Pick Up Trip - Day 4 - 3/1/2012

Pick Up Trip – Day 4                       

For the first time on this trip I’m actually glad we didn’t have internet access last night.  I really needed the night to digest everything we saw and did yesterday…I’m still at a loss for words sufficient to explain properly everything that happened.  I pray I can document this well enough that in 20 years when the children or I look back we can relive all of the same feelings we had today…

We’re still in Doryumu staying at a little hotel in the middle of nowhere.  It’s a quaint little place with 10 rooms and a small restaurant.  I actually enjoy it quite a bit.  The only thing that could make it any better would be if it had hot water, but quite honestly it’s been so hot that at night when we shower it’s refreshing to feel the cool water.

John was to pick us up at 7:00am from the hotel so we could be back to his place to start the egg peeling and boxing of food.  The cooks were up at 4:00am starting to cook and prepare for the craze that would happen later that day.  I’d set our alarm for 6:00am figuring that would give us all plenty of time to get ready.  The night was shorter than I would have liked – mainly because I was still working out in my mind if I’d done the right thing by getting after Mighty. I had just started to get to sleep when Agbesi woke me and told me his ear was “paining” him.  I turned on the light to look and didn’t see anything wrong with it.  I figured he must have been sleeping on it weird or something.  Again we laid down and just as I started to doze off I felt something small crawling on my head.  I annoyingly brushed it off and argued with the bug how I just wanted to go to sleep!  I’d finally fallen into a pretty deep sleep when I heard a knock at my door…John.  I quickly grabbed the phone to look at the time – 7:00!!  Crap!  The alarm didn’t go off!  It was then I noticed the clock on the phone was set for pm while the alarm was set for am.

We all quickly scrambled to throw ourselves together not wanting to slow down the production that was already underway at the house.  When I woke Agbesi he rolled over and had looked like he’d been in a fistfight.  His right eye was swollen completely shut and his left ear was almost twice the size as the other one.  Still groggy and scrambling to figure out what was going on I asked if Mighty had elbowed him in the night or something.  Then it dawned on me…whatever bug was crawling on me had probably bitten him!  I got both of them out of bed, pulled back the sheets and saw a bunch of micro-sized ants crawling around.  Richard saw them and said that was definitely the culprit.  Poor kid – I could tell he was embarrassed about it and didn’t want to go into public looking like that…but he really didn’t have a choice.  When we arrived to Stacy’s house she gave us some anti-allergy pills for him.  By days end the swelling had gone down quite a bit and we could actually see the little bite marks behind his ear and in the corner of his eye.  Dang bugs!

At the house once again John and Stacey showed their incredible hospitality by having breakfast waiting for us all on the table.  We all dished up the hot oatmeal, ate it quickly, and headed out the door for the other house where the cooks were quickly working away.  This morning was abnormally cool having rained hard during the night and still sprinkling a little yet this morning.  All of us Obrunies loved the cool morning air and saw it as a break from the sweltering heat.  The darker members of our crowd shivered and complained how cold it was.  We giggled and told them how they were going to freeze at home if they thought this 70-degree weather was cold!

I walked into the kitchen where the ladies were cooking the meals and was fascinated at how they were able to cook as much as they were.  They had two enormous aluminum pots on a two burner stove heating water for the next wave of rice they’d be cooking.  Outside they had already had filled a thirty gallon trashcan with rice and another with hard-boiled eggs.  We grabbed a long skinny table and set it up immediately outside the kitchen door…this would be the production line table.  We placed several Styrofoam packages in neatly formed row.  The first gal would come along with the rice and give two generous helpings of white rice.  Next would come Richard on egg duty.  He’d place an egg in the corner of the rice.  Then the sauce person would come along and place two tablespoons of the spicy red sauce that had been cooked.  It was a meager meal, but it was more than the people we’d be feeding would have for any other meal that day.  After that row of meals was packaged we’d put a rubber band around it and put a plastic spoon with it.  We brought out a big table and started stacking the individual meals in a row and stacked them high.  As the hours went by the table started filling up.  Row by row we continued to add to the number of meals we’d be able to feed.  By 2:00 in the afternoon – nearly six hours of work for us we’d packaged 1,200 meals.  It was an incredible sight to see all of those little packages and think there would actually be that many children in the one little village where we’d be going.

At 2:30 the three taxi cars we’d hired to help us deliver the meals had arrived.  Two of them were station wagon-type and the other was a sedan.  We all formed a human conveyor belt and started filling up the cars with meals.  In the end, all three cars were filled and left little room for the human passengers.  Before we left we all headed over to the house where the house cook had prepared a generous meal of Red Red – a local dish of fried plantains and black-eyed peas.  It’s actually one of my favorite dishes here.  After all of our bellies were full it was now time to go do the same for several others.

The village we were going to help was called Tema New Town.  It’s a sleepy little fisherman village directly on the coast about an hour east of Accra.  The water is a beautiful, clear blue color with waves gently crawling up the rocky shorelines in most places.  As we continued in the cars down the main road that parralled the beach the rocks turned into a soft sand beach.  There were several very humble homes built right on the beach within a stone’s throw distance to the water line.  The homes were clearly hand built by poor fisherman simply trying to provide shelter for their family.  Many of the homes reminded me of the villas I’d walked through in Argentina as a missionary.  There was a big difference though – there were children in the streets…many, many children.  It was odd.  We’ve traveled through many different villages here and usually we’ll see a few kids here and there, but mostly young adults or adults.  This village however, had a much different feeling to it.  It was nearly all children in the street – and lots of them.  They clearly had not seen too many white people before because they all just stared as we slowly drove by.  Brinley and Tyson loved it and felt like they were the grand masters in a parade waving at everyone garnering giggles from the onlookers.  As we arrived closer to the location where we’d be doing the feeding I looked behind us and noticed a small caravan of running children chasing behind us.

The location they chose to do the feed was a compound with buildings on two sides, a long courtyard in the middle, and two big wooden gates on either end of the courtyard.  We backed the taxis tightly up to the one gate creating a wall so the kids couldn’t directly get to the food.  The idea was to make the crowd go to the far gate for entrance.  John and Brody would be there marking hands with ink to try and create some sort of checks and balances with who had received a meal.  John and Brody would allow small groups of 10 to 20 through the far gate.  The children would run through the courtyard and through our gate where we’d hand them each a meal.  At first the crowd was small and manageable and seemed to follow protocol.  As the children with their meals ran back to their homes with meal in hand the word quickly got out to the many others in the village.  Soon the small crowd had swollen into a great swarm of buzzing excitement.  People were trying to cut lines, push others out of the way, jump he car barrier to get to the food, and any other ploy possible to fill their bellies.  Some of their tricks were pretty cleaver – others were just down right comical.  At one point I heard Stacy say to one, “Nice try, but you can take those puppy dog eyes and big pouty lips up to the back of the line and try it there!”  I laughed out loud at her candor – it was great.

Richard was the great peacekeeper on our end with his big, deep, powerful voice.  The crowd would start pushing past the barrier and I could hear him barking orders in Twi.  The children would quickly react to his demands.  He was also our fearless translator since he speaks all of the lower Ghana languages: Twi, Gah, and Ewe.  If anyone tried to play the “I don’t understand” card Richard would come over and quickly make sure they understood!

We had arrived at the village at 4:30 and by 6:00 we had given out 1,200 meals.  It was a whirlwind of activity and energy.  My mind raced trying to keep up with the pandemonium and everything I had seen and experienced.  There were so many children who only had a shirt on and nothing else…no shoes, no pants, no underwear.  Others who were sick or had physical ailments…leg or arm issues, bad burns on different parts of their body, and others missing eyes or ears.  Mostly, the thing I noticed were the HUGE smiles as they ran out of the gate with their meal in hand.  Most of them would run back to their little homes to enjoy the meal or perhaps share them with others in the home.  There were others who would immediately sit down on anything they could find once out of the gate and start quickly eating.  Several of them would finish eating and then start cleverly figuring out how to remove the mark on their hand.  We saw some of them scrubbing away in the little mud pond behind the building, others scraping their hands on the brick wall, and yet others who would just simply keep the marked hand in their pocket as they came back around trying to get a second meal.  Usually, Brody and John would sniff out the imposter and send them away.  Of course, we wanted to give them as much as they could have…but we had to make sure everyone received at least one.

I couldn’t help but imagine what the Savior would do in this situation or how he would have reacted.  I could picture Him smiling as he saw some of his children administer to others who had needs.  It was a deeply humbling experience for all of us and I was grateful beyond words that my children had the opportunity to experience such a life-altering thing.  Each one of them helped in the process.  Brinley, Tyson, Mighty and Agbesi all were handing out the meals to the kids who would come through the gates.  I stood as a humbled father watching as my kids tried to replicate the Holy One if He were to be there.  They knew exactly what they were doing and they were doing it with great joy.  It was something they truly enjoyed.

Another thing I was deeply touched by was watching Mighty.  Here is a girl who has felt what most of these kids were feeling.  She would grab four or five meals and would usually not make it back to the gate before seeing someone in need and walking to them to feel that need.  She was the only one of the five who would look around while walking to the gate to actually seek one who had a need.  I saw her give a meal to an old man, crippled from the years of manual labor.  I saw her give a meal to two or three young mothers with small infants on their back.  I saw her give a couple meals to some older boys who had some sort of mental issues.  It was truly a holy experience.  Here is a girl who tries very, very hard to create an impenetrable shell so others can’t see her soft side and yet when the rubber meets the road, she shines her inner compassion through.  I didn’t say a word to her – I just admired and pressed the internal ‘record’ button in my mind’s eye…hoping to keep it forever.

Agbesi at first didn’t get out of the car.  He was embarrassed because his eye and ear were still quite swollen and he was worried the other children would tease him.  After about a half hour he slowly came out of the car and just stood by watching.  Next, he moved closer to me.  After a time he noticed that several hundred people had passed by and not one of them even mentioned anything about his eye – so he decided it was OK to come help.  He would grab two meals and disappear into the courtyard only to come running back out and grab two more.  It was fun to watch him get joy out of serving others.

Tyson was again in his element.  He was talking to everyone and trying to make new lifelong friends.  He has a unique ability to make friends with everyone, no matter where we are.  He loved helping others – that’s his M.O.

Brinley was the silent worker.  She worked and observed not saying much.  I could see in her eyes what she was thinking.  Brinley has always been our compassionate one always thinking of others.

Afterwards, on the way back to the hotel the ride was very quite.  Everyone was exhausted from the day’s work, but mostly people were pondering what we’d just experienced.  It was a deeply humbling experience – possibly bordering on the sacred…at least that was the feeling I had.  It seems that every day I say something of the same…but these are memories and feelings I hope I never forget.  More importantly, I hope my children never forget what they saw and felt today.  It is something that should change their outlook on life and hopefully will help them to be better people in life.

Tomorrow we go to the village to visit the biological families with the children.  It should be another emotional-provoking experience.  I’m sure at minimum it will be something to write about!

Until tomorrow…