Stood Up

After the holiday on Monday, Beverly and I got up early to walk to Asunafo. We had to be there at 7, and it takes an hour to walk there, I got up at quarter to 6 and got ready. After days of sleeping in, it is kind of nice to get up extra early and get going.

The walk was pleasant. The sun was rising, covered by gray clouds that sprinkled on and off as we went. The temperature was perfect: cool enough to keep from sweating, but warm enough to not need a jacket.

We arrived at the health center built by some foundation from Cache Valley, the namesake of the center. Benjamin Dehoe, the collector for Asunafo, or Douglas was supposed to meet us, but we grew impatient and called Douglas to hurry. Finally, he arrived on his motorcycle, and we started a long morning of collections.

Douglas said today was different. He had just traveled to Accra to finish legalizing our organization, meaning we had another tool to use. The recipients who are past due on their loan could be sent to court if we deemed it necessary. It seems harsh at first. We white men come into their village to “help” only to eventually make them pay for the court proceedings. I felt a tinge of guilt after the first person we talked to argued and became upset. I was only slightly relieved by remembering it was something they had agreed to; it is really easy to miscommunicate here.

As we walked from recipient to recipient, Beverly and I kept chatting, and I realized that it does no good to excuse people from consequences. Parents have to enforce natural consequences to their children to teach them real life, even though it may be easy to protect them. We were enforcing the consequences, teaching a hard lesson about upholding promises and fulfilling contracts. It is not a lesson we intentionally teach, but it is a lesson that needs to be taught.

The value of what we teach and give goes beyond their business. In the context of the current discourse, the idea of keeping promises can easily be applied in any aspect of life.  We give them credit, a simple idea that blesses families and communities by economic expansion. Maybe the people are too immature for these ideas? I don’t think so. I see them work incredibly hard to sustain their families. Maybe they need more education? Even though many do not have the equivalent of a 4^th grade education, these ideas can still be taught and used correctly as proved by the village of Akokom.

Akokom received their loans about one year ago, and every pod paid their loans in time, meaning they received their interest rebate. Although I did not go, it was awesome to hear of the exciting story of being able to hand back cash to all the ladies who worked hard to get back their rebate.

The hard work we are doing, I believe, is to break the bad habits that obrunis have formed. As I have said before, every other white man that comes through the village has probably just given free handouts. The handouts are given again and again, which creates dependency and a terrible mindset of no accountability. What we are doing creates self-sufficiency and teaches responsibility, which requires more work then handouts, but makes individuals into contributors instead of takers.

We received more promises then payments, a usual occurrence, but we plan to make them keep the promises. We will visit Asunafo again next Tuesday to see how they have decided.

Merry-go-round at the Adelaide School

We had to hurry back from Asunafo so we could get to Amonom to teach the first-phase class. We luckily found a tro-tro (a 15-passenger van which drives around the villages for cheaper than taxis) back to Abomoso for lunch, then hurriedly taxied out to our villages for class. The poor taxi driver sucks at math, and he ended up giving us a free ride because of his lack of change (we would have fixed it but we didn’t realize it until later).

Garrett and I arrived at the Adelaide School (a school from the World Joy Foundation) and asked for Master Oporku (pronounced O-po-ku), who is one of our translators. We found him, and he informed us that Tuesday was the end of a two-week long celebration of the peoples’ forefathers. Most of the people would be praying and probably would not come to class. Because of that, he and Eva (the other translator) had planned trips to Abomosu and could not stay.

He felt bad that we had come because we tried to double-check with him earlier with a phone call. The connection had been bad or our phone sucks because we did not get that from the conversation. He kindly paid our bus ticket back to Abomosu, and we found ourselves with a couple of free hours. I tied up some loose ends with the accounting system we have and may or may not have taken a nap.

That evening, we met to have choir practice. Stephen asked Zandra to be the ward choir director, and this was our first meeting. Although the singing in church had not been top notch, I thought, probably because they are all black, that everybody was supposed to be at least decent singers. Nope. Not at all. We sang through a couple of warm-up hymns, realizing that the only people that could sing were the obrunis and Stephen. We tried just about everything we could think of to teach them how to sing but they couldn’t even match a given pitch. However, I believe that this choir is pretty special. As we were singing Be Still, My Soul, the Spirit strongly bore witness of the words of the song made special by the tone-deaf soprano section. The idea of a choir may be more special to the members than actually having a good choir. One of the guys that showed up (he actually could sing) was a non-member, so the choir, unknowingly to us, was a missionary tool. Zandra is doing a great job, and I think we all have the same attitude that the Abomosu Branch Choir is going to be a hit.

On Wednesday, just like every Wednesday, Beverly and Allan teach in Akokom at two, and Garrent and I teach in Abomosu at six. We have brought the third phase course back to these villages to have second-time recipients.  From the morning until teaching time, I worked on my resume so I can fine-tune it for my actuary intern applications. I critiqued it for hours. Annoying, yet necessary. I shortly looked over the lessons to teach, which were about keeping records and creating customer loyalty. We arrived at the church just in time for class to start only to find that nobody was there to attend the class. We waited ten minutes outside when our first student showed: Mama B. I don’t know if I have mentioned her, but she is our cook. She is so nice and really funny, so we were excited to have her in our class. It took another couple minutes for more to show, and in all, only four students came to class. We figured the word had not been spread to everybody, so we postponed class until Saturday hoping the word would spread by then.

Stephen has a little Rhino that he used to put-puts around, and he gave us a ride home from the church. His generosity is great, and you can tell by the peoples’ respect for him that many admire his goodness. We are very fortunate to be able to work in Ghana under the conditions we do, and it is mainly because Stephen let us into his network. 

Garrett, Allan, myself, and Beverly