Back in Charleston now having gotten through days of food poisoning that I got on my last day in Ghana. I am so thankful it was the last day instead of the first day. As I was sitting in emergency department I was thinking about how our people in Okurase don’t have this luxury and as I felt I was about to die, if I were in Okurase I would have been closer to that reality over something that is highly fixable. As a health care professional, health care in the U.S. rarely meets my standard and it is so frustrating but it is a rude awakening when you look at there being NO health care available. So, let’s get on it and get this health care centre built.
I tell you I had the greatest surprise of my life that I was able to leave Ghana and actually enter the U.S. with a bag of laterite, a bag of sand, a bag of concrete, and 2 bricks. The architecture school asked me to bring all this back. A brick researcher at Clemson is going to work on our brick making and see if there is a way to improve. What another great gift from Clemson. All I had to do was get through customs with these materials. Ghana allowed me to take it out with Prof. Miller’s email, which they kept. I ran to the internet cafe in Kotoka airport to print out another email verifying why i am bringing soil into the U.S. from Africa. I thought I’d surely need it. As I got off the plane in Chicago there were messages being broadcast about hoof and mouth disease epidemics and the need to declare visitation to rural areas and time around livestock. I felt sure the laterite was history. However, we made it through! I am looking forward to this research and otherwise would never have known that the nation’s top brick researcher is at Clemson.
We are so very fortunate to have partnered with Clemson. They have been so good to us and we are extremely grateful. Aside from their wonderful acts, they are great human beings who we have enjoyed getting to know.
We have been truly truly blessed with relationships from so many angles…
The last days in Ghana were days of interacting with people to finalize important steps and tracking down Obama fabric for Ida. Yes, the country printed lovely fabric to commemorate our President’s visit and of course if Ida Taylor asks me to bring the moon, I of course will do my best to make it happen given that she is the world to me, to Djole, to PO.
We had a short visit with our own Ataa Lartey of the Street Academy and caught up with our new friend from January, Esther Lamptey. Esther for years was the Ghana table tennis champ and she is awesome. She volunteers at the Street Academy.
I wanted to buy a large check check bag and put a large number of people in it and bring them on the plane and to America just to have them around me for a lot of time. PO has so many great friends in Ghana and around the world and we are all coming together to change lives. Thank you to David and Lucia for coming to Ghana and painting the faces and arms of 1400 children. Thank you for your great spirit of caring and helping. We are welcoming Betty Cremmins in the next few days. She is coming to volunteer for PO from New York City and we found her via Pedals4Progress. We have this great container of bikes and sewing machines we are in the process of retrieving from the port in Tema and Betty is going to help us get the sewing centre started up. Medaase to Betty! Medaase to Pedals4Progress.
I am leaving Ghana without seeing our wonderful Walterdee. I am so upset about this and Walterdee I need contact number for you…sorry I missed you this trip. … keep up your great music makin. I am leaving without seeing Chief Nabila…so sorry we did not catch up Prof… next time… I am leaving having made new friends – David, Kwabena, K, David Mensah, Loren, Uncle Russ, Cally, Tina, Sidney, and many others. I am leaving as a much richer woman as Ghana and her people always feed my soul. Medaase to Ghana, to our PO family in America, England, Ghana… until next time.
Cindy