Imagine this...35 degrees in the shade, cool bottles of water and hot homemade/homegrown/pesticide & hormone-free meals and fresh fruit served three times a day. These are just some of the material things we are thankful for everyday while we are here :). The biggest blessing being here iwatching and listening to David and Brenda as they encourage us, love the people here and show us by example what love, true gratitude and servant hearts look like.
Just this morning on the drive into Tinga, we were following David up the road and many of us saw a hawk-like bird fly at his truck. It had lodged itself between his driver side mirror and the window, but David shares that if it's legs hadn't been caught like that, it would have flown straight into his face and probably caused an accident. When asking David about it, his first words were to thank God for His protection. (He grabbed the bird and kept it...someone enjoyed it as a meal today).
Something really special when we got to the school yard this morning was meeting Aziz. He is a boy in Bev's Primary 5 class. Posted on the wall in the classroom are the kid's marks for first term...Aziz is one of the top kids in his class. He has managed to do this even though his past year he was in hospital for treatment and a second time for surgery! Aziz was presented to the 2010 Medical Team unable to speak or swallow anything. I may be wrong on some of the exact details, but I understand that the medical team thought he may have been poisoned by something and sent him with funds to the hospital for treatment. He was being fed by a feeding tube in his stomach when David & Brenda saw him last April in Tinga, and NEA helped subsidize the family's savings to afford the surgery he needed. We could see the scar on the left side of his neck/collarbone area and he is well today. Just another example of another beautiful life saved with the help of our annual Ghana Medical Team!!!
On the building site, the window frames are all installed, all the walls are going up quickly and the bond beam will be framed and poured tomorrow. It really is amazing how many hands and motivated hearts make things happen!
Classes continue and progress is made. Today both Bev and I loved working with our small groups in the late morning session. To sit under a tree around a table, have a chance to really get to look each student in the eye, get a better chance to know their names, and really see how they are doing and having a chance to work on helping them is so special...this kind of teaching is so much more the type of teaching I am designed for. I pray that these 45 minute sessions really help each one of them, and in turn the class as a whole.
Out of today's session, Bev and I have decided that tomorrow's lesson topic in the class will be 'kindness' and 'manners'. The children here are extremely respectful to authority and their elders, but not so nice to each other. They won't let us carry our bags and jump up to help if we go to move a chair or anything like that, but when another child is struggling or makes a mistake in their schoolwork, they make jeering comments and may even hit that student on the head while telling them they should know the answer! They come by it honestly though...the teachers speak very gruffly to them, hit them on the head to get their attention or in discipline, hurry them along in their work and even in their printed materials or in sentences on the board they write things like 'If you are late to class, your teacher will beat you'. (This was a sample of a compound sentence). I'm not sure what effect my lesson or heart shaped craft may have on them, but hopefully along with the way we handle them and conduct class, they will at least see there is another way to deal with things. I will be using the verses on what love is from 1 Corinthians 13. We'll see what happens!!!
After dinner, Glenn was sharing with Carol Mensah how much things have changed since he was here in 2000. The fact that the Ghanaian pastors were once again gathered in the conference hall to watch the African Cup, almost a dozen channels are available to anyone who might have a tv connected to an antenna or even a satellite (we've seen them perched on mud huts), and the fact that cell phones are about half as common as we are used to in Canada is truly amazing. Today as we teachers headed back to Carpenter, we saw at least 500 cattle on both sides of the road being led by the African equivalent of shepherds/cowboys. Stephen stopped our truck and we got out to take pictures to see not only the hundreds of cows, but the herdsmen work. They didn't have horses, but they had staffs, wore long traditional dress and headpieces and called out orders to the cattle to cross the road or move around. You could see that they travel and sleep under the stars as they herd the cows...they had tied their sleeping mats and bags on the backs of some of the cows like you would a donkey. The craziest part of the picture was that as one of these herdsmen were leading some of the cattle across the road, he was talking on a cell phone!!!
Another great day...everyone continues to feel well (no one has been sick at all that I have heard!), but today it seems that Jack may have been bit on his back by some ants or something. He felt the burning sensation on the drive home, Bev gave him an antihistamine, and although I forgot to ask about it at dinner, he certainly seemed just fine this evening :)
We appreciate your prayers and we are aware that God is answering them as we continue to work our way through our assignments with grateful hearts and with an eye to see what God is doing through it all...both in us, and in those around us!
Kim
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