God Bless the Irish

Well, after two weeks, internet is back! Water is out again, but we'll take what we can get. Likewise, we’ve all sort of fallen into shameful resignation, as we’ve just begun to see how good our situation actually is.

Last weekend, woefully lost in Bolga (the nearest city), we stumbled across an American girl gleaming like the Holy Grail in the middle of the chaos that is market day. Turns out her name is Melissa, too, and she’s in the Peace Corps stationed nearby in a village only accessible on market days. We met up for dinner with her and some other Peace Corps volunteers in the Upper East region (where Navrongo is) the following Friday, and the four of us from Georgetown left feeling very silly. Only one of them has power, none have running water, there isn’t any plumbing, one latrine is missing a door, there’s no air conditioning, they cook over coal braziers, they don’t have refrigerators, and, to top it off, Melissa has been sleeping on a mat on the floor for the past three weeks. We obviously held our tongues about not having internet, and otherwise we had a great time. Melissa (not me, the other one) is kind of all you picture about the Peace Corps. Very hippie, she dropped out of college to move to India and then Thailand, and her post-Corps plan is to either meditate in India for two years or bicycle across North Africa and become a street performer in Europe. That’s right, because she’s a fire baton twirler. However, not everyone was that crazy intense, and several of the rest of us reminisced for a long time about how much we miss cheese. All in all, it was a lovely Friday night out, and we weaseled an invite to the Peace Corps Halloween party.

Saturday we spent with Mary, an Irish school teacher who adopted a Ghanaian girl named Natifa three years ago, and has been living in Navrongo ever since. She’s been an absolute godsend, and has helped with everything from getting around market to finding drivers to take us clubbing in Bolga. Partially because of her experience with Natifa, she helped start a charity called Friends of African Babies, which supports the Mother of Mercy Babies Home which we visited today. The home is run by three semi-retired nuns who take in babies who are unwanted by their families. Mary explained that no one is really an orphan here, because extended family is so extensive and important, but when a mother dies in childbirth, or if the child has a physical deformity, they’re often unwanted. These babies, plus an older sister or grandmother as a caretaker, come to the home where they are raised and taken care of for up to three years. The Home facilitates family visits, and the child is eventually restored to its family and checked up on by the nuns to ensure successful reintegration. Mary has invited us to a board meeting of FAB, so we have a lot to look forward to there.

Creepy classroom, complete with nun.

Dr. Williams has finally returned from Accra, which partially helps in terms of our research. We’re all working on our Institutional Review Board submissions right now, but haven't gotten anything done since the internet left us weeks ago. We have two weeks to pull it all together, then off for a week in Accra and Cape Coast, and then a weekend in Ouagadougou!