I was excited to finally travel to Ghana. Grace Marin Church and individual members had helped to sponsor me for this leg of the trip, my brother’s friend from college (Kwaku) was from Ghana, and it seemed traveling all over Asia people from Accra kept popping into life.
After landing, the culture was immediately apparent. I hadn’t walked more than 50 feet into the terminal and already a uniformed official was asking for money. Feigning ignorance I shook his hand a kept going.
Meeting the flight were three people with happy dispositions: Dennis (Rafiki Village Director), Samuel (his toddler son), and Sarah (a Rafiki six month volunteer). They made the hour long drive to the village an easy trip. (Dennis and Samuel behind Sarah.)
Ghana is by far the wealthiest African country truly visited thus far. There are nicely paved streets and actual sidewalks with lampposts in places. The people are well dressed, but the dichotomy is that the harassment for “tips” is at the highest level thus far.
The Accra Rafiki Village is actually out in the country, complete with a genuine 4x4 worthy dirt road. This makes the adventure feel more like East Africa. As with all the villages the volunteer staff is very warm and welcoming. The extra special addition in this village was getting to meet Melissa Wiedemann in person. She is a generous woman who went through seminary with my pastor and has kept an e-mail dialogue going since my decision back in June 2006 to volunteer with Rafiki. I made good on my promise to Rod and gave her a big hug from the Miles family. (Although, truth be told she went straight for a hug, no hang-shake intro required. She is that warm and inviting.)
The remaider of the stay was truly a blur. There was a day of introduction meetings and orientation to the village schedule and then that evening… bam, “Did anyone get the license plate of the truck that just hit me?” I had been ignoring the obvious symptoms of malaria for weeks, which had allowed the parasite to multiply exponentially until a final “crashing point”. One of the detriments of a Christian Science upbringing is the ability to endure nuisance level illness for long durations. Unfortunately, what I had thought was simple fatigue and “getting used to the heat” was the deadly parasite regenerating in my system. The net result was a temperature of 101, after the fever broke and over a week in bed and roughly ten days of very limited activity outside the guesthouse.
The beautiful thing is that Dr. Joy, the village director’s wife, lived right on-site. Thank God for modern medicine, otherwise the bodily punishment would have been far more dangerous. The first course of medication pulled me back from the yellow green jandus edge. After over a week of recuperation Dr. Joy took me for blood work and there was still a (1+) parasite count in my system, so we brought out an even more aggressive treatment that ultimately did the trick.
The clock was ticking towards my departure date and I still was not able to manage more than a few hours in an active vertical position. These hours were spent tutoring three girls and a young boy in their reading comprehension skills. It was fun to work with all four students, but I’m guilty of having favorites.
One of them was Mary, a learning impaired girl who is just about as sweet as can be. Mary didn’t just walk to our “reading time” she ran to meet me.
She loved to read books together, with an enthusiasm and joy for life that was especially needed at the time.
I don’t know who had more fun Mary or me?
The other kids were great and some had energy for learning, while others read with the labored effort I had at that age. It was really thrilling when Florence started to correct herself mid-sentence, proving that she was carrying the previous day's learning forward.
Rita reading out loud.
After over ten days of relative "bed rest", these few hours of effort with the kids left me totally drained of energy. How could I continue the trip to Egypt? Fortunately, the second round, high dosage, multiple drug therapy took hold and on the departure day a fuller strength returned.
The last morning in Ghana was spent visiting the school classes. The teachers do a great and patient job of teaching a very energetic group of children.
My "Guest Cottage Com Padre", Sarah, has been a kindergarten teacher for about the last five months. She is great with the kids and has an amazing ability to tell multiple siblings apart. If I am remembering correctly Sarah has a set of triplets and a set of twins in her class. (Can you pick them out?)
For some reason, Ghana has an unusually high multiple birth rate. Local lore attributes the phenomenon to a diet high in yams, that are apparently high in estrogen. I don't know if this is factual, but there are at least two sets of triplets and several pairs of twins at the Rafiki Village in Ghana. This is the highest sibling rate in any of the four Rafiki villages visited.
During my school visit recess was called. It was absolute joy to be able to play quarterback for a schoolyard game of “American Football”. We all had a great time and much to everyone’s surprise the girls beat the boys. Usually, the boys dominate football (soccer), so they may have made the assumption that this would carry over to “American Football”, but the boys had “hands of stone” while the girls made some great catches to make up for some pretty bad passes from the quarterback.
In each Rafiki Village the Junior Secondary School young adults learn a trade as well as study their country specific and traditional subjects. In Ghana the trade skill is basket weaving and they are great artists.
Their product is shipped back to the United States and is sold in the Rafiki Exchange to help support the orphanage.
The kids have time to be "children" as well. One of the favorite afternoon games, seemingly every afternoon, was football (not the American kind but the World variety). Somehow, teams would naturally develop and they would play a "single goal keeper" version of the game, similar to half-court basketball. At dinner each night I would hear the excited stories of goals scored, like this one by Godfred, and successful defense. (Yep, no shoes, shin-guards, referee, over zealous parents or civil lawyers on the sidelines, just pure fun.)
One of the aspects of these particular children that I loved was their ability to be creative. A few came up with a "bottle cap version" of football. All that was needed were a few bottle caps, a small tightly balled piece of paper, and two small plastic tabs to shoot the caps into the ball. I was fascinated just to watch them play, with their defensive and offensive bottle cap fore placement strategies. It was like chess for jocks. :-)
Another favorite past time is picking mangos, when they are in season. These mangos are not the huge, perfect, "grafted" variety found in supermarkets at home, but the smaller fiberous fruit. The children seem to love the challenge of getting them off the tree as much as eating them.
Preparing to leave the Accra Village I was seriously blessed by a visit from Dr. Joy, Nancy (a St. Louis native and fellow Ted Drew's fanatic), and Joy's son Samuel. His nanny would bring Samuel by the guest cottage twice a week, when her sister was cleaning, to visit. His happy disposition, smiling face, and impromptu songs were definite buoyancy for me during the tough malaria times.
I have to include my other "buddy" in the blog. This lizard was the coolest, by far, seen in Africa. He would sun himself on the concrete curbs, doing his version of aggressive "push ups" any time another smaller lizard would venture anywhere near. This seemed to do the trick and the smaller lizards would give him a wide berth. Hey, I was impressed viewing the whole scene, each day, from inside the guest cottage.
Returning strength was a welcomed blessing as I faced a “red-eye” flight from Accra to Dubai, followed by a nine-hour layover.
As luck would have it, yours truly, had a center seat between two smelly men with no concept of personal space or hygiene. Translated, that meant no armrests and they were both extended into my seat so far that my shoulders were curled forward. This was not going to work for the seven and a half hour flight. Gradually, I began to establish boundaries and it was no big international incident to assert shoulder and elbow position. What came to be evident was that “no personal boundaries” extended both ways, so it was perfectly acceptable when one of their elbows left the rest momentarily (in a body shift) to assume that space. When their elbow tried to resume position, the space was filled and it simply dropped along side the rest. Fair is fair, so when I shifted or got up to walk down the aisle the body masses had re-draped over into my seat. “No worries”, simply start from square one in the seat "border skermish" physical negotiations.
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