Giving a blank page to the unheard.
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 …
I feel like I’ve been operating on pure hope lately, propelling our fundraising efforts along by sheer force of will. To be perfectly honest, I’m exhausted. I wish I could say that I’m weary because of all the difference I’m making and all the good work I’m doing, and I know that’s what I should be saying…but I’m not. In …
I don’t know if you listen to Coldplay, but I have, and there is a lyric that’s been stuck with me for weeks now: Nobody said it was easy; no one ever said it would be this hard. I’m sure Chris Martin wasn’t singing about creating a nonprofit from scratch when he crooned those words, but they ring true. When we started …
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 …
Nestled in the Bosomtwe District of Ashanti Region, just a few kilometers away from Lake Bosomtwe, the water-filled crater left by a meteor some 10 million years ago and the legendary site of the god Twi, for whom the traditional lingua franca of much of Ghana is named, lies the proud and newly paved village of Asisiriwa. Boasting a quad-shaped …
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 …
It was hot the day we arrived in Adaklu Helekpe, a small town in the Volta Region abutting Adaklu Mountain, said to be the tallest free-standing mountain in Ghana. We came first by tro-tro to Ho, then took a shared taxi the rest of the way to Helekpe, after being informed that the town we originally intended to visit had …
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, …
Untold International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. If you pay taxes in the US, your donation is tax-deductible.
