Maggot Weiners

We’ve arrived!

After being detained at the immigration office for a couple hours and having to forfeit our passports, we finally made it out of the airport and met up with Mr. Gyamfi and Phillip, two men who work for Elghana, the

organization with which we are volunteering.

Mr. Gyamfi is showing off his impression of "blue steel".

We spent the first night in a hotel and then moved on to visit Marina’s orphanage and meet our host family the next day. I’ll share more about the orphanage and the association with which I’ll be working in later posts – there’s already plenty to say! But to keep things reasonably short, I’ll just tell you a bit about where we’re living, for now.

It’s a bit confusing to keep everyone in the family straight.

John and Ja are the parents, and Ja is John’s second wife. There are three kids living here as well. A bulky 20-year old named Marvin with a massive affro who is from John’s first marriage, a 19-year old girl named Asia who is from Ja’s first marriage, and a 5-year old boy named Rashid who is from John and a woman who came along between his two marriages. Ja and Asia are refugees from Sierra Leone, so I would imagine that they lost Asia’s father during the civil war.

In addition, one of Marvin’s friends lives in a shack out back. We just met him last night when he returned from holidays and appeared to be drunk. He met Marina first and thought it OK to hit on her (as does every other man in the country), so needless to say I’m a real fan of this guy.

Asia and Marina in the living room. The pots and buckets on the ground are to collect the rainwater through the leaks in the ceiling. Upon immediate review of this photo, Marina concludes: "I look fat."

The home is made up of two buildings on a large property, with a private school that John owns on the neighbouring lot. Considering that most of the Ghanaians live in small huts, this family is obviously quite well off. That being said, things are in a real state of disrepair and it doesn’t seem that there is a reliable source of income coming in. The private school is losing money and John tells me that he would need twice as many students in order to break even. John runs three charitable organizations which have brought in some funding. Though I will be working for one of them, I’m still not clear as to what exactly these organizations have done in terms of charity. John mentioned some donations of chalk to some schools…

As I said, there’s plenty to say. But I’ll leave that for now.

It’s been an interesting and challenging experience already. We’ve spent some of our time here traveling, and are marveling at how different things are from the places we've traveled to in the past. For one thing, I can’t believe the variety of things that people carry on their heads!! Sharp knives, eggs, dead fish, live chickens…

That's enough for now. I’ll leave you with an image from our first breakfast in Ghana:

-Davis