Exciting work is coming!

Finally ideas are beginning to gain momentum.  I came away from the All Volunteer Conference earlier this month with lots of ideas and now some of them are starting to happen.  We’ve all but finished the latrine project—all that’s left is the final evaluation for the NGO.  With the help of World Vision (and the District Assembly when they finally release the money), we helped 25 families in Damanko afford latrines for their households.  Now they don’t have to go to the bush to take a dump.  Now it’s time to move on to other things.

Camp GGLOW will be in a couple weeks, and I’m real excited for that.  Some years ago some volunteers in some other country started a camp program for instilling leadership skills and inspiration in young girls (in our case young guys too).  Now, many of them are held in Ghana, and those of us who are in the Nkwanta area are making our own.  I could only take five junior high students, so I went to the two junior high schools in town and asked the teachers to choose a boy and a girl from each.  I also asked the teachers from the smaller English-Arabic (Muslim) school to choose a girl for me.  I am very happy with their choices and look forward to taking these kids to Nkwanta for a week.  I expect it to be as crazy and silly fun as American camp is, which is something these kids will never have even heard of before.  There should be 60 to 70 kids all held in the conference area of Nkwanta’s hospital and we’ll talk to them about life after school, finishing school, boy-girl stuff, health, decision-making, goal setting, etc.  I can’t wait to see how they do.

One of the more popular events the previous volunteers in Damanko planned was a large soccer tournament which Kwesi is eager to replicate.  Football is a big draw around here, so it offers a rich opportunity to educate people about any number of subjects.  Since we have this lucrative pot of gold program called PEPFAR, it will be an HIV/AIDS Football Tournament.  We invite football teams from the surrounding bush villages and provide focused education to the team players, and then to the crowd in between matches.  We’ll even set up free testing at the clinic.  The whole thing should last three days and be a whole lot of fun.  The thing I’m excited about is that we were able to coincide this event with Peace Corps’ training program, so for this event, PC will send us several of the new volunteers who will be arriving in country in about a week.  They won’t come to us until the end of July.

I’ve also organized ten or so kids to participate in a nationwide art contest focused on HIV/AIDS prevention messages.  Plenty of kids like to draw, but don’t often get the chance, so now I’ve got several of them in my house the past few afternoons drawing all kinds of things.

Next week we’ll start my vegetable garden experiment.  I bought seeds for carrots, green peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, and green beans in Tamale so we’ll see if they can grow here.  If they do, it will be a great opportunity for some to farm some extra vegetables for the market.  We’ll transform half of my “yard” into the garden and add tomato and basil plants.  We’ll also start nursing moringa trees.  Any seeds I don’t use, I’ll give to Joseph so he can start his own little garden too, and maybe it will help ease some of the income stress he feels.

Balls are rolling and it's exciting.  Wish you all could see it!