Weekend #2 and Beyond

This week at the school Jayme, Jen, Robyn, and Kyle started doing teacher training. I spent most of my time finishing up the library and training the staff on how to administer the medicines that we brought over. It was a great week but we were ready to have some fun by the end of it. Jayme, Kyle and I headed out on Saturday to Cape Coast to go to the castle that served as a slave trading point and colonial government seat. It was very informative and we really learned a lot.

We ate lunch at a place right next to the castle that advertised Obrunni food. We had high hopes but were pretty let down. My pizza with cape coast pineapple on it was great, but Jayme's club sandwich was awful (bread with the crust cut off with some canned chicken, hard boiled eggs, and lettuce.....no mayo or anything!)

Our next tourist stop was about thirty minutes from Cape Coast along the road back to Hemeng. Kakum National Park is a tropical rain forrest reserve that is well-known throughout Ghana. I thought it would be neat to visit and it turned out to be absolutely incredible. They have a canopy walk that lets you walk around the tops of trees that are over 100 feet in the air. It was so much better than I thought it was going to be! We enjoyed it so much that we are planning on going back and camp there this Thursday night on our way back to Accra. Make sure to ask us to see our pictures of Kakum when we get back to the states (this bad internet is really getting lame!).

On Saturday night we had party at the school for all member of the Church in the Hemeng area. There were about 50 people there. They are going to start meeting here on Sunday's instead of going all the way (about 20 mins) to Praso to go to Church. We decided to go to Praso for Church on Sunday and it was quite an experience. It was a good sized branch that was crammed in a tiny rented chapel. It was 95% in Twi and great. We were able to go to with assistant headmaster here at the school that started taking the missionary discussions when we first got here. He is committed to be baptized this Saturday so we are hoping that everything works out with that. Congratulations Francis! You will never regret joining the true church!

This week we will leave Hemeng on Thursday and stay overnight in Kakum park. Friday morning we will go to Accra and meet some of my friends from my mission. Friday night we will stay in Accra. Saturday we will travel to Nkawkaw and stay overnight there so we can go to church on Sunday there. We will leave Nkawkaw after church and go back to Accra to get Jayme on her flight back to the USA where she will promptly go and eat a Cafe Rio Burrito for me and send me a picture of it to get me through the next two weeks.

Forever Young International School

This is a shot of the school from down on the road.  It's an incredible structure compared to everything in the vicinity.  The big building at the top in the administration building and the rooms going down the hill are the classrooms.  Our apartment is just to the left of the administration building (you can't see it in this picture).

Veiw from the Hillside

This fishing village was really interesting to see, it was a little bit more poverty stricken then some of the villages we've seen but surrounded by the most beautiful scenery.  I love this picture because it shows how on top of each other the huts are.

Fishing Village

I loved the boats in this village, they are all so rustic and colorful (great to look at, probably not awesome for actually fishing).  I thought these two little naked kids climbing up the sides of the boat and jumping in the ocean were the cutest!  Steve was leery of posting naked children...hopefully no one is offended.

Sunrise on the Beach in Akwidaa

14 hours on tro-tros....and it was worth it!

In preparation for our trip to Ghana I searched the internet for places to visit and things to see. We knew that most of our time would be spent working in the school but we would have a little time on the weekends to see some sights. When I was here before I heard all about the great beaches in the Western Region but I never had a chance to visit since I was in the Accra Mission. I wanted to go to a beach resort while we were here and I came across a little eco-reserve on the beach that had bungalows they rent out for very cheap (www.ezilebay.com) On the internet and while talking to the place on the phone it sounded like it would be easy to find and not that far so we set off at about 1 PM on Friday for Ezile Bay in Akwidaa in the Western Region of Ghana. The tro-tros ended up being VERY slow at the stations and the place ended up being much harder to find than I thought it would be. Six hours later Jayme and I barely made the last tro-tro to Akwidaa where Ezile Bay was. The Tro Tro was already full but they saw we were Obrunnis and made everyone smash a little more since it was the last tro tro of the night and there would be no way to get there until the next morning if we missed it. There were over 20 people crammed in that tro tro (a tro tro is a minivan, ghetto minivan-pictures to come) and I was not really in a seat at all. We finally got there after 7 hours on the tro-tros with the help of the driver and his son. The place was totally dark since they don't have any electricity there (eco-reserve hippies and the Ghanian power company both don't care to get it there). We were greeted by a Frenchman from Champagne named Donnie who seriously didn't speak any English or Twi. It was fun trying to communicate with him with our broken French and his African learned minimal English. We were given a kerosene lantern and shown to our bungalow. It was super basic but very fun.

The next day was absolutely incredible as we discovered the places we couldn't see in the dark the night before. It was truly Breathtaking. A large private beach was about 30 feet from our bungalow. We were the only guests that first night and there were just one other French couple from Burkina Faso staying there on the second night. The food was great since they had European type dishes for Jayme and they even pounded fufu for me! What a great place and a great experience. Totally worth it (In terms of time and trouble getting there I mean....money wise it was WAY worth it since the whole weekend with meals and room costed us about $70 US!)

Sunday morning we left early in our church clothes. We got to the tro tro station with the help of a local boy that the Frenchmen arranged for us. When we arrived there were only two other passengers who wanted to go to Akwidaa so we had to wait for about 15 other passengers before they would leave. The station was in a gross part of town so Jayme and I just sat in the tro tro for about 45 mins until we were all ready to go (by the way....we looked SO out of place! Not only are we white, but we were dressed so nice compared to everyone else!). We hoped to make it to Church in the nearest branch by 9 if we left the hotel by 7 so we could catch the first tro tro but we ended up getting to the Agona branch at 9:15.

Church in Agona was also an incredible experience. There were about 40 people in the branch. One of the them was walking to the church when we rode by in a taxi so we asked her where the church was and offered her a ride. She spoke zero English but explained to me that she had been a member of the Church since 1975 when they weren't really members yet here. Anyway, we walked in late to sacrament and sat down in the back. Immediately a member of the Branch Presidency walks back to us, greets us, and asks us to bear out testimonies. We both did and had a great time doing it. After Sacrament we found out the that we were the first ever non missionary visitors they had ever had to their branch! There was a pair of couple missionaries there named the Lambs from Bountiful that were super nice to us and gave us a ride to Takoradi and helped us find the station that would take us to Cape Coast. We will try to find a better connection so we can post pictures because we are sure you will love them. Until next time….

Week One

The school where we are working is a really a special place. The administrators of the school are interesting and and inspiring individuals. I already wrote a bit about Brigham (and I am sure I will write more in the future) but we are also having a great time getting to know the rest. Francis Baidoo is the Assistant Headmaster here at the school is a young guy like myself. His sister actually served in the mission with me. Francis, however, is not a member of the Church. Ever since we got here Kyle, Jen, Jayme and I have been talking to him about the Church and pushing him toward baptism. Today (we were told since we were not there) he met with the full time missionaries at church in Praso and has committed to read the Book Of Mormon and work towards baptism. I love how open to the gospel Ghanians are! If only the world could be a little bit more Ghanian in so many ways!

This week Jayme and I have been holed up in the Library for almost all of our time. We are inventorying and organizing the library here and we are going to train a teacher who has been hired to be a full time librarian. After combining this years shipments with the books that LDS Charities and an Eagle Scott donated to the school, we have a grand total of around 1600 books. Most of them are in the elementary school reading level and we hope in the future they can expand their Junior High and High School level books. This library blows the other local school's libraries out of the water and we are just hoping that we can get the kids reading and enjoying it.

We also spent a day working in the school's infirmary (they call it the Malaria Centre). We brought over a lot of medical supplies and added them to the ones that were left over from last year. They now have a pretty decent supply of medicines that the kids can take when they are sick with malaria or anything else. We are going to be training the teachers and administrators on how much medicine to give the kids etc. There seems to have been a bit of a problem with not giving out the meds last year since they think they will run out and they won't be able to get any more anytime soon. We are telling them that they need to use them or they will expire and never help anyone. This week looks like it will be more of the same for me but Jayme will also start training the teachers here too.

Also...one mouse, two spiders and a lizard have managed to penetrate our house so far. Jayme has been less than excited about welcoming the house guests so I have been taking care of their entertainment.

Steve's Post

Windows 95 never looked so good as right now on this PC in the middle of Twifo Praso! Jayme and I are here in Ghana and loving it so far. The school is wonderful even thuogh it is in the middle of nowhere! We took a tro tro for 15 mins to be able to send this email out since to use it at the school is super expensive....thus the windows 95 computers and 56K modem fun! Sorry about the lack of pics but it is really hard since there is no bandwidth here at all. Everything is just like I remembered it and I am just loving to be back here and show everything I love to Jayme. We have spent this week in the library working on an inventory and check out scheme and that has kept us plenty busy. We are huge celebrities around the school and all the kids are constantly fighting over who gets to hold our hands. I still maintain that these kids are the cutest on the planet and we just want to take a couple home with us.

We are also loving working with and getting to know Brigham and the staff here. Brigham is a great guy and has a lot of his father in him I think. He told us the story of how the school came to be and how on the day that they broke ground for the school (which he designed since he is architect) his father gave him a special gift. It was a childs picture of some buildings. His father said that when he was 7 years old he told his dad that he had had a dream and saw this school in it and so he drew it. Billy had kept the picture for all those years and Brigham had forgotten about it but when he looked at it Brigham said it was our very school that he had drawn from his dream when he was 7.....cool place...cool people...loving it

We're Here!

Stephen and I made it safe and sound to Ghana and it's been great!  We have been here for four days and already gotten a lot done at the school.  I really want to post more pictures of where we are living and the school and more of these cute kids.  To get the one picture that I am (hopefully) posting I waited 20 minutes for the upload so...maybe more in the future.  We are so spoiled at home with amazing computers and fast internet that its easy to forget how incredible it is that I am able to post anything at all here.  We will try to post more!

Ghana...it's in Africa

A day hasn't gone by over the past three years since I left Ghana that I haven't thought about it. Even though Jayme has seen all my pictures, heard all the stories and even met many of the people that I served with there, she still hasn't been able to have the same kind of connection that I have to Ghana. I have wanted to take Jayme there ever since we started dating but it has never been a possibility until this summer. Due to the kindness and generosity of numerous individuals Jayme and I will be leaving on Saturday July 10 for Accra Ghana. From Accra we are going to take the long drive to Twifo-Hemang to the Forever Young International School where we will be working for the next three weeks. The school was built by the Forever Young Foundation and they have invited us join a group of three other teachers who are going over to help make the school better (and no, this was not just because I am also named Steve Young). We are super excited and are counting down the hours until we take off. Jayme is hoping that we have some great experiences with the tropical rainforest where we will be living, but I just hope that we don't end up having a pet like Jessica. We hope to be able to update this blog with our experiences and pictures while we are there. If for some reason we are unable to update often it won't be because we didn't try! Here are a few of my favorite pictures from my last trip there that I hope we can match during this trip:

We're Bloggers!

Well, after months of intending to create this blog and more hours than I would care to admit doing it today, Stephen and I have a family blog!  I love looking at peoples blogs and I had no idea to time and creative genius that some of you out there must put in to your blogs, bravo.  My lofty ideas for what our blog would look like deteriorated over the hours that I spent today searching out templates, backgrounds, headers, fonts, writing html codes, and having a couple of minor breakdowns.  Stephen finally convinced me that we can start small and work our way up in our blog design so I went for the most simple setup possible.  If you are reading this and you are a blog master, I'd love to have a long conversation with you soon.  Hope you all enjoy what we've settled on to start!