Hard Work at its Finest

Things have been picking up here as the school year is coming to an end. The weeks seem to blur together for they go by so quickly. After the game in Kumasi, I took it easy for a week and tried to focus on school (or simply forced myself to go to class is more like it). Sometimes the motivation to make it to class is low, because all of my classes are large political science classes where the professor reads from the packet we all have for 2 hours. I find I learn better when I do the reading myself, and take my own notes. But this week I went to all of them in preparation for finals which are coming up soon. I am anxious to see how those are going to pan out, it should be interesting.

Since we were all taking it easy, we decided not to travel very far last weekend. Instead, we went to the orphanage in Kpando with a group of friends. The last couple times I have been to Hardt Haven, Edem has shown me the construction he has been doing single handedly on the new orphanage. I asked him if he would want help some weekend digging, painting, cleaning, whatever he needed done. He loved the idea, so I asked around to see if any of my friends would be interested in going to help, and I was thrilled with how many people wanted to come.
Saturday morning, a group of 11 of us made our way up to Kpando. Alli, Tai, Melissa, Jess, Kaci, Jack, John, Jay, Max, Ryan and I found an empty tro tro at the tro station, and were able to completely fill it by ourselves. The tro ride is about 4 hours to Kpando, and when we got there, the sky looked like rain was in store for us. We put our stuff down at the guest house we checked into, and walked over to Hardt Haven. (Sidenote: That is something I absolutely love about Kpando, it is small enough where you can walk everywhere. It has such a sense of community, and everyone welcomes you (Akwaaba) as you walk by.)

I was so excited to see the kids again, it had been almost 3 weeks since I had been there last; I wish it was closer so I could go more often. Christopher (the 2 year old boy) automatically gravitated towards Tai. You should have seen it, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight, it was so cute. The guys got a big game of soccer going, and all the younger boys were so excited to have older boys to play with. (Most all of the volunteers that come are usually females) We hung out with the kids for most of the day, and then it started to rain, but lightly. We all went back to our guest house to shower and go out to dinner. At dinner, it started pouring. As in huge storm. The power went out, and we sat in the pitch dark until candles were lit. It was still raining on the walk home, but not too bad. We all went to bed early because we were waking up early to work the next morning.

Our day began at 7 am. We got up, and walked over to the work site. There is a house that belongs to Edem that is already there, (that is going to be the children’s rooms) and he is adding on to it. The house hasn’t been used in years tho, so it was the girls job to begin to clean it out. The boys were outside digging property lines around the house, 1 ½ ft deep, and 1 ½ ft wide. The inside of the house was completely empty, except for dirt. There was about ½ inch think layer of dirt on the ground in every room. It took us a while to sweep it all out because they don’t have brooms here, they use twigs tied together at the end. So you have to bend down really low to sweep. Once we got most of the dirt out, we scrubbed the walls. We encountered so many different spiders, it was intense. I’m not big on spiders, but I can handle them. They were pretty huge though, and some of the girls couldn’t stand to be in there. I found a dead bat too, which was pretty gross. But it the house definitely looked a lot cleaner once that was done.
After we had been cleaning for about 2 hours, we all thought we should give the boys a break, and go switch with them. I’ve had to dig before, and I thought it wouldn’t be too hard. Needless to say, we largely underestimated how hard that type of work is. We got outside and the boys were all shoveling or pick axing away in the blazing sun. The boys each traded out their shovel or pick ax with us, but stuck around to watch. (I’m pretty sure they anticipated the comical situation which was about to occur). Jack had the largest pick ax and I traded out with him. I could hardly lift it over my head. I lasted maybe 10 minutes before he offered to trade out again. (Probably because it was painful to watch hahaha) But then I switched to shoveling, which was just as intense. Again, I probably only shoveled for about 10 minutes until John took it back over. We (the girls) were thankful we had the boys there because they were much better at the landscaping work than we were. But, Alli was working away, and shoveled with the boys the remainder of the time, and has the blisters to prove it!

We had to catch a tro later that day so we stopped working around 12pm, and head back to the guest house to shower. Although it didn’t seem like we got a lot of work done, we cleaned out the entire house, and got a good start on the property line. And that is that much more work Edem doesn’t have to do by himself, which makes a big difference to him. We went back to Hardt Haven to hang with the kids for about an hour before we had to head home.

The trip was wonderful. It was so great to have my friends meet all the kids, and love them as much as they did. Many of them want to go back again, which I think we definitely will during finals week. I am still just so happy so many people wanted to come be a part of this, and were willing to give up a weekend of traveling to help work.I thought maybe 4 would be interested, but there were 11 of us. It broke my heart all over again leaving the kids, especially Paulie (talked about in earlier blogs) But that gives me that much more incentive to go back as soon as I can.

That’s all I have for now....this week I am just laying low and starting to study. But my big trip is coming up soon, so I’m sure after that I will have loads to write about!
Until next time, Much Love!
Nat