A New Projector!

So the District here has received a new projector and because no one really seems to know how it works Elder Terry was put in charge of its safe-keeping. Hearing this, Spencer and Joey got really excited and asked if they'd be allowed to use it for their business classes. What a great improvement the projector is over the tiny tv they've had to use thus far.

I was not here this night because I stayed home to watch one of the semi-finals world cup games - I just couldn't bare missing it! But Emily took these pictures and I just felt like I needed to post them.
These are many of the regular children who come to play when there are business classes. They're crazy, but darling! Emily is great with them and when I decide I don't want to sit in the business classes anymore, I go out to let the children distract me also.

Unexpected Flowers

So the other morning as Emily and I are walking out the door to go to school I almost ran into Stephen. He promptly asks me if I know "this man". I saw a guy on the bench and didn't recognize him, kind of stumbled over my words and said, "uh... sure". Then I realized he was talking about a man who was standing just behind him, and I definitely didn't know him.
Stephen then said "Today is a special day! This man has brought you flowers!"


I then see these really cool flowers that were HUGE! Come to find out it had been a festival for the last two weeks commemorating a major loss in war when Ghana went to war against some big European country - probably England, and that day was the end of the festival and a "quiet" day. The people weren't even allowed to pound fufu (their main meal that's eaten almost every day).

Well, whoever this man is, and why-ever he had the desire to bring 4 obronis flowers for this special day is beyond me, but I loved the flowers! They definitely made my morning!

Spencer wasn't quite so thrilled as I was about the flowers, but he held them for the camera anyway :)

Surprise Trip for the Girls

So when we made it to Ghana just over 7 weeks ago they approved our visas for 60 days. That was May 18th - our plane tickets out of Ghana aren't until August 5th. That's not only 60 days... which posed a slight problem.

Our 60 days is up now in just over a week, and we still haven't been able to renew our visas. Not because they haven't let us renew them, but because we haven't had time to go to Accra and get it done. So this morning Joey talked to the guy from the church who is in charge of all the travel and visa renewing for the missionaries and luckily for us he will be able to take care of it. The only things he needs from us are our passports, 40 Ghana Cedis and 2 passport photos and we are going to the temple in Accra tomorrow with the branch so we can just leave the stuff there for him to get it taken care of for us. YAY! Only one problem...

The passport photos were an easy one for the guys, they had 4 taken when they opened the bank account in Kwabeng and still have 2 left from that. Easy! But Emily and I suddenly needed a surprise trip to Kwabeng so that we could get ourselves 2 passport photos of our own. The guys needed to go to Asunafo to teach their second class, so Emily and I were on our own for this chapter of our adventure.

So off we went. We weren't thrilled to take a taxi on our own because we didn't want the guy overcharging us because we're two white girls with no escorts, but luck was definitely on our side. Not only did we catch a Tro Tro (pronounced "cho cho" with a slight "r" sound in between the "ch" and the "o" but barely noticeable to the ear untrained in Ghanaian speech) just before it filled up, nabbing the front seats and everything!

To our great surprise the last person to jump in was none other than Nicholas Mensah, Esther's husband! It was such a relief to see a friendly face that we knew and it was easy for us to ask him the price. I'm not sure why asking the driver seemed more difficult, but it was just a nice comfort to have Nicholas there with us.

Once we arrived in Kwabeng our next obstacle was finding a place to take our passport pictures. When the guys went it was quite the ordeal, so they made sure to let us know which place to go to first - but no one seemed to be at either the "bad" place they'd gone to OR the "good" place. Eventually, after going back and forth between the two, someone finally decided to call the guy who ran the "bad" photo shop and he finally decided to show up. I was a little skeptical, knowing that this was they guy we were told not to patronize, but seeing as we didn't really have any other options I was also grateful that someone had shown up.

It all turned out okay though! It was actually VERY fast and VERY efficient. Instead of having to pay 6 cedis each, since we only needed 2 photos a piece, he was able to take both our pictures on one polaroid picture (pretty facinating actually) and once both our pictures had been snapped it was only 60 seconds later and we had the pictures done! Not "BAD" at all! ;) I guess when the guys had gone to him his camera wasn't really working so it took forever before he finally told them they'd have to go somewhere else, which wasted quite a bit of time. It worked like a charm for us though! I loved it!

Then, after the disappointing news that the popcorn machine was not there anymore (which I was greatly anticipating) we then needed to find a way home. Transportation to Kwabeng is always easy to find because it's on the way to Anyinem, which is a main transportation hub, but going back to Abomosu is a little bit harder. We were told when we first got here that we would need to catch a taxi into Anyinem before being able to come back to Abomosu - luckily we haven't yet had to do that, but it is always a trick trying to get something to take us back. The first time we finally caught a taxi, but had to pay a little extra - but this time Emily and I got really excited when we saw the exact same Tro Tro on the way home! We slowed it down long enough for the driver to greet us and then tell us that he was staying :( SAD! But then the driver points behind us and says - "There the bus!"
And oh what a blessed sight the government bus was! Emily and I went running and got on the bus with a really big sigh of relief! We'd made it!!! Our adventure alone was successful, and boy are we ever grateful for that!

Gloria Learns to Ride a Bike

I wasn't feeling up for much dinner last night, so after eating some pineapple I left the others to go on a little walk. I walked down the road a little ways and as I got to some of the other houses I heard a cry in the distance - "OBRONI!!!" And suddenly saw 4 little children running as fast as they could towards me down a little path about a hundred yards away.

Initial reaction... What do I do? Keep walking? NO Run towards them? Don't think I want to do that either. Stand there and wait, arms open with a big smile? YES!

As they reached me all four of them jumped into my arms at the same time, about knocking me on my butt. They were so cute!!! Then as I said hello to each of them individually and asked them their names (which I couldn't really understand until asking 2 or 3 times, and now I can only remember 2 of them) they each grabbed a hold of a part of my hands and just stared and smiled at me.

Because they don't really speak English, after greeting them and asking their names, that's about all the conversation we can have. So I just kind of sat there and stared at them too. After about 10 seconds of that I started brainstorming things I could do with them. Teach them London Bridge Is Falling Down? No. Ring Around the Rosie? No. How about I find a place to sit and if they sit around me then I can think of something for us to do. Deal!

Knowing that just down the walk, close to our house, is a little mound of gravel, I decided that would be a great place to go sit with the kids. So we headed down the walk to go sit down, and as we came up to the house out came Joey, Emily, Spencer and Gloria. They had the bikes and I wasn't quite sure what they were doing, so I stuck to my original plan and took a seat with the kids.

The kids surrounded me on the gravel and as usual immediately started either playing with my hair or playing hand games with me. Plan worked! I found something to do with the kids!

But then I was still trying to figure out what everyone else was doing with the bikes. Then I saw Gloria get on. She didn't look too incredibly thrilled :)

And then Spencer told me they were going to teach Gloria how to ride a bike!
FUN!!! I love riding bikes! It made me very happy that they were teaching Gloria to ride - I had no idea she'd never learned! Apparently no one else did either, so when word got out that she hadn't then it was immediately decided that the situation needed some fixing.

She was a great student! It took very little time and she got the hang of it.

When Gloria, Joey and Emily went into the World Joy house to give Gloria a less bumpy experience so that she could learn to balance better, I continued to play with the kids as Emily snapped a bunch of pictures.


They love to try and climb on us and see how many of them could possibly be carried at once. They're so much fun!


Aren't they just darling!? What a good day!

Lately...

So the children of this wonderful little place in Africa seem to be overtaking my mind lately. Number one reason, the classes that Emily and I teach in every day have needed some recent revamping. You see, we are teaching this amazing program calle ABC's and All of Me, where we go in, teach a song about a letter and then take half of the class outside for some sensory learning in writing the letter while the other half uses dry-erase markers on wonderfully laminated paper, that so many volunteers spent hours coloring and laminating, to write these letters. It's a wonderful program and we've loved it... until recently... the white board markers have run completely out.

It's so hard to be in a place where you have absolutely no control over something like running out of white board markers. Our exhaustive search in Accra a couple weeks ago found us only 4 write board markers at a ridiculously expensive price. We started out with 22 markers, which would have been totally fine given we could run the program as it's designed to run, but seeing as this is Africa and not run anything like the US we now teach about 200 kids a day with about 70 of them using the white board markers each and every day. With that much usage it's little wonder the markers haven't lasted the duration of our stay. But this small problem has caused myself and Emily quite a bit of stress. How do you explain to a child that if they are unlucky enough to get a marker that doesn't work that you don't have anything else to give them? Especially a child that doesn't really understand your English?

So now, with only about 6 regularly reliable markers, we have bought ourselves little exercise books and after self-writing little traceable letters on each page, the children get one page to write the letter of the day in their exercise book. This, while a little more work for us everyday, has so significantly decreased stress in the classroom, which, for me is a huge plus. But I can't help but be so sad that we can't keep using the materials that Melanie Hermann and her family spent so much time preparing. If someone else is able to come someday with the same program, I am glad now that they will have a better idea of what to expect and be able to plan for that.

I am just grateful that we were set up with this program before coming here. I don't know what I'd do without it! I have no doubt we would have found other things to do, but I sure am glad that we've gotten to know the kids and had the opportunity to teach them through this program. They absolutely love it! Emily was just saying the other day that she feels bad for any other white girls that come to this village because the kids are going to be singing the letter songs to them and the white people aren't gonna have a clue what they're singing! It makes me laugh to think about it!

Anyway, the second reason the kids have been occupying my mind lately is because they're pretty much ALWAYS around! It's actually quite funny when you're in a good mood. I mean, look at these pictures:


Do you see the white outlines in the windows?

This a very common occurrence outside the window of our living room. There are frequently children outside our windows calling to us. "Obroni give me food". "Obroni I'm thirsty" "Obroni come play" Although they have learned our names now, so often hear "Spanky!" "Joe!" "I want a football" "I need a pen" and then other random gibberish in Twi, and they won't go away until one of the Ghanaians literally chase them down the walk and tell them to go away.
While sometimes it would be nice to have some privacy, it's honestly going to be something we laugh about for the rest of our lives. I love it!

If we're not in the living room, we are outside and rarely do we ever walk anywhere without getting bombarded by the kids. My favorites are the little ones, like 4 and younger (who aren't scared of you). They just run up and jump in your arms. I love squeezing them and trying to learn their names. Emily is really good at the names, but I forget almost immediately - still working on that one!

I think the hardest thing though about being here is that there is so little that really CAN do to help these kids. Usually when they ask us for food or water or a pencil you know that they probably do need it, but our ability to supply them with all those needs is so limited. It breaks my heart.

It's so hard not to be able to help these cute little ones more!

There's one little girl in the branch, Mary, whose dad, Ben (who the guys gave a loan to) honestly wants us to take her home with us to the US. There were girls talking to Emily just last night who were telling her all the kids that she needs to take home to America otherwise they don't really have a chance here. How sad is that? I wish we really could take them all with us! But I have to keep telling myself that what little we are doing here really will help them have better lives. Hopefully the guys being able to give out the loans with what little money they have, will help the people here build better lives for themselves and their kids. Hopefully by Emily and I being in the schools and making learning more fun for the kids will make them have a desire to get as much education as they can so that they can give their own children better lives.

At least that's my prayer - who knows what'll really happen, but I have to tell myself this in order to be okay here.

Independence Day!

Happy 4th of July!!!

On this day I find myself thinking about all the things I love about the US, but as I try to think about the great things in America and appreciate the freedoms that we enjoy there, I can't help but think of all the things I love about the place we are in now. I just can't help but be grateful for this opportunity of being in Ghana. While it hasn't all been a beautiful bed of roses, I have come to cherish every moment that we've spent here. Abomosu is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and the people are even better. So as everyone at home celebrates the freedoms of America I have decided to celebrate Ghana and post all sorts of pictures about our life here and everything I am going to miss like crazy when we have to leave.






I am going to miss family dinners. While this only happens about once a week because of busy schedules and crazy lives, when we all get to eat around the table (and into the living room) together it is so much fun to laugh and share stories. We have come to love our time spent with the Abus when they have time to sit down because they have so many wonderful stories to tell and we continually learn so much from them.


I am going to miss seeing Sister Abu in the kitchen and out on the porch working on dinner. She really does spend most of her day cooking and making sure that her husband, the workers (they feed the farm hands dinner when they come in from the fields) and we have food. I just think that she is the most amazing woman and I have learned so much about working hard in the home from her.


I honestly think I'm going to miss this little cooker. They put coal in it, light it and then fan the bottom of it through a hole until all the coals are white. Then they do all their cooking right there. They have a stove-top in the kitchen, but if it's possible to cook it outside on this little guy and they don't have to heat up the kitchen, then that's exactly what they do.
Here they are boiling the leftover chicken skins and bones to make chicken stock. It's really delicious. I am definitely going to miss how good they are at using every resource they have. They don't just throw their leftovers to animals, they will always find a better use for it than that.


I am going to miss raw cocoa! This is where Stephen dries out his cocoa beans before he is able to sell them to the people who make "the chocolate that you love so much" (as Stephen would say). Cocoa beans right from the tree are so delicious! You crack open the fruit and there a ton of little seeds inside.

You pull them out... like so...

and you suck on the beans. It's got the most wonderful fruity taste! It's hard to imagine that chocolate actually comes from a fruity plant.


This is the Abu's house, where we live. I will ALWAYS miss this place!

These next pictures are our room. It's a little messy, but I wanted to post these pictures because it will bring back some great memories for Spencer and I when we remember our time here.

We actually have two beds. The one on the left is the one we sleep on (notice the unused mosquito net that we've draped to the side) and the right bed is the temporary home for most off our belongings.


I don't know why this makes me so happy, but our towel holder is the curtain string of our windows. I love it!


And these are our drawers and cupboards here :) We actually do have a couple drawers in Emily and Joey's room where we keep some of our clothes, but this is where we keep the good majority of the stuff we need on a daily basis.

These next pictures are of the puppies. Oh how I love the puppies! We have named them all now. One is called Temperance because she is rather fickle when it comes to liking the humans, the only boy is called Shmallow, because he's a "fatty" and Spencer thinks he looks like a marshmallow. My favorite on is called Love (kinda self explanatory) and the last (which is Spencer's favorite) is called Mini because she's the runt of the group.
Spencer is holding Love in all these pictures. I think I'm getting closer to getting him to let me take her home.



They're so cute and cuddly!


But the puppies, believe it or not, are not my very most favorite part about Ghana and they aren't going to be what I miss the most. What I will miss the most will definitely be the kids. And more than that, I'm going to miss seeing Spencer play with all the kids. He is so darling and so good with them. I know I have his family to thank for that seeing as we have 50 nieces and nephews on his side, so he's grown up surrounded by them. But I just think it's so wonderful to watch him with the Ghanaian children. They love him and we love them!

This is Stephen and Margaret's grandson, Ernest. He has literally been glued to Spencer's side since yesterday. It's darling! Earnest found the football (soccer ball) and decided that he wanted to make it a basketball. Spencer was all for that and so I had to take pictures of them playing in the hall.

Today totally reaffirmed the fact that the kids here are my favorite. At church, Spencer and I got to go into the two primary classes and do singing time with them. We taught them the theme song for this year, "I know that my Saviour loves me". They were so darling, and watching all those precious children sing about our Saviour's love just made my heart completely melt. I'm so excited to go back next week and keep teaching them more of the song!





This is just random now, but I had to take a picture of these bikes because there's a great story behind them.
Last week Joey went on quite the voyage to two different towns (Anyinam and Nkawkaw) to see if he could find some cheap bikes for him and Spencer to ride around on. It takes a good 20 minutes to get to church and the guys have to go every night. Sometimes they're short on time and need to get there in a hurry, so bikes would be the perfect solution to the problem.
Well after a day of searching, nothing within a good price range was found. But when Joey got home and told of his adventure to Stephen, Stephen mentioned that he had a couple of bikes, but that they were broken. There is a local bike repair person in town, so Joey decided that he should check it out and see if he could get them fixed.
Sure enough, the next day the bikes were back with "workable". Meaning, they weren't top notch, but they would definitely do the job, and best of all, it only cost 15 Ghana Cedis to repair them!
On both of the bikes the brakes basically don't work, so you have to drag your feet if you need to slow down quicker than regular friction will allow, and the seats are hard a rocks. The gears don't change at all, so you're stuck for whatever terrain you're in, but they do the job. It only took one ride to flatten both tires of one of the bikes, so for another 5 cedis both tires were fixed and now they can both be ridden, which is a great thing seeing as the guys are going to start teaching classes in Asunafo, a nearby town, this week. They need the bikes if they don't want to pay a taxi every time they go. So yay for these broken-up bikes! Good times had by all!

Ghana Republic Day

6 Weeks in Abomosu!

Thursday, July 1st was Ghana’s Republic Day. While no one here in Abomosu seemed to care much that it was a “holiday” (they all still had farm work and life to attend to), the kids didn’t have school and we had VERY free day.

A week or so ago the Terrys were telling us about a waterfall, called Tini Falls, that they had gone to that’s not far from here. They said it was totally worth going to, so we decided we needed to make the trip.

Along with the four of us obronis, we invited Gloria and Susana (a girl in the branch) to come with us. Our initial plan was to catch the government bus at 9am to Anyinam and then a taxi up to the falls from there, but after waiting for the bus and realizing it wasn’t coming all six of us crammed into a taxi.
Gloria and Susana squeezed together in the front seat

And Emily, Joey, Spencer and I in the back

We switched cabs in Anyinam, and just trying to get out of the taxi station was a bit of a joke. One man parked his cab right in the middle of the pathway which prevented anyone from moving, and he refused to move. Well, that’s how we saw it because we didn’t understand a word of all the yelling that was going on. We finally made it to the base trail. Turns out, we arrived at the same time as an entire bus full of yelling, screaming, horn blowing kids. I decided it was an outing sponsored by a school if the kids wanted something to do for their day off, but whatever it was brought almost a hundred kids and adults along with it.

This bus was literally PACKED full of kids. I couldn’t believe it.

So when we got out of the cab we decided that we weren’t going to wait around for the people in the bus to exit and regroup, we were going to beat them there and have our own time at the falls.

The hike was really nice. It was more of a little uphill jaunt than a hike, but at points we all did get a bit winded. For a while it actually felt like we were circling the falls, hearing water falling on one side and then the other, but we enjoyed the journey.

It was all so pretty! I felt like we were walking in an enchanted tropical forest.

The forest around us was not even farm land (like all the other land we’ve been on here) and there were men who we saw just chopping away at the edges of the trail trying to maintain a good place for all the visitors to walk.
When we were almost there we ran into this fallen tree. It was huge! The Terrys actually told us about it. I guess when they went up there there were men there using a chainsaw to cut out 2x4s from this massive trunk. Incredible! So we had to stop and take pictures ourselves.

When we got to the waterfall this was the first thing we saw.


It was HUGE! But by huge I mean really high up and wide – the water coming over the falls didn’t really seem like very much at all. Apparently the falls are only a seasonal thing. Just a month ago there wasn’t ANY water coming over the cliff and about a month from now we’re told the amount of water will more than double here. Pretty cool huh? I guess that’s what the dry and rainy seasons will do.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for everyone to decide that the falls needed to be climbed (and since we didn’t think there was too much water, we really didn’t think we’d get too wet). Spencer led the way

The rocks were quite slippery and it was a bit more precarious than I’d imagined (along with A LOT more wet).

Gloria and Susana started yelling the second they walked in sight of the falls. At first I thought it was because they enjoyed hearing the echoes, but then Gloria told us that if you yell then more water is supposed to come over the falls, so whenever Ghanaians come up to water falls they just start yelling.

After we’d made it to the top (or as high as we could safely go) the bus people showed up, confirming what Susana and Gloria had told us, because suddenly there were not just 2 people yelling and screaming, there was a hundred! I actually found myself needing to join in, but more because I was getting completely soaked and poured on by a waterfall that I didn’t think had much water coming down. And as the surges came in we decided it was time to head down.

With all the slippery rocks it was quite a bit harder to make it down than it was to get up there so Spencer decided we needed a little help. Funny though, it was harder with his help because couldn't use both hands to steady our feet.

Here’s Spencer and I in front of the falls after we climbed down. The people behind us in the picture are only a portion of those that showed up. It was nuts, but really fun!

We then headed back down the trail and caught ourselves a taxi home. We then continued our vacation day by watching Mission Impossible 2 and making chicken tacos for dinner. It was a perfect way to the end the day and after eating our delicious tacos my stomach was definitely satisfied.