GHANA

Fortunately for those who attempt to tackle this blog, I don’t have a weeks worth of things to report on about Ghana due to the fact that I was quarantined on the ship for THREE whole days!  But in the days that I did get to spend in Ghana I had an awesome time!  The first day in Ghana I went with a big group of friends and other SAS-ers to a school/orphanage called the City of Hope Refuge, which was a little ways outside of Tema, the city where we were docked.  The school and orphanage was started and is run by a husband and wife who live at the City of Hope.  They originally started the school when the couple began rescuing children from child trafficking.  At the nearby lake Volta hundreds of children are either kidnapped or even sold or simply GIVEN AWAY by their own parents to local fishermen.  Fishing is a major industry on Lake Volta and the job requires more than one set of hands.  These fishermen often have one or two child slaves that do their dirty work for them.  The difference between the water level of the lake in the dry season vs the water level in the rainy season is drastically different, and so during the rainy season (when most of the fishing is done) there are many trees submerged under the water.  A lot of times the fishermen’s nets get caught in the trees and this is where the child slave comes in handy.  The children are often sent to jump into the water and detangle the nets from the mess of limbs and debris underwater.  This is obviously a dangerous task and many children drown trying to do their owner’s dirty work. 

            Anyways, the husband who started the organization was one of these children.  He was rescued in his early teens by a British couple who provided him with a roof over his head and an education.  After being relieved of a childhood of exploitation, he was determined to completely end child trafficking in the Volta region of Ghana.  I don’t know the total number of children they have rescued so far, but there are at least 22 freed children living at the City of Hope.  Some of these children they adopted themselves but then they also have two other “new families” that take care of the children on the property.  Each family unit has their own building and a mother and father.  I talked with the mother and father of one of the new families and the couple said that they have children who have grown up and moved away. But it isn’t just the rescued kids that go to the school.  There are also children from the nearby village that attend the school, which is actually funded by an organization in Australia. 

            Anyways, sorry for the overload of background information.  So when we arrived at the Refuge it was relatively early in the afternoon so the kids were still in school.  They first showed us around their small, concrete, open air, dirt-floor schoolhouse.  After showing us around, hey split us up into groups and put us in different classrooms with the students.  I was with the little bit older kids (life 4^th grade) and we made Valentine’s day cards.  They were very engaged in their card making until we pulled out our cameras to take a few pictures and then all the attention went immediately to our cameras.  They LOVED our cameras and looking at the pictures after we took them.  After class all the kids congregated outside the school and I became instant friends with the little girl named Rebecca.  She hadn’t been in my class or anything but she just ran up and jumped into my arms and started talking my ear off.  After talking to me about everything from bugs to her Valentines Day card, I gave her my camera and she ran around taking pictures of absolutely everything!  She was actually really good with the camera and in no time she was taking videos too. 

            After all the kids who didn’t live at the Refuge went home we got busy packing a van with 600 meals that they had been preparing all day.  The meals consisted of white rice with some unidentified red stuff poured on top and a hard-boiled egg.  We then headed to the nearby village where a lot of the kids were from to feed the 600 meals to the children there.  I can tell you right now, I’m not going to be able to come even close to properly describing the experience we had feeding the kids.  From the moment we entered the village children popped out from all directions and started chasing after the bus.  By the time we reached the spot where we were going to hand out the meals, there were swarms of people surrounding the bus and van with the meals.  The guy in charge started screaming at everyone in a different language and surprisingly the hoards of children got into somewhat organized cramped rows to wait for food.  However, what little order he had succeeded in establishing at first was lost the second they opened up the back of the van to pull out the meals.  I was standing in between the mass of kids and the van and so I ended up being shoved and squished in the mad rush to get food.  Children were shoving from all direction.  Toddlers were getting trampled.  Hundreds of little hands were sticking out of the mob and were grabbing me trying to get a hold on a little box of food.  We were supposed to be passing the meals to the next helper so they could get them to the back of the pack, but when all of this first started everyone just stood there in shock.  I didn’t even know what to think about what was going on and this definitely wasn’t what any of us expected.  I just stood there promising each kid who was begging me for a meal that I would get him or her one, even though it was so chaotic that I couldn’t even get a hold of one.  When I was given boxes to hand out, they didn’t stay in my hand for one second before someone snatched it.  In the middle of the mob of children I heard someone call my name and saw Rebecca waving at me.  I made my way through the crowd and handed her a meal.  Somehow the mass of hungry children didn’t seem to get any smaller.  When on one swarm of hungry children ran off with their meals, another swooped in grabbing at anything they could get their hands on.  While the pile of meals was disappearing quickly, the number of children kept on multiplying.  As the food stained carpet of the van gradually became more and more visible, it became more and more obvious to us that many children would be turned away without a meal.  It was so hard handing out the last few meals knowing that the next kid wasn’t going to get one.  It sounds cliché, but I really have not even come close to describing what it was like.  It was unlike anything I have ever or will ever experience again.

            The next morning I woke up not feeling so hot.  We decided just to eat breakfast on the ship and then head out to the markets, but I didn’t end up making it off the ship.  I ended up have a missssserable stomach bug that kept me on the ship for 3 days.  Even though I was feeling awful, I thought that I would just try to leave our 4^th day anyways… fail.  Since I had been put on quarantine they had my name in the computer system and wouldn’t let me off the ship at all.  After going back to the doctor and telling a few small lies they cleared me to leave the next day (so our last day in Ghana).  The next day I took full advantage of my freedom.  We went to Accra (the capital) and walked around the town a little.  But the main event of the day was the art market.  I definitely caught up to the purchases of my friends who got a whole week in Ghana.  I found some really cool paintings, a rasta man hat, a million random bracelets, a flag, a crazy looking African shirt, and my favorite… a wooden elephant covered in colorful beads.  I know, all necessary things.  But everything was so cheap and I had a lot of catching up to do.  I didn’t even end up spending all of my Cidi.  I barely made it back to the ship on time because we were outside bargaining for our last Ghanaian treasures.  Even though I spent most of the time in Ghana staring out my window (which wasn’t even facing Ghana, so I was stuck looking at the ocean), I still loved what little time I had there.  I’m upset that I missed so much, but when I think of what I did back into those 2 days, I realize it’s more than I would ever expect I would experience and wouldn’t do it any differently!

“When you are sitting in your own house, you don’t learn anything. You must get out of your house to learn.” ~Ghanaian proverb