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Catching Up
Sorry for the delay, the internet here is a bit useless. Sometimes it is working and some times it is not! I am going to try and catch up today, so fingers crossed!
Some good news first though… Kamal found my phone and the money that I lost at the orphanage!
Our first Weekend
Saturday was a nice relaxing day. We just hung around at our new home for the morning and then Kamal & Co. (we don't know his name) picked us up on the bikes, to go swimming and headed towards town. Just as they arrived though it started to rain, by the time we had got to Tamale town it was absolutely pouring down! So we sheltered for a while, and then set off again, only for the rain to come down even harder and faster, so we had to shelter again, we picked a great day to go swimming! Eventually it eased off and we made it to the swimming pool. I was surprised to see how many other people were also not put off by the rain.
It was great to swim, we felt really clean and it was a great afternoon, washed away all of the horrors of the orphanage from the day before! We were a bit surprise to find that it was just Jenna & I swimming and not Kamal & Co. We were beginning to feel a bit like pampered princesses being taken everywhere!
The evening was spent like most of our evenings, at home with Fouzia who is the girl who looks after our house mother. We chat to her, share photos, read & update our diaries.
On Sunday we had a very similar day, but this time not at the pool. Kamal & Co. showed us round the National Centre for Culture. It is a place where artists work together to promote the regional arts and crafts, so there are a lot of stalls all in a large circle around a large building where there are often performances. The stalls looked great & I couldn't wait to get started. Every time we passed a shop, they called us in and were so chatty, everyone wants to know where we are from, why we are her & for how long. They didn't seem to push too much for us to buy, but they just wanted to show us and explain everything, so it took us all afternoon for us to get around the market/shops. Also, next to the large building was a restaurant called sparkles, where they sell English food as well as typical Ghanaian food. Jenna was so excited!
Our First Week
Our first week was good, Kamal slowly let us go off on our own and we found our bearings in Tamale. I really enjoyed being able to make decisions about what we were doing. Our afternoons were always much better than our mornings!
The orphanage is hard even on a really good day when there are lots of volunteers helping out. The children are always wet, in ill-fitting clothes that even after they have been washed have a faint odour of urine and faeces, just disgusting. Kids in England really don't know how lucky they are! I can't wait to give Joshua, Harvey & Sam huge big cuddles when I get back.
Our bags had arrived at the orphanage by Monday and are with the Madam (She has her own office outside of the baby & toddlers house). So throughout the week we got different toys out for them to play with. I can now see why all of their toys look so horrible though, after one day a wooden puzzle had been scratched so much that it looked like it was 2 years old. Because they only have concrete floors, even in the playroom, everything just gets dusty and scratched very quickly.
The women who work in the home are pretty useless and are not really interested in what the children are up to. They are happy if all of the children are out of their way so that they can watch day time TV. They literally appear first thing in the morning, once to give them a biscuit and then for lunch.
Towards the end of the first week, we rebelled a little and took all of the children outside, even though the women though it was too cold!!!! They were so happy playing on the broken swings and the slide, it made a good change for us too as the smell is not as overpowering outside and the children did not want to sit on us, which meant we stayed a bit cleaner too.
The afternoons we filled with visiting Kamal at his shop, looking around the art stalls, going swimming, booking some drumming lessons, having lunch and just wandering through the streets and markets of Tamale. We had some great fun in the afternoons, and they always made us feel much better about the orphanage.
We also booked a flight back from Tamale to Accra as I wanted to avoid swollen ankles and being crushed for 12 hours again. I think we were quite please to reach the end of our first week, it means that we are over half way inthe orphanage and we had Mole National Park to look forward to!
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Leila Dawn. So glad to hear that things are looking up for you. The market sounds like fun as does your explorations of Tamale. Think you made a wise decision to book flight back to Accra especially as you will have another long flight back to the UK so swollen ankles are best avoided at all costs! xxx