Good morning Roachetnam!

Keeping this blog up to date is a challenge here. The nearest Internet cafe is in Ho, the capital of Volta Region, which is 24 km from our village of Nyive. The road is made of poorly graded dirt and rock, although some of it has been recently surfaced. I don't want to exaggerate the progress, but it seems to my lightly educated eye that the conditions here have improved a little in the last two years - more roads, more banks, more phone coverage, more shops. Small but palpable changes.

First, an update on the library itself. We're off an running, thanks to an unexpected donation from a Nyive citizen! At the moment, the library is an empty building, with a partially finished interior, which is doubling as the kindergarten while the community and local government are busily rebuilding the actual school building. In order to house computers and books, the building needs to be made secure from the elements and from theft. That means a finished ceiling to keep out rain and bugs, secure windows and doors, shelves and furniture.

On Monday, we came to Ho to shop for materials, with a detailed estimate of our needs put together by some members of the Nyive Development Association, our partner organization. (Several members are also professional carpenters.) We decided to take our business to a man named Owm Delali, originally from Nyive, who runs a successful lumber business here in Ho. It also turns out he's the most miraculously generous man I've ever met. He gave us our materials for a third of the market cost!

Thanks to this, I can say that virtually all of the donations made by my friends and family in Canada will go towards actual books and computers for the library. Thank you all for helping the village so much! They are incredibly grateful and very excited about the library being finished. None of it would be possible without you all! A full list of donors will follow, along with pictures of the site.

Before I go, let me quickly explain the title of this post. We're staying at a house here, hosted by Mr. Emmanuel Numado, a local headmaster and a very good friend. The accomodations are very comfy: we have a living room, fans, a fridge, electrcity, and a giant mango tree in our front yard! But the plumbing is all outdoors. Bathing from a bucket it quite relaxing at the end of a long, hot day, but the outhouse is a challenge after dark. During the day it's not so bad, but at night it's home to the biggest cockroaches I've ever seen. They appear to have extablished an advanced civilization in the toilet, which is a little unnerving, to say the least.

For more thoughts on this and other subjects, visit my friend Jessi's blog at thespottedjessicat.blogspot.com.

More to come!

Breakfast over Baghdad

When we found our flights to Ghana via Dubai online two months ago, we were excited about the price. I wish we'd thought harder about the amount of time we were going to spend in the air! Thirteen hours nonstop from Toronto to the United Arab Emirates, followed by twelve hours loose in Dubai for the night, followed by eight more hours backwards to Accra...we're wiped!

It's hard to believe the journey's begun. The first moment it really sank in was when I woke from another catnap on the flight to Dubai to eat my breakfast (which they served at night, because of the time difference). I checked the live map on the screen in front of me to see where we were. The nearest city: Mosul.

Oh my goodness. There's Fallujah. And there's Baghdad.

Breakfast in the sky over Iraq. Wasn't expecting that.

Dubai itself is hard to describe. We've come up with various attempts, none of them reflecting how cool it actually is. Jessi says it's a it like Vegas, without the gambling, strippers, or booze. I compared it to a giant Arab South Keys (for those of you who are up on your Ottawa shopping malls). Needless to say, we're speaking of the tourist areas. We had a hard time navigating (due mostly to our total failure to read the guide book), so we spent most of our time at the Deira City Centre mall, which is exactly like every mall in Canada except with Arabic writing. We did make an excursion to the Gold Souk, where we dodged handbag hawkers and ended up wandering down a side street into some decidedly male-only territory. We ended up hanging out at Dubai Duty Free in the airport for several hours, buying gifts for friends in Ghana. I definitely want to go back to Dubai sometime (possibly during the day) and really experience it. Maybe I'll wait for Dubailand to open.

Meanwhile, we've already made it from Accra (the capital of Ghana) to Ho (the regional capital of Volta Region, the easternmost region of the country). Our next stop is the village itself - Nyive, about 25 km outside Ho, hugging the Togolese border. I'm expecting a warm welcome, probably followed by a lot of sleep. Then our work will really start.

Salaam everybody!