To sum up Ghana, I will quote from a bumper sticker: "On judgement day you'll wish you had Jesus stickers on your car" Four days later I can cooly admit that my post about my first day at school was the nicest I could have made it... in reality my first day was hell and I cried when I got home... but since then, the school is awesome... I'm tag-team teaching the oldest kids (a much smaller class of only 22 students and located on an outside wall so it is much less noisy... my first class was directly in the [View Full Entry]

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Volunteer Bootcamp is what we were calling it on saturday... we arrived at our homestay on friday and went to the land (the site of the building project) to put in a few hours work on saturday. We only lasted a few hours seeing as how we were lifting 40lb blocks of cement and carrying them over rough ground to place them beside the dug-out foundations where they will eventually be laid. The family that I am living with is incredible: Botche (12) and Jima (8) do more housework than an 18th century housewife and Nana (4) and Mamaqua (3) help [View Full Entry]

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So I've found a better internet cafe today but hotmail is still slower than Molases in trois pistol :), so if people are interrested in I emailing me please use kettelkl@gmail.com. I have found out that there is no international calling in offinso and no internet so I'll only be able to get online/use the phone every few weeks when I take a bus to Kumasi. Anyways, Kersten's knee got worse so she's flying home to have it MRI'd and set properly. Ababio, the founder of Future Island School should be coming down today to spend a day with her before [View Full Entry]

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Hey guys, I have arrived safe and sound in Africa. I'm on my way to my ghanaian dancing and drumming lesson, so this will be brief, but a few highlights to think about... -on my plane over they were deporting a prisoner from Amsterdam back to Ghana so he was handcuffed to the chair like 8 rows behind me and the flight was delayed because he was making a scene -last night we went to "mentor", the ghanaian equivalent of Canadian Idol. We were special guests and so they made people give up their seats for us... of course we were [View Full Entry]

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May 4th... seems like I should be boarding a plane today... I've spent the last few days getting ready, and after buying 5 bottles of sunscreen and 3 bottles of Purell, I figure I'm ready for whatever Africa wants to throw at me! My final Donation list is below, and it has filled two of the largest suitcases I could find... about 70lbs of donations coming with me, and another 40lbs coming with my mother in July. I have also raised $3735 for the school, which is over 8% of the cost of building the school. For those of you who [View Full Entry]

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Well as you may or may not know, I've been strategically approaching local businesses to get goods donated for the school. I picked up tons more stuff today so I thought the logical step would be to let you all know what I've collected so far: * From Titles (campus bookstore) : 300 pencils * From the McMaster Health Centre : 400 bandaids, 800 antiseptics * From Fortinos : 10 dictionnaries, 120 big pieces of sidewalk chalk, 2 kids card games, 2 boxes of crayons, 2 packs of pencil crayons, 1 cribbage board * From Grand and Toy : 72 pens, [View Full Entry]

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So I've lasted this long in my life without the need for a blog, but I've decided this is likely the best way to let everyone know what I'm doing this summer. But now back to midterms... I leave in 44 days and have way too much to do between now and then! [View Full Entry]

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