), I turned my attention to sneakers. 

I remember my mom's constant battles to get me to wear flat granny shoes (which I considered to be school marmish) and out of the jeans, baggy shirts and sneakers combo.  Even when she could get me into a sexy spaghetti top, I'd pull on a pair of baggy jeans and one of my brothers' or dad's long sleeved shirts to cover the top.  My entire university education was spent battling my mother on what to wear (as a proper young lady).

Eventually, I hit a phase where I said "screw you" to my orthopedic surgeons and chiropractors/ physiotherapists. I'd finally reached the point when my feminine instincts rolled in and I wanted to look as glamorous as the next chic. So I began my heel collection. It's nothing much, I assure you and consists mainly of peep toe pumps and sandals. It didn't take long for me to realise one thing though, the docs and all were right: I can't wear my gorgeous heels for too long or I end up spending days laid out in bed with heating pads and liniment to keep me company. My solution? Carrying around a pair of flat slippers or in recent years, comfortable flats.

No not these

Source: charlottehappening.com

You know, like these? They're beautiful and not marmish at all!

Source: coquette.blogs.com

These are so comfy!  And fit easily under my seat in the car (or in my handbag) and on those days where I can't deal with the woes of a high heel but have one problem.  Unlike my sneakers where I wear socks which absorb any sweat off my feet (I live in Africa, people), my flats are impossible to wear stockings with. They are simply cut too low to accommodate them. What makes it worse is, they do not come with removable inlays.  As embarrassing as this is to confess, my ultra comfortable shoes have plagued me with one problem.


I can't clean the bloody things!!!

There.  I've said it. I have found it impossible to care for my flats.  I'm not the only one with this problem.  Yes, I've aired them  like I air my sneakers but they do not smell like new shoes anymore.  I am told the slightly vinegar-ish smell is normal for leather shoes but I refuse to wear shoes that I cannot clean!!! My feet smell absolutely fine. They smell nothing like the shoes do.  The second my feet are out of them, they smell fine.  I've had a shoe maker remove the insoles so I could scrub them without ruining the shoes.  I have to agree that the smell isn't bad but the thing is I've never had this problem with sneakers! To me, it's simple.  Shoes are shoes. Canvas may breathe differently from leather but I simply refuse to accept something that isn't natural to me, especially when none of my leather heels have this effect.

So I set out to do two things.  Learn how to avoid or minimize my back pain when wearing heels and also how to take care of my troublesome flats. I discovered the following:

1. Ultra Low Foot liners by Minicci 
2. The Proper Way to Walk in Heels 
3. How to take care of flats the Daixy way.

I adore the foot liners.  They are low enough that they do not show when I put on my flats and  thick enough to absorb any moisture that my feet my produce.  Even better, they are machine washable for those days when I'm feeling too lazy to do anything by hand.

I also discovered that you can take away the tomboyish clothes but you can't take away the walk.  I'm practicing in my heels every evening now for fifteen minutes a day.  Hopefully I'll be a pro soon and quit injuring myself every time I wear my stilettos.

Finally, I have devised a way to deal with my need to have my shoes smelling like roses.  First, of course was removing the cloth lined inlays from the shoes so I could clean them.  Then I discovered odour controlling inlays that could go into the shoes, on top of the inbuilt ones. I refuse to use deodorants (why mask a smell?  I always say to attack the problem head on) and as I've become a bit of a home remedy junkie, I decided to find something in my home which would work as well as the charcoal inserts suggested by a friend in the USA. My solution works well with the fact that I like to clean my inlays and have thus ripped them out.  My solution?  Baking soda!  Every time I take off my flats now, I toss in a teaspoon of baking soda and shake it about.  I leave it in there when I dry them in the sun and pour it out when I'm ready to wear the shoes.  Just tap gently and it all pours out.  I wipe the insides of the shoes with a cloth and slip in my stockinged feet and away I go.  Comfort, Pain-free and absolutely sure all moisture is taken care off.

It's been a strange journey, finding a way to deal with scoliosis.  The teasing all through primary and high school, the awkwardness of growing into my body and finally finding a "me" I'm comfortable with, and finding a way to look and feel beautiful without sacrificing my health and comfort.  I believe I've reached my zen foot-wise.  Now it's down to proper exercise and diet to keep my weight stable and myself pain free.

What's your story with shoe care or walking in heels?  Is there anyone else out there with back pain who dares to wear heels?


~Daixy~

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