My excursion to the Northern Region of Ghana was the most memorable of my trip. Leaving around 6 in the morning, we took a loooong bus ride (somewhere near 9 or 10 hours) to a waiting jeep about 2 hours from Mole National Park. On the way I had a chance to chat with other volunteers but mostly I tried to keep my mind off how many hours were left. I was promised by previous volunteers who had taken the trip that it would be worth it, but I wasn’t feeling it yet.
After the rendezvous with the jeep, we took a 2 hour bumpy ride to our resort in the actual park. When we arrived around 8 o’clock it was dark so we could only be impressed by sounds not sights. After checking-in we took our dinner in an outside veranda. 
Exhausted by the trip, I returned with my roommate Jason to the room to retire. As I was preparing for bed, I thought I could hear two other volunteers, Kendra and Sarah, in the next room screaming like school girls. Probably bonding, I figured.
Turns out, the next morning on our way to catch the jeep for the safari I heard all about their bonding experience. It included them bravely deciding they could sleep with all of the gigantic bugs crawling under their door, then changing their minds when they found a huge ant hole in their closet where ants were carrying these unfortunate beastly bugs back for dinner. The funniest part was, the o
nly light in their room was 
burned out, so they only realized this after settling in to their room. They ended up changing rooms. School girls.
The safari we took in the morning was incredible. Riding on the roof of the jeep gave us a great vantage point, and the guy with the huge gun only stopped to talk to us when he saw something important. We saw giant ant-holes, bush deer, wild boars, monkeys, and (the best part of all) we were only about 30 yards from five MASSIVE elephants.
After returning for breakfast, we could see our surroundings much better in the day light. Our resort sat on a ledge that looked out into the savannah and over a watering hole. While we waited for our food to come, we could watch elephants taking a bath. Breakfast consisted of omelets and sausage, which was glorious because I hadn’t had anything but starch in a month. It still took an hour to get to us though. I never really got used to that.
After breakfast we made a short trip to the village of Larabanga
to visit the oldest mosque in Western Africa. It sat next to an enormous Baobab tree and was nearly 650 years old! Our guide then took us around the village to show us what it was like in the Northern Region. This village was in much worse condition than my own. At one point he commented about their only source of water, a shriveled watering hole that made even the sheep sick when they drank it. Conveniently, a man sitting under a tree offered us tea he was preparing and wouldn’t accept no for an answer. I did a quick fake-out and passed mine to a child to drink.
We returned in the afternoon to take lunch then had free time to relax, nap, and swim in the pool before dinner. This was a great time for the four volunteers to get to know each other, discussing important things like the election, poverty, and what we did on our 21st birthdays (mine was the lamest, I’m sorry to report).
The next morning we left around 3:30, but instead of taking a jeep we took a…city bus! The same dirt roads we crossed in a range rover we now traversed in a city bus, which approximately 10 minutes into the journey got stuck in a hole. See, the problem was, this bus stopped to pick up people on the road side just like in a city…only in the middle of nowhere. The conductor of our bus politely asked the men to get off and push. Luckily the bus driver must have done his training in northern Michigan because he did the same thing I do when I’m stuck in a snow bank: rock it baaaack and forth. We got free without sucking bus fumes.
It was an unbelievable trip that I’m glad I took. Although the long bus rides were tortuous, there was no way for us to have seen the things we saw without it, so in the end it was definitely worth it.
My experience in my home village of Atorkor was life-changing to say the least. 
I taught math to 7th and 8th graders, but I feel they have taught me more than I could have in a lifetime there. It’s unfair because it gives me this guilty feeling of taking instead of giving while I was here. But that is only one emotion of many I experienced during my two months there.
Every morning I would get up around 5:15 am to go for a run along the coast. After breakfast and a little reading, I would go to school for the beginning of the day, which always started with Assembly where they would line up and sing the national anthem before marching to class. Before and after teaching my morning classes I would usually chat with teachers, volunteers, or just read.
After meeting all of the volunteers for lunch down at “Belinda’s” (the name of our fabulous cook) we’d debrief and talk about the morning. At the end of lunch we would head back to the house to rest before our afternoons.
By about 3 pm Frank, a fellow volunteer, and I would head back to the school for our afternoon library session. Basically what ensued was something like a good cop-bad cop regime. Frank would make funny faces and wind-up all of the kids until it was too loud for anyone to think, then I would demand everyone to sit down and read. Of course he was the favorite, but he inevitably
paid for it by being the go-to guy for any of the millions of petty requests made by school children the world around.
The most difficult aspect of my trip has been adjusting to the nagging health concerns that you can never forget about. Thoughts such as “has this been cooked”, “what process made this dish possible”, “was any part of this meal touched by hands without being cook”, and so on. Although I managed to avoid getting violently ill while I was here, I did have my bouts of upset stomachs with lessons learned.
Such was a day in my village, and it doesn’t seem very significant does it? The truth is, things move really slowly, much more so than back home. It sometimes seemed to me that if every day didn’t blend together so that they all seemed like one big day, I would probably have remembered every minute of my days as a teacher. But to me, the experience has been like getting a huge textbook at the beginning of a semester. Looking at it I can’t imagine getting through the whole thing, but on the day I finish my final exam, I can thumb through the book and recall memories about each page and realize that not only did I make it but I’m in some way better now because of it.
So now it is time to go home
. Of course I have missed home, mostly my family and friends. I realize, however, that I now have family and friends that I must leave behind here. When I finally get back, I know I will miss them in the same way and long to return to them.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to say exactly what I’m taking away from this trip until I can contrast with my life back home. Everything is so natural now that I can’t imagine how easy and blessed life was before I left. Until I can put the two together, I can only guess how terrific my two months have been, and hope I can articulate to the world how important it is to take the opportunity to lose yourself in a project like this.
Patrick Moore
Ann Arbor, Michigan – USA
ADF, ATORKOR
May 22 – July 14, 2008
Ann Casteel, and I had a fantastic experience during our assignment with Village Volunteers this summer. For three weeks, the three of us worked in the Basic School in Atorkor during the week and toured on the weekends. This experience was most rewarding due to the superb organization of our In-Country Coordinator in Accra, Gunadiish Nyavie, our Atork
or coordinator Seth Kordorwu, and the school Headmistress, Mr. Beaulah Mensah-Tetteh.
Next, the Headmistress and the staff and students were so welcoming and eager for us to teach a group of Grade 1 students Basic English vocabulary a
nd for us to conduct a Teacher Workshop. Although we usually worked from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00, the students and teachers worked hard to learn new methods. The test we conducted for the students and the workshop survey indicated we were successful. The smiles on the faces and the farewell hugs were all the reward we needed to let us know that our efforts were appreciated. We also felt very special during the welcoming ceremony and when the ADF presented us with a dress fashioned from Batik. We hope our contact with them continues in the future.
to the coast for the volunteers to swim or relax was also a treat. Of the three, Ashanti was the most disappointing. The four hour bus ride was really six hours, and because our guide did not follow the schedule, we only saw three of the seven sites scheduled. In Accra, we were signed up for the cloth making lessons, which we assumed would be making the Kenta cloth; however, it was they dyeing of Batik. The experience made for a long day, but we learned method. We probably would not have signed up for that class if we had realized it was not learning to use the loom to make cloth.
