We’ve been here a week now. It’s so easy to get attached to these kids, it’s hard to imagine that we’ve only known them a week. Every time you sit down one or two crawl into your lap or attach themselves to your side and before you know it you’re on your third or fourth book. We wake up almost every morning to them singing and playing outside as they do their morning chores (we’re adjusting to the rooster too so some sanity is returning to the light sleepers).

John created a standard test (based on the experience we had in Florida) which we gave to every kid and have grouped them into levels. Some ten year olds don’t know their ABCs and we have a 6 year old who is the best reader of the whole bunch. So we have a lot of variety. We have been doing individual tutoring with them. They love being singled out to have some alone time where they get to talk and read without 15 others climbing all over. We’ve also been sorting through boxes of donated books and filling the bookshelf to overflowing, which we are very pleased with! Now the trick is getting the kids to cooperate with the organization of the books.

Today we have some students from NYU coming to help out. They are here on a study abroad program, apparently there is an NYU Ghana, who knew? So we will be figuring out what they want to do and how they can help us out around here because I guess they need community service hours. We have ideas for a garden, sports program (which John has been starting, but I am not much help in this area, unfortunately), art class, and all kinds of other things swimming around in our heads. We are also trying to be patient not to initiate too many new ideas until we have a firmer grasp of how things run here and how they should be approached.

Health is a big issue which we need to look into. We think a lot of the kids have malaria, though neither of us is very medically knowledgeable. A few of them have been running very high fevers, then after a few hours they are back to normal and feeling fine.