Ready!!!!

Yesterday everybody had to be off the ship for an inclining test, pretty much a test to determine stability and center of gravity.   Because this evacuation they planned a day for us to go to a local zoo/adventure park. Not necessarily the number one thing I would choose to do, but since Mercy Ships decided to do this for us I went and enjoyed myself. While I was waking around with some friends it gave me ample opportunity to think some things over. Last night made my fifth night on the ship and I still haven't posted anything about our time in Ghana so I figured this would be a great chance to tell you a little bit about it.

My team left DFW airport on Sunday, July 15th knowing very little about what all would be happening during our time in Ghana before we got to the ship on August 2nd. We flew from Dallas to London-Heathrow and had about a 6 hour layover. Monday afternoon the 16th we left Heathrow and flew to Accra, Ghana, the capital city. After about 36 hours of travel we made it to an international hostel were we stayed the night before heading to the village we would be in for two weeks.

The bus ride was another 6 hours into the country so it ended up taking 3 full days to get to the village from the Mercy Ships headquarters in Texas. We were greeted with dinner by the ladies that cooked for us and had some time to settle in. 

The women stayed in a house near the road. There were twenty of them for one bathroom. The men, couples and families stayed in a compound close by. Each had their own room (couples, families & men) and a bathroom for each room.

 We went up the hill the next morning to Good Shepard International School. That's where we would be working in the village. The school has 3 main areas Pre-Primary, Primary & High School. Each area was like a pole-barn with a tin roof. Some of the classrooms had half-walls (made from clay/mud bricks) around them and some had full walls between the classes.
 

There were several different project that we tackled over the many working days. Putting gutters on two of the buildings, putting concrete-brick walls around the classrooms of the pre-primary and digging a drainage trench on the hill above the high school to prevent rain from washing the poles out. At the school the other main project was back-filling  the side of a hill into some footings that had been pored for another building. These all might sound like easy tasks but they're much different when you are put into the setting of an African village. Wednesday, Thursday  Friday we worked full days. Breakfast being served from 7 to 8 and then devotionals before going up the hill to work at the school. We would work in our assigned areas till noon and go back for lunch. At 1 we would go back up the hill and work till around 5. Just in time to get showered, if the water was on, before getting some food for dinner. In the evenings we were free to do whatever we wanted. If the power was on we could sit around and play some card games or do some activities with the kids from the village. A couple times you could find several people sitting around a single computer watching a movie but it was often that we would be going to bed early because of a combination of it getting dark early and being tired from working hard all day.

Saturday a group of people wanted to go to a lake near by but since there isn't any type of tourism in the area they couldn't find transportation to get them there. It ended up being a day to get your laundry done by some local ladies or doing it yourself (by hand) witch wasn't too bad. The hard part was getting it to dry in the humidity before it got stinky again.
On Sunday we went to some different local churches. The forty of us spit up between an Evangelical church, a Roman Catholic church, and two Pentecostal churches. It was a surprise to hear them start the service with a song I learned in Sierra Leone, it was like God saying welcome back to Africa. We met back up for lunch and I started editing some of the pictures that I had taken during the whole week.

Monday morning the rain started. It had rained earlier in the week but I think it rained at some point everyday till we left. We started off the week with a review of how everybody was doing. Things that were bothering people, places that people could see God working and ways to make the week better than the first week had been. The first week wasn't horrible but there were things that were draining people of energy and the conditions where we were staying wasn't giving people the chance to recharge their energy levels. After the meeting people headed back to the site and got working on their different projects.

One of my favorite things about the second week is that since there were so many of us the leaders allowed us to start side projects where we more trained. Several of the nurses started spending a day working in the clinic, some people were able to start VBS, a few people started working on broken desks of the students and I got to work with the cooks for a few of the meals.

The remainder of the week went by with the same schedule. After eight full days out on the various work sites a tremendous amount of work was finished.

The gutters were finished on both of the buildings, the trench was dug and lined with rocks to prevent washout, many desks were fixed back to "usable" condition, the concrete walls were up and they started pouring the support columns. We were able to back-fill much more of the foundations than what we expected, great friendships were formed between the nurses and workers at the clinic.
Friday afternoon we finished at lunch time and a group of guys played football (soccer) against the school team. Saturday we were able to do laundry again and some people began packing to return to Accra. Sunday we split up again and went to different churches and had a meeting in the afternoon for the next few days of travel that we would have to get to the ship.

 Monday morning was spent finishing packing everything up, saying goodbye to the people we had met in the village and a big thank you ceremony by the kids, teachers and leaders of the school. After eating lunch we got on the bus and headed to Accra for our final leg of travel to the Africa Mercy.

Tomorrow I will start my first day of work and I am READY!!!!! Stay tuned for a post on the final leg of travel to the ship and a few more of the side stories from our time in Pai Katanga.