Monday

JIm & I took a couple of meetings this morning at the Presbyterian Church of Ghana Headquarters.

The first meeting was with the clerk of the PCG and all the PCG directors. Relationship and strategic in nature and some good discussion on the Living Waters initiatives in Ghana and worldwide.

The second meeting was with the Ghana Living Water Network Committee and the main purpose of the meeting was to review past operating results and future operating needs of the current 11 installed systems.

There is a couple on this team, the Osaes, who are highly engaged in the clean water initiative. Both are highly educated - he has his PhD and she is a successful business lady - both in their 30s.

The second half of the day we went out to Trinity Seminary and had lunch with Joy Mante the President of the Seminary and a very good friend of Gayle Walker, Associate Pastor at Idlewild.

Nice campus pictures are below.

Trinity has about 500+ students, about 150 of those are studying to be ordained and the rest are their because of their interest in theology.

After Trinity we stopped by a road side marketplace where I got to watch Jim barter a shop keeper down for some items for his grandchildren.

Samuel (our driver) and I watched how the Ghana police handled a minor fender bender. Pretty interesting - the police passed judgement on the person at fault - seized the keys to that persons vehicle and told them to pay the other driver in cash for the damages. The police told both drivers to return to the scene in a few hours where either the offending driver would pay up or lose their vehicle altogether.

Tomorrow we have a factory tour at a local bottle maker and a few odds and ends and then we start to make the journey back to Memphis.

Luke

After the service today we were hanging around waiting to head out to lunch and there were some kids hanging around.

So I went over and sat down in the middle of them and asked did they want to see a movie of my dog.

Last fall my son David and I took our yellow lab, Luke, over to the farm and worked Luke in preparation for duck season. We made some videos of Luke retrieving a series of bumper throws that afternoon and I have those videos on my iPad.

I have not noticed a lot of dogs in Ghana for whatever reason. The ones I do see are small.

I thought the kids might enjoy the video.

So while waiting on Rev Daniel, I sat down and showed the kids Luke in action. They loved it. I am not sure they have seen a dog that big and certainly not one doing "tricks". One little guy even said it was a lion.

So it was good kids entertainment for about 10 minutes.

Thanks Luke!

P.S. this has caused somewhat of a rift in my household as John & David feel slighted that I am showing pictures of the dog and not of them. I explained that I was demonstrating how members of my family could pickup after themselves.

Yaw!

Jim & I worshiped today at Reverend Daniel Opong-Wereko's church, Emanuel North Darkumon Presbyterian Church.

The church is located not too far from the center of Accra in a part of the city where dirt roads are the norm. The church is in the process of building a new building (more on that later) and so therefore the new building is on one side of the road and the old building is on the other side of the road.

The old building and grounds are used for children classes as we saw when we arrive. We stopped into 3 classes and with the exception of the little bitties, the other two classes were very academic, i.e. teaching scripture and verse - way over my head!

The little people were all lined up in little chairs and were singing songs - until we arrived and I think when they saw me that the giant had arrived!

The congregation worships on the ground floor (future parking are) of basically a building under construction. NO WAY THIS WOULD HAPPEN IN THE STATES. The congregation has no idea when they will finish the 3 story building. As Rev Daniel says when The Lord provides, it will happen - for now they have a 3 story building with no walls, but a roof, which allows them to worship.

The service was great, a tad longer than at Idlewild, I clocked today's service start to finish right at 3 hours - certainly a new record for me.

Lots of activities during the service - but probably the best thing they have going is that the church is "kid friendly" during the service. They attribute a large part of their growth to being kid friendly - reminded me of a place back in Memphis up on the hill - "as my friends at GSL say".

I had been given 3 days notice that there was going to be audience participation during the service in the form of dance. Now for those of you who know me - you know that I don't dance (ask Chalmers - it's a bad subject in our household) and the 2-3 times I have danced usually are memorable by others, not so much by me!

Nevertheless, the dancing during the service took place during the offerings (yes - plural). So, I used the first offering just to get a feel for the process and rhythm of the dance - not hard to do - plenty of people there to help during that first run at it. Shuffle your feet a little bit, move your arms a little bit and drop the money into the bowl with your right hand. I think I probably looked like a choo-choo.

Offering II. Now that I had my trial run behind me, it was time for the main event if you will. I jumped in the middle of the Elder line (think of it kind of like conga line) and started my moves. I started with the choo-choo and then moved into kind of a MIchael Jackson meets Frankenstein with a little bit of hip & arm action. But what really got the line going was when I decided to shuffle backwards -evidently the line is only supposed to move forward - oh well - I think I at least gave one of the pastors good stuff to talk about for a week or so.

In all seriousness, all week I have gotten a very strong sense of what God means to the Ghanian people. It is a very religious country and you can see and feel that from almost the moment you arrive. I think today's service really brought it all together for me. The participation of the church members in the service, the pride the women and some men had in wearing the "fabric" of the church, the group bible study time during the service, and everyone gave some thing in both offerings - and know that the second offering was exclusively for local outreach.

Nice picture of Jim in just general celebration mode.

Great time for sure.

If you read to this point then you get to know why this post is titled "Yaw". During the service the congregation breaks into bible study groups based on which day of the week they were born - because somewhere in their name is the day of the week they were born - so I have met 3 men named Kofi. So, when I was asked by an elder which group I should attend - No idea. However, whipped out the iPad, leaned on Google, and presto - I am I Yaw - I was born on Thursday.

Post Card

I have gotten a few messages and one indirect that there are no blog posts containing a picture of me.

So here is a postcard picture from our "veranda" at the Salvation Army Hostel in Accra.

Now a few comments you should know:

1) The other big person in the picture is Rev Joshua Heikkila from Minnesota on a 3 year mission for the PCUSA.

2) Prior to Jim taking this picture, Jim had a serious discussion with the two people in the picture about packaging the faucet water into little bags. They promised him that what they were doing were making ice bags - not drinking water bags. Still don't like the bags - they are like plastic water bottles in the US - everywhere!

3) Chalmers hates the shirt I have on - which is exactly why I wore it to see if she is paying attention to the blog.

4) Since my arrival in Africa I have been shrinking - can't you tell!

Abokobi

Presbyterian Women's Centre.

This place is about as nice of a retreat center as you will find. It is on the outskirts of Accra.

presbyterianwomencentre.org

Check out the URL as my pictures will not do it justice.

Built in 1992 by the women of the presbyterian church it is open for all kinds of meetings, events, etc.

The clean water system installed is a reverse osmosis system because of the salt content in the PWC bore hole. The ROS lowers the salt content in the water and eliminates the salty taste.

THe PWC served clean water to their meeting and events to the tune of 10,000 people last year.

We met and then had lunch with Esther (the Director) and Joyce (the administrator). I spent my lunch with Esther and Joyce comparing notes on teenagers - the take away - teenagers in Ghana and USA sleep a lot, eat a lot, talk on the phone a lot, and don't want to spend a lot of time with their parents.

Abokobi's clean water system doing just fine.

Immanuel Madina

Our morning stated with a short, relatively speaking, jaunt to the outskirts of Accra to a community named Madina. Think of it as a suburb with no paved roads.

The church is doing well! It's obvious from the minute you drive into the compound that their members are engaged.

They had a group setting up for a wedding that was to take place that afternoon with the reception being set up under a big shade tree.

We met with their water board and it was another good meeting. They really only have 1 issue with producing clean water - source for water. Immanuel is set up with a roof collection system for rain water. Problem - no rain since December. They attempted to fill their huge in ground cistern with purchased water - but the water they purchased after being processed did not taste good - so they stopped.

The good news is in our meeting it was shared that Immanuel that they can purchase water from a known water company that has been tested by a previous IPC-LWW team and that water company is close enough to deliver. So they think they can be back up & running within a month, as Michael wants to make a simple plumbing change to make it easier to receive the water from a tanker truck.

The second issue that the Immanuel water board brought up was the need for smaller bottles, i.e. the 5 gallon bottles are just too heavy to carry. We have heard this several times on this trip, so we have made a change to Monday afternoon's schedule so we can visit a local manufacturer that blows bottles with a hope that we can identify a solution for a smaller bottle. This smaller bottled really comes up as an issue with the system that are in schools or service schools.

Now so that you all know that giving and service is a circle - as we concluded our water board meeting, I wandered over to a court yard where I heard drummers and kids. I asked one of the board members what was going on and he said "Compassion". Compassion is an outreach program that Immanuel has where on Saturdays the church members bring in kids that have no one "watching them", i.e. orphans, kids living on the street, etc. and feed these kids all day, play games, sing, etc. and generally play in a safe environment.

Krobo School for Girls

I told you about Dora in Nsawam the other day. Now meet Cecilia, the Headmistress for the Krobo School for Girls.

I am going to provide some highlights of the history and purpose of the school, but for deeper information about what they are doing go Goggle "Krobo School for Girls" and check it out.

KSG was founded in 1927 by several female missionaries from Scotland. The school started in another location than where it is now, but some time early on several girls from the Krobo region attended the school and the Chief of the village that the girls were from was so impressed with the results of the school that he gave the school a HUGE slice a land on a mountain. The compound/campus is multiple buildings (I lost count) on the mountain and is secured by the terrain and a wall.

The girls come from all over Ghana now as KSG has built a premier reputation. It's a boarding school and the girls are basically there 9 months out of the year. Although it is a "boarding school" Cecilia clearly states 2 things:

1) Boarding is not optional - because the school wants to keep the girls focused, together, and safe. As we all know there are too many distractions for teenagers these days and in Ghana it is not different - just different distractions.

2) Boarding School may denote a school for the elite of Ghana, but not in this case. A large percentage of the girls are on scholarship primarily funded by the government and churches AND wait for it...villages will pool their money and send a girl to the school.

Idlewild in considering putting in a clean water system at the school.

Here are a few pictures of the campus.