Black History Month: Lydia's story

Lydia Otchere is one of our international nurses and has moved from Ghana to Essex to work as a mental health nurse for EPUT.

As part of Black History Month, Lydia talks about her nursing journey and gives an insight into her life in Ghana.

My love for working in mental health care

I am the first-born of my parents, one of four girls. So growing up I saw myself as a big sister who needs to set up some standards and be a role model for my siblings.

So after my senior high school education, I decided to go into nursing, which was a better option for me to get a job and then help my parents look after the younger ones.

After my training I got a home care job looking after an 80-year-old dementia patient and that one year period of looking after gave me a whole lot of exposure about people with mental health and the help they need to recover.

Getting to know her personally, spending about six days a week with her, gave me a lot of great pleasure taking good care of her. To date, I still get in contact with her. She calls me and checks up on me, and I also call her. It has been a great experience.

My love for mental health care started when I was in training. I had a six week affiliation with a mental health facility in Ghana.

Back in Ghana some of our mental health facilities are not in good shape so they struggle with resources.

So I had to organise my friends and then we bought some few things and put up monies and made a donation to the ward. They were so appreciative of what we did.

We formed a foundation, which is still active in Ghana and every year on October 10, which is World Mental Health Day, we do education from schools to schools, churches, everywhere, on platforms such as social media and talk about what mental health is and the love and the care we need to give people.

After my training, my dad put it in the back of my mind that Ghana doesn’t give too much exposure to the nursing field so you have to go out there, it’s either you travel outside the country and gather the experience in order to go far.

The day I moved from Ghana to here I told myself I’m going to make it and I’m going to have that exposure to advancing my career.

I am a Fante lady and Fante ladies know how to cook!

I am a Fante from the central region of Ghana and we have a different culture and different diversity to other parts of Ghana.

Most Fante ladies know how to cook and that is one thing that is unique about us.

We have different festivals which we celebrate, even within the Fante tribe, which makes us all of unique but when we come together and we are speaking our language, it is the same thing. Just that the intonations are different from each of the tribes within the Fante itself.

Black History Month is a good opportunity to educate people

Black History Month will help expose we Africans to this part of the world because sometimes you’re walking down the road and somebody looks at you and it’s like ‘what are you doing in this part?’

They don’t really tell you but their actions say because they look at you in a certain way.

I think moving forward we will need to continue with education. That will create more awareness about how black people from Africa can also be included in this part of the world and we can input and share our knowledge and resources to help improve the NHS, EPUT and everywhere in England.

We are all individuals. We are unique in our own ways so there’s no way of comparing yourself to others.