As most of you know, my motivation to go to Ghana came from my senior design project at Delaware, during which I worked with the (NGO) The GoGetDem Wheelchair Racing Club. They are using sports to improve the lives of disabled persons, especially youth in rural areas. By training and preparing them, they also want to increase their presence at The Paralympics and other events, to change the existing stigma on disabled persons in Ghana. Raphael, the founder of this club, is not only a great person, but also a phenomenal athlete. He has participated in 3 Paralympics, and many many other competitions! So this weekend was a very special weekend to me, because I planned on meeting Raphael and MacLean!! (MacLean is one of the athletes of the club who was won several gold medals at international competitions). With our design team at Delaware we had had several Skype conversations with each other, but meeting them in person and being part of their lives for the weekend was an even greater experience then I could have imagined.
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Yes, holiday! Appearantly I planned my arrival very well, because it happened to be a big holiday with a festival in Cape Coast! Together with the two Americans and Acheampong, a Ghanaian guy who works with one of the Americans, we took the bus to Elmina (a place nearby Cape Coast). The bus system here works just a liiiitle different than how we know it... Instead of leaving according to a schedule, the bus just leaves when it's filled. So, when we got there with the 4 of us, there were just 3 spots left, which meant we had to wait for the next bus to fill which was gonna take about an hour. Well, that's a "Ghanaian hour". We settled in the bus at 7:45pm, and we left at 11:10pm... By the time we got to Elmina it was past 3am. So there we were, in the dark, standing on the side of the road with no taxi's passing us to take us to our place. Thank god there one of us was Ghanaian, because after some calls with the place that we were staying at, they called a friend that was a taxi driver and could pick us up :-)
So much has happened since the last blog I wrote, crazy that that is only 5 days ago... I will tell you about it in two blogs, since (as most of you know) it's quite a challenge for me not to use too many words describing my experiences when I'm excited.
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October 2017
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