Heart to Heart

The ICHA Blog

Returning to Elmina by Sujatha Sankaran on August 6, 2009 | 1 comment

In little more than one month, the first ICHA outreach team will embark to Elmina, Ghana.  For me, it will be a journey back to a place that affected me deeply, a town that provided the seed that eventually gave rise to this new organization aimed at educating communities to prevent the enormous suffering caused by untreated cardiovascular illness.  It was the interactions with patients and individuals in this dynamic fishing village that helped me understand the pain that untreated cardiovascular disease causes people in underserved regions.

When I lived in Elmina in 2006, I learned to recognize the ubiquitous Akan symbols scattered throughout the town.  These rich images somehow managed to use simple representations to illustrate deeply profound ideas.  Gyename was perhaps the most common, crescent moons surrounding a gentle squiggle that symbolized faith and the omnipotence of God.  But the symbol that perhaps resonated most deeply with me was sankofa.  Sankofa, commonly represented as a bird looking backwards, translates literally to ‘go back and get it’, and illustrates positive progress through the benevolent use of knowledge, how the depth of experience from our collective pasts can and should be used to create a better future.

To me, Elmina seemed to embody sankofa—a village that is steeped in its past yet is inexorably moving forward.  Living in Elmina, you could never escape the past—the large slave castle reminding people of the atrocities of the past, the fishermen still going out to sea in wooden canoes using rudimentary nets, the Ghanaian women pounding fufu in their oversized mortars and pestles as they must have done for centuries.  And yet, the energy and bustle and motivation to go forward seemed to overshadow everything.  In the clinic, on the street, wherever I went, I was assaulted with questions.  Community health workers would ask, what do you give a patient who has chest pain? Why does heart failure cause shortness of breath? Children would ask, do you eat hamburgers in America? Do you live in Hollywood?

When I left Elmina, I never imagined that I would return so soon.  But I am returning—this time accompanied by a group of energetic volunteers eager to learn and teach as they form connections with the inspiring individuals in this dynamic town.  And I think that it’s only now that I truly realize the significance of sankofa.  Go back and get it.  Past and present traveling together, in unison, to achieve a brighter future.

There exists another representation of the sankofa symbol in addition to the bird looking backwards—this representation of sankofa strongly resembles a stylized heart.  This is more than a coincidence to me.  I am now going back to Elmina, guided by the heart of sankofa, accompanied by a community of caring and motivated individuals to share knowledge, and to help to create a better future.