“Party’s Over”

Banana splits, beachfront hotel rooms, feeding monkeys, waterfalls, and bumpy bus rides; so long yellow brick road. That’s right, the MPA party is over, now the work begins. But that’s ok; my work is mostly play anyway!

What I’ll miss about the MPA students being here was not the fun stuff we did or all I learned about my classmates; it was showing the Ghana I love to a new pair of eyes. Luckily that’s something I get to do fairly frequently while working too. And the first chance I got was the day after the students left, and it was with a new friend Sue who I met at JFK in February. We were both waiting to board flight 26 to Accra, we started talking about what the other was doing in Ghana, exchanged cards and went to our separate isle seats to wait out the 11-hour puddle jump. This is kind of a frequent occurrence when I fly to Ghana, maybe it’s my inner four-year-old, but I am always intrigued by what people are going to Ghana for. In Sue’s case it was a holiday with some friends. Fast-forward to April, a few phone calls and emails later, and Sue is back in Ghana looking at one of EPI’s electricity-generating merry-go-rounds for a school she fell in love with while here last. So to begin the working part of this Ghana trip, we took Sue and a friend out to Attabui to see the school and play around.

Our next trip was out to Abomosu to visit the installations we did in February with World Joy and Viridian. This project was somewhat different than our usual installations, and the first time we have worked with something other than a school, but so far it has been a big success! These four projects were made possible by Viridian, a green energy company based in the US, who rewards their top employees each year with a humanitarian trip to another continent in a program they named 7 Continents in 7 Years. Thanks to their generosity, and the local know-how of World Joy, 400 students now have access to light for nighttime studies and reading, locals are able to check out a book as well as a lantern from the library, and life-saving medicines are kept refrigerated and accessible to those in need. Did I mention how much I love my job yet?