I have no idea how to start this blog…..there are a ton of things that I have done in the past 2 months but not sure where to start. I’ll start at the end of the food security summit that I went to in The Gambia: This journey started on a rainy evening at around 11pm, where 4 PCV’s started an intense game of Euchre. None of us were truly prepared for how long and involved this game would become, until we looked at the clock and saw that it was 3am, and time for me to get to the airport to board a plane to Casablanca, Morocco. The 4 of us (Jordan, Chase and Aikins) had a layover for 12 hours in Casablanca, and since three of us are Americans, we got the opportunity to enter the country without a visa. We got on to the train at the airport that would carry us into the depths of Casablanca, not one of us having any knowledge of where to go next. We ended up choosing a random town to get off in and walk around….let me tell you…..Casablanca is AMAZING! I feel in love the second I stepped off the train. For the next 8 hours, we walked around Casablanca, ate some amazing food, bought some nik naks and headed back to the airport where we had a flight to The Gambia. We arrived in The Gambia around 2 am and got a ride from Peace Corps Gambia. At this point in our journey, we were all slightly delirious and going crazy from lack of sleep, a rap song happens to come on to the radio and our Food Security coordinator begins to sing every word of it….curses and all….blowing us all out of the water and making us laugh so hard we almost peed our trousers.
The next morning, we get to business and go around Banjul, the capital of Gambia with a few PCV’s from around that area. Throughout the day, more PCV’s from all over West Africa begin to show up and settle down. The morning of July 2, the summit begins! For the next 5 days, we learn all there is to know about Food Security and what each country is doing with it. After the summit, we again leave at the butt ass crake of dawn, with a flight leaving at 3am for Monrovia, Liberia, for another 12 hour layover. This time we are not so lucky and got greeted with resistance and a bribe. They wanted 50 US dollars EACH to get into the country…..umm Hell no! but we got ourselves out of it, but saying that we will not leave the airport, so from 5am-5pm, we were stuck at the airport…with not much to do, but on the bright side….they had American plugs….which was cool to be able to plug my computer straight into the wall again. We arrived back in good ol’ Ghana around 7 pm and got back to the office for some much needed sleep.
The next big thing I did was help out at Operation Smile, an organization that comes to third world countries and fixes cleft palates and cleft lips for free. It was more than incredible to watch a child with a cleft lip come out of surgery and see their face for the first time. I cannot imagine what it would feel like to change you physical appearance so much in such a short amount of time; the fact that they can now walk around and have no one stare at them openly is such a gift.
And last but not least, I have designed a cross sector boot camp for the new education volunteers who just swore in today (CONGRATS EVERYONE). I am SO excited for this boot camp because I feel that this is just an important part of training that we do not cover well here in Ghana. But starting tomorrow, I hope to give each EDU PCV a better idea what they can do at their sites with health, water, sanitation and food security. It is set up so that in the morning, they will learn all about the sectors with different presentations that current PCV’s have created, and in the afternoon they will do hands on, practical’s about all that they learned in the morning. It starts tomorrow and ends the 19th, I will make sure to write another blog about how fabulously well it went…Until than!
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