Looking towards the future...

I'm optimistic about going back because there's still so much to be done. It's basically all about education and awareness of all issues.

Ghana Blog: Day 5-...Accra is my home

Hey all,

Well, it has become that and more. Accra is wonderous because it is just so alive, you wouldn't think you would find so many people out in about in one place whether at night or during the day, but this place is just constant movement. We had to switch hotels yesterday, but the upgrade was a good one. The internet is faster and allows me to keep my loved ones up to date on my situation here.

Our Vacation Bible school has become everything we felt it should be, from the first day we broke out the theme song to Son Treasure Island and decorated Beautiful Gate Center; orange, red and blue fish dance on the walls and we brought backgrounds of the ocean covered in seaweed to line the stone walls. The pink house where the majority of the 28 sleep is small to keep so many, so many sleep outside in the church/ an open gazebo type area...cold concrete floor, instruments in the front and older beige chairs that line the area for the congregation..it is also now the main location for our groups VBS. We've held a puppet show with a tickle crew, singing times and I've played more games in the past 3 days then I have since middle school.

They love soccer so you better believe that's going to be my grand finale. The kids are kind-hearted, sweet souls and some of them have lived on the street for most of their lives...for this reason among so many others do I cherish being here and serving them even if at the end of the night they have to go back out into the street.

There's a sort of tearing of the heart when you think that all some of these kids have is what the center can give them on a day to day basis..and yet they stay because they have protection, friends and some kind of shelter.

Resources are just not enough......so, we make do with what we can bring and the Lord provides more for these children than I think we ever could. Our days have been spent mostly inside...though we toured the city on Saturday and I saw the same. Same smiles, same kind eyes, same sympathetic spirit....it's a blessing and a true learning experience for me....plus pages and pages of notes. The heat is magnified with the smoke burning garbage in some of the communities surrounding the center, but if we hadn't walked around giving flyers I would have seen the beauty within the difficulty.


The little ones walking around selling goods, while balancing it on their head with ease and perfect poise. Dresses flowing, some dragging through the red clay as mothers walk speaking the local language..Twi truly only spoken in Ghana by a small million or so. Purples and reds color the dresses and a little head pops out of a pouch they tie along their back and smiles at me as I pass. These reflections, these memories are gifts....and I am treasuring every sight. Hope to continue posting tomorrow. Hope all is well, and your as blessed as I am through family and good friends. I've now prayed in 6 different languages..and they're forcing me to speak french lol.

love u guys
-Cristela

"Ghana By air."

Poet Ghanian Poetry

More Poetry

"Let the dry savannah winds
grab you by the hair
and drag you
stumbling
through tough clumps
of cow-nibbled grass.

Did you see the children streak by
on bikes - two or sometimes three
on the same?
Did you see the striking garments
energised by night dances?

Now the green of the forest
will sweep you across the secret
passages of
Ashanti pride
into the rich red
depths of palm nut soup.

Did you see a woman drag her husband
home by the cuff - insulting him
all the way?
Did you hear the market traders
hurling prices down the street?

The lights of Accra
will confound you as you circle
dreamily round
haphazard
houses arranged to fit
sprouting family trees.

Did you hear the blaring
horns - sometimes angry,
sometimes friendly?
Did you see two lovers
heading for Labadi beach?

Follow them
lift the hem
of the sea

plunge...

you have reached
the centre
of the world."

My Life! Experience: Student reflects on trip to Ghana - Life!

My Life! Experience: Student reflects on trip to Ghana - Life!

Vacation Bible School 3/13/07

"...The children saw us coming from a mile away when we finally made our way from the Sama/ Crystal Palms Hotel to The Center. Truth be told, earlier thar day and even now as I write I felt a heaviness of heart that was and still feels unsettling. Yesterday monring, though it could easily be attributed to Malerone, my malaria medicine. Nevertheless, I'm also sure it could also be in a part a desire to discover this city, get to know the real Accra, find out what it's really made of. Recently, what's come to mind is more and more a desire to just go out and explore what this world has to offer and how I can help it...I hear kids laughing over the rigid wall. Traffic and horns sound off in a distant background and a comfortable breeze flows in, there's not a cloud in the sky.

My energy was on at yesterday's VBS, the Lord must have made a way because God knows I was tired. I played with almost 50 kids they say with two parachutes and a bucnh of balls to balance. I was on the brink of losing my voice but it was worth it. All they had to do was hold on to the colorful sheet and they were off...shaking and vibrating a stormy parachute that looked like it was about to fly away. With only a little insistence, did all the kids have a ball, and with a little discipline by one of the other members of my troops, we were finally able to get all the kids under control. Pardon the pun, but what a ball they had...

Past Journal entries...3/11/07

Ghana

A land covered with dirt, red clay roads, rusted metal and a familiar breeze of smoke, Ghana is overwhelmingly sharp. It sharpens and as you breath in the smells of rice and curry, it sharpens your taste buds...as you drink the sweet tang of real pineapple juice, it sharpens your spirit as you enter into a community of strangers, you come out a friend. My first weekend in this, my first truely foreign country has been epitomized by different moments--some good and so many insignificant after tonight. They pale in comparison to truly doing what I'm meant to do when I'm here, make an impact--tell their story. The story of the Beautiful Gate Center, surrounded by a dustry front yeard filled with a parade of smiling face, and sweaty squinty eyes...smiling and laughing, laughing sweating, smiling. Through all this laughter you wouldn't know they were starving sometimes, you wouldn't even realize some of them aren't seen for long periods of time, swallowed up by the dark Ghanian streets."

To see more pictures and here a bit about the work my first half of my trip focused on VBS and the second as a Medical missions through Fulness Ministries Interntional.

The faces of Africa

The images are beautiful...and so I think it does serve it's purpose

Elephant Bones

Prayer for those in Ghana

(I wrote this as we attended their service)

"To come to the poorest of nations, the porest of continents and find the realest understanding
of the father, the fullest truest perspective, in true form of praise, in endless love, in constant
worship, in the most ideal definition of prayer without ceasing. That is this church, this
is Beautiful Gate Center at is best...The people of this continent know you better then we do."

Ghana: Day 2..A beginning

Hey all,

This is going to be no where near the journal I'm keep of my travels. But it's definitely a taste..I've been in Accra, Ghana for almost two days now. Half of which were spent in a jet-lagged stupor I've been trying to knock myself out of....you know how it goes though. We're waking up at 7 a.m. which is actually 2 a.m. in the U.S. My body is not used to it. Arrived at our hotel, www.vitarahotel.com/global
is the website at 8 a.m. and continued. We've seen Accra, for what it really is.....villages of people and children, colors dresses, smells some good some not so much. The earth is a red clay thick and dusty and the marketplace is not a place you want to find yourself unless you can haggle a hard bargain. I feel like though it seems these people need so much I've never fet more faith and friendship, particularly from the church we're working with. They take care of 28 to 30 children, all from the street many handicapped and the majority with some of the biggest smiles I've ever seen. The love and affection these people have for strangers I just want to put in a box and hold onto....it's a strong dose of humility for our group who felt we brought them the world with a couple of boxes of toothpaste (8 suitcases full, but nonetheless). We're going to tour there neighborhood on foot tomorrow and hand out flyers...we're going to teach lessons about love, abstinence and faith..and I'm in charge of games. Excitement doesn't even sum how I feel....I'm joyous, covered in mosquito bites and affection for sweating. I'll be writing soon....I promise to keep in touch....just know I'm ok and taking a lot of pictures.

Blogger's of the World Unite

It's been almost two months since I returned from Ghana, a land of beautiful people and a very severe and often sad history. I was only there for two weeks, from March 9th to the 24th but in the time wrote more then I have while abroad. In a way, I feel there was so much to reflect on as we worked with children and adults in church ministry, providing essentials we take for granted in the United States. I used the blog to keep in touch with friends and loved ones, but at the same time educate them on the true situation in the country and the continent.

For Ghanaian history, the BBC provides a lot of useful info. We went three days after the country's independence day, which this article gives quite a bit of background on. The people of the country have varying opinions on their leaders in power, whether they actual care about the people, where they actually serve the needs of the country. Ultimately though, it's useful to take into consideration all opinions. In my experience, I think it really is all relative when it comes to government--the city of Accra has such a wide variety of people and tribes. It really just depends on those that involve themselves. I met the chief of a tribe in the mountains and local children in uniforms. I met future world cup soccer champions, at the end of my time there it was the people that made the experience fruitful.

The reality of Ghana's independence

In his second and final piece, the BBC's reporter in Ghana, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, looks at what happened to the ambitious dreams at Ghana's independence from Britain 50 years ago in the subsequent decades.

The vision of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and the man who led the country to independence in 1957, was to make his country a beacon of success in Africa and power the movement towards African nationalism.

Nkrumah was ousted by a coup in 1966 and died in exile in 1972 - but his vision was known to all.

He had had the dream, but the reality was much harder - how to turn this former colonial country into a successful African nation.

Nkrumah's son, Gamal, says that the "euphoria of independence" soon wore off, and his father's message of pan-Africanism increasingly became overlooked.

"Countries became more jealous of national sovereignty," he adds.

"The main goal of the ruling cliques - many of which were military - was to preserve and concentrate power... the seeds of the problems we now associate with the continent - poverty, corruption, the breakdown of public services - were sown in those times."

Military revolt

The leaders of the 1966 military coup against Nkrumah, who had made the country a one-party state and declared himself a Life President, had hoped they could sort out the country's tottering economy.

But once Nkrumah was gone, Ghana's troubles continued to get worse.

There was hardly any electricity, failures all the time, no water. The situation was so volatile it was like lighting a match Former Ghana president Jerry Rawlings

Eventually, in 1979, a military revolt of a dozen junior officers against their seniors, who they perceived as arrogant and corrupt, brought 32-year-old Jerry John Rawlings came to power.

Rawlings' newly-formed Armed Forces Revolutionary Council executed eight senior officers, including three former heads of state.

Neither a politician nor an intellectual - he was a flight lieutenant in the Ghana Air Force - Rawlings believed he knew what the country needed.

"In effect, 1979 was a reaction to the cumulative events that had been happening in the country," he says.

"There was hardly any electricity, failures all the time, no water. The situation was so volatile it was like lighting a match."

He says the executions were necessary.

"I'm taking responsibility for it all," he says.

"There was no alternative. We had to contain it within the military so it didn't spill into the civil front - if it had it would have been terrible.

"We had no choice but to sacrifice the most senior ones - the commanders."

Coups and violence

Despite Rawlings' acceptance of responsibility for these and subsequent executions, he has never been tried in a court.

And the current 1992 constitution - written during his time as head of state - also contains a clause which prevents anyone being charged for executions which took place under military regimes.

In 1979, Rawlings handed over power to the elected President Dr Hilla Limann - but by 1981 he was seizing it again in another coup.

He instigated what he called "participatory democracy" - a people's revolution - which would keep him in power for two decades.

And he also presided over periods of violence, human rights abuse and disappearances - over 200 people disappeared in the early 1980s, all suspected opponents of Rawlings' regime.

In 1982 there was another attempted coup, which, Rawlings claimed, was funded by Kwame Pianim, who was imprisoned for 10 years.

A country that Nkrumah had envisioned would lead Africa in optimism and change had descended into coups and violence.

"There were times when I openly shed tears for the suffering of my own people," says Charles Palmer-Buckle, the Catholic Archbishop of Accra who sat on Ghana's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for two years.

"It was eye-opening, because I never believed that certain types of atrocities did take place in this country."

When he became the country's first president, Kwame Nkrumah had attempted to keep a lid on Ghana's divisions by minimising them. Being African, he said, was not about being tribal.

But his focus on the "total liberation of Africa" meant he sometimes ignored problems at home.

The economy in particular suffered as Nkrumah failed to look beyond timber to keep it in health.

And when Rawlings was in charge, the economy hit rock bottom. The period is called the "Rawlings necklace" after the way starved Ghanaians' collarbones became visible.

'Dreams of people'

To this day, Ghana's economy still limps along, and a third of our people live on less than a dollar a day.

We were once rich in timber, diamonds and gold and the world's top exporter of cocoa. Not today.

"Cocoa is seasonal so we have long periods of poverty," says cocoa farmer William Korampong.

"After paying my debts there is no money to send the children to school or pay for food. Get the government to process cocoa here and not abroad - then there would be more money in our pockets."

Fifty years after independence, it is now that Ghanaian - and African - renewal must begin.

Ghana's head of state in this jubilee year is John Kufuor - generally considered a stable force.

He says Ghana has not achieved the dreams of 1957.

"Perhaps it is an endless journey to pursue the dreams of people," he explains.

"The objective with which we entered independence was to become viable and prosperous.

"But since independence we've had a chequered history... it has taken us a while to come back to the original aspirations.

"We have moved along the track a small way but we have a long way to go."

And his words are echoed by Nkrumah's son Gamal, who says that it is not only Ghana's battle that continues, but Africa's.

"Pan-Africanism never took off as such, but that does not mean it is too late for it to take off," he says.

"Because part of Kwame Nkrumah's popularity today is his call for pan-Africanism, people instinctively know it is the only way forward for the continent."

Part Two of Ghana, Winds Of Change is broadcast on BBC World Service on Monday 5 March at 0930 GMT.

Ways to Listen WINDS OF CHANGE - PART ONE

The Architect of Independence