Ghana! A Travel Journal of Ghana and West Africa

Life has finally settled into a semblance of a routine here for me. Its no longer a hassle just to do the daily rounds like washing and sleeping and such and it feels good, like I'm starting to belong here or something. My day goes something like this:

5-6AM: Wake up to either one of the million roosters running around camp or to the blaring screech of the demonic preacher on a megaphone just up the path. This preacher would be comedic if he didn't start at 5AM sharp, didn't have such an horrible, evil raspy voice , or didn't preach about the "burning, rotting flesh of sinners in hell." But take these three things together and you have the makings of one really scare alarm clock! Some mornings I wonder, as i brush the cobwebs of sleep from my brain, just which circle of hell i woke up in!

6:30AM: Go around and empty the CBW (Children Better Way) trash bins that we set up around camp. Sometimes i question the point of this as we take the trash to the UN who then promptly dump the trash just outside the camp in an area known locally as "the gulf." But at least we're getting the trash away from the people...

8AM meet up with the wat/san. Department to go around and clean the drains (I wont describe that again...) or if its a Tuesday, to spray peoples bathrooms for bugs. By 1030-11AM I'm usually done with wat/san, at which time it’s usually so miserably hot that I retire to the house for lunch (made by our cook of course...gosh life is so tough eh?!) On sunny days, as i sit inside during mid-day, I can hear our tin roof crackling as it expands under the intense heat of the tropical sun. It usually too hot to touch everyone the inside (I found this out the hard way...between being burned and electrocuted by roofs here i think i need to stop touching them!)

Afternoons we have recreation time for the kids that Erin, Kiran and I run. We grab some kids and head out through the 'gulf', literally picking our way through trash and sewage to the field (As I’m typing this I realized that the smell of shit i smell is from my shoes- I still have someone's shit stuck on the bottom of my shoe from walking through there today that i still haven’t wiped off!). Once out there we have learned to give up all hope of having any control or order. We once tried a game of kickball (like baseball but you kick a soccer ball instead of hitting a baseball) but the kids kept stealing bases...literally, they would pick them up and run off with them! So now we just dump a couple soccer balls into the field of stand around while all the kids go nuts. The kids are cute but incredibly misbehaved and filthy (two of the other volunteers seems to have picked up Scabies, a skin parasite, from one of them). But as soon as I feel myself start to lose my patience with any of them i just try and remind myself of where they've come from and what they've been through. It’s amazing to watch them sometimes, their carefree happiness and uninhibited joy stand in such stark contrast to the tortured history of the land they've fled and the lives they live.

hehe just a side not...the Google Ads that i have on the top and side of the page are smart ads- they scan the content of whatever website their on and place advertisments for corresponding companies. As I'm looking at my page just now I can't help but notice that they're all for sewage and toilet solutions! Guess google's been reading about my work here...

# posted by Matthew @ 6/21/2006 02:24:00 PM