end of april.

This past week has been good getting back into daily grinds after our Volta trip. The thing about Ghana is that something always needs to be fixed and this week was no different. There are times when this gets on my last nerve and I get very frustrated to the point, well maybe I shouldn’t express as to what point…But surprisingly this week’s problems didn’t unnerve me. Does that mean I’m making cross-cultural living progress? We ran out of water this week. That’s not uncommon right now for most people. With our crisis of water in Lake Volta Dam they are doing electricity load shedding as well as water load shedding. We ended up buying some water and according to our ‘water guys’ with the lack of water in the dam there’s not enough to go around so unless you buy some from another nearby water source, you could go months without water flowing in your area. Thankfully we are able to purchase water, but most aren’t. However after we got water and filled out tanks the next day mysteriously we had lost over 6,000 gallons? Enter in the fact there’s always something to be fixed here! Sammy, our plumber came over and literally chiseled away the concrete to one of the pipes and replaced a valve that was causing the water to be pumped back out into the water main line out underneath the streets...oh I hope somebody received all that water and it wasn’t lost…!

The rest of the week was good. I finished another video project (thankfully I got one port on my hard drive to work), ordered a new hard drive since the ports on mine have blown out, went to a film festival showing a Ghanaian film entitled “Witches in Exile” (don’t forget I live in Accra…big city with embassy’s and it was The Environmental Film Festival) and then Sunday night came possibly the worst I have ever felt in my whole life. I will now talk about throwing up…so if that grosses you out…stop reading!

Sunday night a friend celebrated her 24th birthday so we went out to eat actually at a very American restuaraunt called Champs. I ordered a chicken burger and thought it was pretty good, it tasted a little ‘different’ but not too bad…Then we got in the car to leave and my friend had to pull over because I felt really sick so I threw up! I did. A lot. Then I felt better and she dropped me off where my car was and I headed home. Once I arrived at my house I got extremely nauseas again and then it started. From 1am to around 7am Monday morning I threw up five times. Then I started getting chills and my fever spiked to 101 so I read my trusty “Where there is No Doctor” book and I had every symptom of … Malaria. There’s something about living in Ghana, maybe even Aftica as a whole, that when you get fever…you automatically think “it’s got to be malaria, I just know it.” Of course I’m reading the book and all the sudden I have every symptom for cholera, meningitis, malaria, typhoid… this is why I could never study medicine I would think I had every thing. Anyway- I went to have my blood tested and thankfully … NO malaria, however this wasn’t without a call to my dad 6am his time to simply ‘let them know’ I was sick! I’m such a baby!! But now I’m back to the land of living. Yesterday I slept more than I think should be humanly possible and today I feel good! I’m very thankful.

Wednesday we’re leaving to go North. I’m going to work on the water video project with Mary Kay, but the trip is for Jim Ramsay, our Director of Field Ministries from home office, to see the Ghana field and all the missionaries’ locations/lives and ministries! I’ll update more when we return.