Giving a blank page to the unheard.
Partnering with an international community to build something is a lot like an interpersonal relationship: you both have to make compromises to make it work. You don’t compromise just to keep them happy; you do it out of a genuine desire to see them get what they need. For example, the village of Asisiriwa really wants to steward the money …
Kaitlyn and I arrived back in the village of Asisiriwa, Ghana on Saturday with our liaison, Professor Agyekum. We made our way first to the chief’s house where men had gathered from all over the district to see what tidings we had brought. The council meeting opened in a similar fashion as last time. We walked counter-clockwise around the room …
According to the CIA World Factbook, the 2015 estimated global literacy rate is 86.1%. Upon first hearing that, it doesn’t sound so bad. Here in the US, that’s a solid B grade in school—perfectly passable. But if you zoom in on that number and realize that 13.9% of the world is still illiterate largely because of poor access to education, it …
I’m not sure if everyone does this, but I often find I have to shock myself out of a train of thought that might be painful, degrading, or just embarrassing. I have to interrupt myself with words, or sometimes even noises. For instance, when I think about the time I stupidly asked a female friend of mine, “Do you wanna …
It’s too bad that God only wants us to help people exactly like us. It’s a shame he said things like “Let the downtrodden gentiles suffer” and “Slaughter the lost sheep.” And then there’s that whole parable about refusing to give money to the pagan building a school—as though pagans could do good! We’re reading the same Bible, right? Hi. …
We all know that injustices have been committed on the continent of Africa—namely the Transatlantic Slave Trade—but the media generally likes to portray Westerners as washing the African blood off their hands after that point. The uncomfortable truth is that the colonial era came next, which arguably did greater damage to the cultures of this beautiful continent than the slave …
A professor at Regis University recently told me, “I love your vision. As you’ll soon learn in development work, about 5% of the overall effort is the vision and 95% is the delivery and refinement of that vision. No exaggeration here!” I had a feeling that he was right, but could do nothing to refine the vision than to brace …
Obviously, there are some health concerns whenever one is traveling to the tropics, to say nothing of the specific connotations with sub-Saharan Africa. I think people actually have so many fears about traveling to Africa—or loved ones traveling there—because they don’t understand the health concerns. It’s just a place with a lot of diseases we can’t count or wrap our temperate-clime heads …
I once wrote a poem to encapsulate my study abroad experience that began with the words, “What did we expect to find in Ghana?” That rings as true now, finding myself plodding along these same pedestrian-hostile streets I knew so well two years ago. What did I expect this time? What can I expect from Ghana, even having lived here before? Heat, …
We are starting a library in Ghana. That’s what we thought when we launched this crazy crowd-funding campaign and began researching how best to prove our sanity to our families. Establishing anything in another country is audacious—far from the transient backpacking forays I’m used to—but apparently it wasn’t big enough. Kaitlyn and I sat down with an old family friend of …
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