If you’ve ever wondered what happened to an old t-shirt you decorated for a college pep rally or summer camp way back when; we have located all such discarded items. The used clothing (and used everything else) market here is remarkable. Ghanaians proudly display their Salvation Army cast-offs and declare to the world that the senior class of 2005 rules the school! I am pleased to see that westerners constant consumerism has some benefits for the less commercial world, though they are also the victims of some horrible fashion trends from decades past such as the one where every other teenage girl in the States proclaimed their sense of self-worth (or lack their of) across their chest with bold letters stating their beauty. I saw a very African woman wearing a shirt that proclaimed in bold letters “Help me, I’m blond!”

In other news, today I spent the afternoon cutting 24 small, dirty sets of finger and toe nails. Most, if not all, had never been cut by anything but a razor blade before. There are some things my western mind just can’t come to terms with, and one of them is the use of double edged razor blades by small children. They use them for lots of things and think I’m so paranoid for insisting they use scissors or cutting every single piece of paper myself just to keep the blades out of their hands. The hygiene and safety factors here have been affecting us in different ways. We keep telling ourselves that millions of people live this way and survive, and then again their life expectancy is much shorter than ours. We are dealing with a lot of health issues for the kids and are looking into the different possibilities for their health care and testing.

John built a compost box with some of the kids the other day and we are hoping to get started on some garden boxes soon. Locating good soil is a challenge (which is part of the systematic problem of production here) but we are hoping to grow as much of our own produce as possible to cut costs and improve the kids (and our) diet.
John has been doing an amazing job of organizing nightly football (soccer) matches for the kids, which they absolutely love, and is quite a task to accomplish. He has taught them how to count off into teams and play in shifts, which seems to be working much better than the alternative. Sometimes he takes them down to the closest “field” where he incorporates the local neighborhood kids into the games and draws quite a crowd of fans.

Other than that we’ve been tearing through books in the evenings. The kids go to their rooms at 8pm (I would say they go to bed at 8, but our bathrooms are connected and I can hear them playing around long after 9 sometimes – which I really don’t understand how they have the energy to do because they wake up at 4:30am, don’t take naps, and some of the kids are only 5 years old!) at which time we usually retire to our room for reading or sometimes on an exceptionally long day we take a walk down to the local establishment (which we’ve affectionately dubbed, Our Lord’s Pub, but is really just a window from which a sweet, plump older woman serves very cheap drinks and there are some tables and chairs set under a corrugated tin roof canopy) for some refreshment.

We are thankful to have found a few more affordable grocery stores and vendors where we can save a few pennies here and there. We aren’t technically supposed to be paying for food right now, since we have a cook here, but our stomachs are begging us to buckle down and make the investment in something familiar and nutritionally valuable. I am generally pretty tightfisted, I’ll admit, but when it comes to eating, there are some things you just have to pay for. The other thing we have been spending a lot on is communication. Internet usage and phone calls, which add up, but are definitely worth it and make a big difference for our sanity, which could seem questionable, depending on what hour, or minute, you catch us. We’ve definitely been on a rollercoaster ride of emotions since we arrived.

Emails and phone calls are some of our best encouragements here. Thanks for the updates and support, we really couldn’t make it without our relationships all over the world that keep us lifted up. Keep them coming, please!