Charged

Current, as in electricity, in the camp is sporadic at times. Sometimes, we will go to bed with the whole world dark, and the curvature of this world etched by the stars, then wake up at 2 with all the lights in the house on. Such is life, and this is Africa. I wish I could write more, and I wish I could better describe this past week than with the hasty words of a time-rushed woman. Last week was amazing and terrible. My first week in Accra in May, I met these British medical students whom I "clicked" with immediately; they were the people I visited in Kumasi. Well one of them traveled across the country and spent the week at a nearby hotel, hoping to get work at the one clinic on camp. We had a competition of how many countries we've each been to, and he beat by one. It was really awesome and Tim ended up helping out with CBW, we talked until all hours of the night, so this past week lacked quite a few of the usual hours of sleep. He picked up the slack of some other workers and helped out at the summer school the international volunteers put together. A side note: this is a free summer program for half a day, providing free bread and water to about 300 students. Well since it started last week, the numbers were fluctuating and at one time there were 65 3-5 year olds for one teacher! Which is why I have stopped with the HIV/AIDS outreach and am now helping with the ABC class (the young ones)....which makes me really realize the importance of using a condom!!!!
Well one afternoon, I found out that a two year old twin boy died of dehydration. He was the first child I picked up when I came to camp and would stand outside one of the volunteer houses in yellow underwear and do karate moves under a tree. Tragic, heartbreaking, unfair the words to describe it come easily. Maybe even relief, here was a child that had escaped the confines of the camp, by heeding to the raw wrath of survival. Was he saved, if so what from? Knowing a child that has died made me question everything. What kind of world is this, where 5 months ago, I was paying $8 for a plate of food or taking a 20 minute shower. The little things, the lack of equilibrium. It changes you, I know I've changed. I don't really know what else to say. I ended up climbing up an abandoned building in a field outside of camp and watching the African sun set behind an African mountain and thinking about life. Dehydration and completely preventable, but in a swing of rationality everybody dies.

I leave a week from Monday. I wish I didn't have to, I love it here, I love most of the people. I think when I come home I will be fairly disgusted by the daily living of most Americans until I succumb to the materialistic consumerism that rules the middle-class, relative wealth sucks because its not how much you have that matters, people forget about that, it's about how much more you have.

The skies here are amazing. Grace the lady I helped with the 2 month old baby was reunited with her brother from the war this past 2 days. She hadn't seen him since she was 11 and now she's 26! He lives in Ghana 4 hours away and was told that he looked like a lady that sold fish in the camp so he came and saw and sure enough it was his sister, his and her only form of blood family for over a decade! It was emotional in the highest form of the word, seeing the two of them together; they have each other now. I found out that she was raped during the war, more than once.