Name change for the Chippewa Area Catholic School System

4 Alumni News
Alumni Spotlight
Shelley '07 and
Jamie ‘06 Coughlin
Shelley and Jamie are daughters of Mike and Annie
Coughlin who both graduated from St. Thomas. Shelley
with a major in Neuroscience and Jamie a graduate
student at Northwestern University in the Medill School
of Journalism where she writes and produces video
content. Shelley spent six weeks this summer in Hohoe,
Ghana volunteering at a hospital and other social
institutions. Thank you Jamie for sharing Shelley’s story
with us!
Ghana
Written by Jamie Coughlin, Journalist with the Medill
News Service.
“Hello?”
I croaked into my cell phone, half asleep, snug in
bed in my air-conditioned studio apartment. Light was
streaming in through the windows, where I could see
one or two sailboats on the lake.
It was 7 a.m. on a Saturday in late June and I had been
out late with friends the night before, enjoying the brief,
transcendent Chicago summer, when the streets come
alive at the crack of dawn with runners and couples
walking their dogs along the lakeshore and don’t empty
until the last drunken 20-something has stumbled home
from Wrigleyville on the shoulders of friends.
I answered the phone on impulse; I didn’t recognize
the international number. But I did recognize the
frightened voice on the other end.
“Jam,” said a voice I had heard nearly every day of my
life. “Are you awake? I don’t know if I can do this.”
It was my sister, Shelley, calling from Hohoe, Ghana,
where she spent six weeks in the summer of 2011
volunteering at a hospital and at other social institutions.
Ghana is nation like so many of its neighbors. It is
severely impoverished. It lies on Africa’s western coast
on the Gulf of Guinea, bordered by Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina
Faso and Togo.
When Shelley was 7 years old, our family went to a
homeless shelter in Minneapolis during the Christmas
season to drop off clothes and toys. There were people
lined up around the block, many without coats. I started
to cry, but Shelley didn’t. She asked our dad what more
she could do to help.
That intrinsic desire to help others and her natural
strength to face situations others could not has steered
Shelley’s path in life. Fifteen years after the homeless
shelter in Minneapolis, Shelley, found herself on a 10day
medical volunteer trip in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
She loved the experience so much, she wanted to do
more. She started researching programs that would let
her volunteer in a medical capacity in a nation where the
help was truly needed.
“As much as I know there is a lot of poverty in the
US, these people in third world countries don’t even
have access to healthcare that the poor have in the US,”
Playing with the kids at the GBI School for the Mentally Challenged in Hohoe, Ghana.
Shelley said.
She stumbled upon non-profit Cross-Cultural
Solutions, which organizes volunteer trips abroad. She
found their program in Ghana and was convinced she
had to make it happen.
The lack of doctors or trained medical personnel in
Ghana and the infant mortality rate, which is 49 out of
1000 compared with six in the United States, were just a
few of the factors that she said made her decision easy.
She had to go.
With help from our parents and a loan from an aunt,
Shelley had the $7,000 she needed to finance the trip.
Without hesitation, she flew out Memorial Day weekend
to embark on what she later said was the most amazing
and difficult adventure of her life.
Shelley traveled for 24 hours before she finally arrived
at the tiny Accra airport. She said walking off the plane,
it was hot and crowded and a little overwhelming.
Then she got into a van for the drive to Hohoe. They
drove through the streets crowded with people selling
their wares. “There were so many people, I’m surprised
nobody got hit,” Shelley said. Small children with baskets
of fruit on their heads ran up to the van trying to sell it
to them.
Shelley said the drive to the volunteer bunkhouse in
Hohoe wasn’t for the faint of stomach. “There weren’t
lanes on the dirt road, so it was a free for all. The driver
had to weave in and out to avoid potholes and other
vehicles.”
When she got to the house she picked the top bunk in
a room she would share with four other volunteers. She
covered her bed with a mosquito net to keep out insects
and lizards. It rained all day on her first day, which was to
be expected during the rainy season. June is the wettest
month of the year, averaging more than 8 inches and
temperatures in the mid 80s, keeping the country hot
and sticky – conditions ideal for the spread of malaria.
That night Shelley met up with some of the other 40 or
so volunteers and they went out for drinks at a local bar
called Obama Gardens.
“Lots of bars, restaurants and stores are called Obama
something,” Shelley said. “They love him here.”
At the bar, Shelley and the other volunteers met some
of the locals. She told me how amazed they were with
her bright blonde hair. Never having seen blonde hair
in person before, many people kept walking up to her
to touch it.
Playing with the Mona Monkeys at the
Tafi Monkey Sanctuary