- basketball
Holy basketball. So my friends here, Eve and Moh have started up this basketball program that runs every Saturday. It’s basically an awesome 5 hours of trying to convert these football/soccer loving kids into basketball players. We (I try to help them) have a session in the morning with the younger kids just doing basic skills, then in the afternoon we take the older kids and try to have like a team practice. They are all super cute and super serious. We’ve been going for 6 weeks now, and each week we’ve had from 60-80 or so kids..

A couple of weeks ago, Eve and our friend were taking a taxi to the program and the taxi driver started going on about how he came to Accra when he was young and worked as a shoe shine boy for three years, then took out a loan at 60% interest to buy his first taxi. He worked 24 hours and 6 days a week for a little bit to pay of the loan as quickly as he could. Now he has 6 taxi and can get a much better interest rate. Anyways, Eve got this guy to tell all the kids about his story and it was pretty cool. He made them repeat “I can do it” after him. He also emphasized the potential of staying in Ghana, which was nice because so many people here get stuck on the idea of moving to the US.

Soo. I’ve been tagged in a couple of pictures on facebook during the program, so you should check the album out. ALSO, the NGO is called ABaCoDe (African Ball and Community Development). Eve’s friends from Canada started it in Uganda, so her and Moh have adopted it and made it their own thing in Ghana. Since it’s just starting out, they’ve been fronting a lot of the costs so far. The costs aren’t a lot, (water for the kids, t-shirts, basketballs, and paying the local staff) but it’s adding up. Anyways, if you have 5 bucks or something, feel free to help us out! http://pledgie.com/campaigns/13675

between the program and playing scrimage games in the morning, the court has really become my favourite place in ghana. it kind of feels like home

- visits
Also my brother and sister were here for a week! it was AWESOME. we spent a LOT of time in tro tros (small bus things) but we got to see a lot. in the end, we even got to feed a monkey 3 days after biking down and walking up hills hopelessly looking for a monkey sanctuary for 2.5 hours (a trek which was concluded when I asked an older lady walking this really long dirt road if there were monkeys ahead [full with monkey charades to ensure she really understood what I was saying]. being February, it also happened to be Christmas and my birthday while they were here, so I got a sweet stash of granola bars and solid stick deodorant! apart from the random rashes we all got, overall it was a really good time, but super stressful trying to show them everywhere in such a short time. and my parents are coming tomorrow!!!