NUGS-Cuba — General Secretary
Holding the list for a scholarship cohort five thousand miles from home
2025 — 2026 · Havana, Cuba
In one paragraph
For the 2025–2026 term I served as General Secretary of the National Union of Ghana Students in Cuba, representing the “Enrique Cabrera” Faculty of Medical Sciences — the administrative spine of a scholarship cohort several thousand miles from home. Records, minutes, welfare cases, the paperwork of students caught between two ministries, and Ghana Day. I held it through the same year as a five-rotation internship on 1-in-4 call.
What the role is
NUGS-Cuba is the representative body for Ghanaian students studying in Cuba, most of them on government-supported scholarships in medicine. The General Secretary for a faculty is the person who keeps the record: who is enrolled, who has been heard from, whose documents are where, what the Union has undertaken and whether it has been done.
Responsibility | In practice |
Records and minutes | The Union's institutional memory for the faculty across a full term. |
Welfare | First point of contact for students in difficulty — academic, financial, medical, immigration. |
Documentation | Chasing student paperwork through the gap between the Cuban and Ghanaian systems, where things stall silently. |
Representation | Faculty-level liaison with the Union executive and, through it, the Ghanaian mission in Havana. |
Ghana Day | The cultural programme — logistics, stands, and the flag on the table. |
Why I did it in my internship year
It was not good scheduling. I took it because a scholarship cohort abroad has a specific failure mode: a student in difficulty stops coming to things, and nobody notices for a term because nobody is holding the list.
That is the same failure as the patient who quietly stops attending clinic — and the same remedy. Somebody has to keep the list of who has not been heard from, and then somebody has to go and ask. I did not find it a different kind of work from the house-to-house rounds at CMF-4. It is the same instinct pointed at a different population.
Ghana, at a distance
Six years is a long time to be away, in a language that is not yours, doing something difficult. The Union is a large part of how a cohort survives it, and Ghana Day — which sounds like a party and is mostly logistics — is the day the cohort remembers what it is doing there.
Recognition
On 6 August 2026 the Union issued a Certificate of Appreciation “in recognition of your exemplary leadership, dedication and outstanding service in the capacity of General Secretary representing the Faculty of Enrique Cabrera for NUGS-CUBA during the 2025–2026 term”, signed by the Union President and countersigned by H.E. Kofi Attor, Ambassador of the Republic of Ghana to the Republic of Cuba.
Dr. (Med) David Ntiri — NUGS-Cuba President, 2025–2026
H.E. Kofi Attor — Ambassador of Ghana to the Republic of Cuba
What I took from it
Administration is what care looks like when it is applied to a population instead of a person, and it is invisible in exactly the same way. Nobody thanks you for the term in which nothing went wrong.