Day Three

We've all used Robert's camera and taken many pictures. I uploaded pictures here. The children love the camera. They like being photoed and they like taking the pictures.

Today not a lot has happened. We got up late and worked at the computer lab.It's weird to be up at the computer lab during the day. I keep thinking it's late and the sun will be down, but I step outside and the sunlight streames out so bright. And the heat, it's definatly cooler at night. Tommorow we have power out at night, so we'll be working the "day shift" again. Then we had lunch which was great. I did our laundry and now we're working at the lab again. We've got 18 computers working now and we've put more RAM in them. We thought we had found some cans that would work to make cantennas but they ended up being too small.

Ant Feathers

Day three in Ghana has been good so far. I slept in again after being up late last night working in the computer lab (I didn't even hear Dwayne snore last night - thanks Dwayne). There was a cobra on campus today and one of the American college students here chopped its head off. He was so proud. We had spaghetti for lunch, which turned out to be real tasty. And I found out this morning that all of the climbing on the rocks yesterday left me with a small cut on one of my toes that ends up hurting when I walk because there's always sand and dirt in my sandals. OK, enough whining for now.

Last night around 11:00 there were millions of flying bugs swarming all over the place. We weren't sure what they were, but they were everywhere. You couldn't walk outside without stepping on them. By 1:00 (we left the computer lab late again) they were all gone. But they left there wings behind. This morning, there were clumps of wings all around the campus. Millions of wings.


I picked up a few of these wings and asked a group of local workers here what they were. He told me they were "ant feathers". But not from ants exactly, some other bug similar to ants. Termites? Not exactly. I'm still not sure what they are. He said that when it rains they come up out of the ground and fly until their feathers fall off, then they crawl around and make new holes in the ground. He said that many Nigerians like to eat these bugs, but not the feather part, but Ghanaians don't eat these bugs. Then one of the other workers said that actually he did eat them. I had to take their picture.

Day Two

Today we went to the beach, which is about a 25 minute walk from VOH. The slope of the beach down to the water was quite steep. Taking each additional step into the water gets you significantly deeper. And the undertow from the retreating waves was significant. But the biggest difference from this beach and other beaches that I've been at was the trash in the water. Most waves would crash around you and retreat leaving part of a black trash bag stuck to your leg. Or maybe a discarded cookie bag or other undesirable item. But it was fun anyway. And on the walk there we went through an extremely poor village. Later we learned that we took a road that is actually more off of the beaten path than we were supposed to go.

Tonight we've been working in the computer lab again. It's now after midnight, but the electricity is on and the room is cool, so we're pretty much in paradise. We came up with a plan today to take wireless internet access from the school building to the other end of campus, which is several hundred yards away. I've been looking at instructions for making our own antennas using used metal cans (i.e. pringles cans or coffee cans). You can look at Cantennas for more details. In this way we can make directional antennas that would carry the signals greater distances. Hopefully we'll get to try that out tomorrow, as long as we can find a couple of cans in trash.

So far in Ghana

Ghana has an energy and water shortage so they have planned "outages" to save energy. Today was one of the planned outages, it's supposed to be from 6am to 6pm but everyone said that it ends up going till around 11pm. Yesterday since we knew that, we stayed up till 1 working on the computers. There are 16 working computers and 3 more set up but aren't working. There's a closet with dead computers and monitors so Robert and I were going to open the computers and see if there was any memory. The computers were Dell and they always have the weirdest release mechanisms. We looked at the first computer and couldn't figure out how it opened so we were going to pry it open with a flat blade screw driver but we didn't have any. That closet also had other random things in it and we found some spoons. We ended up using the spoons to pry 3 computers open and then we found the release button. We felt pretty silly but got some good laughs out of it.

Today we got up and had breakfast and went back to sleep, then got up again and ate lunch. The cooks here are so nice and they cook great meals. After lunch we walked around VOH to measure the distance from the computer lab to the clinic, the clinic to the directors house, and the directors house to the computer lab. We might direct our wireless antennas to reach all the way to the directors house or we might set up a couple antennas to "leap frog" to the directors house. After we cooled off a little we walked to the beach.
It was about a 30 minute walk. The beach was very nice. My swimsuit was it the bag we lost so I couldn't really play in the water. But I took pictures with Robert's camera. My camera's batteries died yesterday and the batteries and charger are also in the bag we lost. This was the first time Robert has been to the beach!! He had to travel half was around the world just to see the beach. The power came back on at 6:30!! Everyone was amazed. We've been up at the lab since then working on the computers.

First day in Ghana

There are planned power outages here every other day. They are planned for 6am-6pm and 6pm-6am on an alternating schedule (i.e. outage Sunday night, then Tuesday morning, then Thursday night, etc). Apparently, the day outages often continue well beyond 6pm. That makes it a bit difficult to do a lot of work in the lab. So while the power is on and it's cool (late night) we decided to stay in the lab and work. It's currently 11:20pm

We've spent a long time today working in the computer lab. There are 19 older PC's here. Each has anywhere from 128-256 MB of RAM and a 10GB harddrive. We will be updating and optimizing these computers. We also will be trying to add wireless networking in the next several days to span across the campus. A few of the staff members here have laptops and bring them here to the lab to connect to the internet.

Our first whole day in Ghana, and we had two special visitors. Two green mambas (snakes) were found in the two cottages immediately next to ours. The staff members were able to kill them (pictured at right). Fortunately they were small. Apparently a bite from an adult will kill a person in 15 minutes or so. Fortunately the medical clinic here on site has anitvenom available.

Missing Luggage

Tuesday when we got to the first airport in London one of our suitcases didn't make it. When we looked at the "receipts" that we got for the suitcases there were only 6. We checked ours and Ray's together, he had 2 and we had 5. It might not have been British Airway's fault for losing our suitcase, it might never have gotten a tag. Then Wednesday when we got to London another one of our suitcases, not Ray's, was missing. Some lady took it off the luggage carousel thinking it was hers. She took it back to the airport that night but we had already left. Daddy went this afternoon to get it. Tommy, the directer of the school, was actually amazed that we didn't lose more.

Time Chart

The whole trip took us 34 hours and 15 minutes. Daddy and I left our house at 8:42 am and we got to Ghana at 11:57 their time. For Ray it was 25 minutes shorter and for Robert it was 5 hours longer. He flew into Dallas from Kentucky.

• 15 min driving to Ray's hours
• 10 min packing up and saying good bye
• 2 hrs and 25 min driving to Dallas
• 49 min stopped to eat
• 23 min to drive the rest of the way to the airport
• 35 min to check the bags and get through security
• 3 hrs waiting in the airport
• 47 min sitting in the plane waiting for it to take off
• 8 hrs 43 min flying to London
• 20 min waiting to get off the plane
• 1 hr and 23 min getting our bags and finding a taxi
• 44 min driving to the next airport
• 4 hrs and 1 min at the airport
• 1 hr and 7 min sitting in the plane waiting for it to take off
• 6 hrs and 12 min flying to Ghana
• 11 min waiting to get off the plane
• 5 min bus ride to the place were we got our luggage
• 1 hr 30 min getting our luggage
• 1 hr and 45 min driving to Village of Hope

Re-packing

Well, just this morning we got a message from a current volunteer at Village of Hope expressing the joy the childred had playing with the very simple educational "toys" she brought. Since we had managed to get everything packed in so few suitcases, we decided we couldn't let the opportunity pass to take a more gifts to the children there.

Originally we thot to take educational toys but that soon expanded to group toys as well. And, when a last minute donation came in we were off to the stores for jump ropes, balls, frizbees, and sidewalk chalk. We also found flash cards, and other math drills in our homeschooling supplies that could be put to better use there. To top it off, we included 2100 basic LEGO bricks. They can be used to teach math and sturcture, but basically they are just fun to play with. Hopefully we'll get a chance to enjoy all the toys with the children while we are there.

We expected to pack all the new "loot" in one extra piece of luggage but then we started weighing the already packed ones. The big one wasn't closed yet and it was already to heavy! So, we scratched our heads for a while and then re-organized. After an hour or two we have everything in bag and all the bags are unweight.

This should be our last post from this side of the world. Next time you hear from us, we will be in Ghana. We will also be posting as often as we have internet access and we will include photos.

Keep praying for us.

Packing

Today daddy and I started packing suitcases for Ghana. We have a lot of computer hardware to take with us and we don't want them to get beat up so we packed daddy's clothes around them. We packed one and a half suitcases and then ran out of daddy's clothes. We started using my clothes to pack more hardware. Now I had been packing my bag over many days, so all of my stuff was nicely in a suitcase. I was a little bummed to have to unpack it all. We got most of the stuff packed, we're just waiting for last minute things like pillows and pj's. It only took us four suitcases to pack everything. Daddy was expecting to use five.

Hi, I'm Robert

Hi, I'm Robert Butts, and I'm going to Ghana with the three you've already met, obviously. Sorry it took so long to introduce myself, I've been extremely busy between finals, and now at home getting everything prepared for the trip and trying to work on a car at the same time. I've never been off the continent, and I am very excited to actually apply my skills in the mission field (I'm a Computer Science major at ACU). The need for technical help is there, but so much more often mission trips are organized around food, shelter, building schools, etc. Personally, I'd rather be doing construction and other manual labor. But it'll be nice to be help how I can, in ways other people aren't able to. And it really does help; providing computer and internet skills and access is a big step in helping a third-world country get on the level of the rest of the world.

I also expect to learn a lot from them. I agree with Professor Pettit, our standard of living shouldn't be higher than our brothers and sisters' and since it is, we should be doing as much as we can to help them, especially those in poverty. Even poverty in America is so much better than the conditions in so many countries.