Hello. Long time no chat! It's the joy of living in a developing nation and my inability to cope with the heat. I can't face walking into and through town on my afternoon break and in the evening it takes a while to cook for 4, eat and clean. Two Sundays ago I had a nice little blog done, but in my haste to leave I didn't save it somewhere else before saving it in my blog. The internet server was down and the whole thing disappeared.

It's been a good three weeks since we last chatted. Although I've had my moment of feeling I'm done with this heat! Seems I haven't adjusted at all. But there has been some excitement. There were twelve dutch people here to do some work building around the property. They did a lot of fundraising and brought quite a bit with them. I was very impressed by all they did and in this heat no less! The men were very busy with their construction. The women helped them some of the time, but their job seemed to be to do a bit of pampering. They were painting faces one day. Another they painted nails - some of them professionally. The kids were so excited the day they brought out bathing suits and everyone got a brand new suit of their very own. A couple days later they brought out some used clothing and people were excited again to get some nice new clothes. I had to admire the boys' hiking boots in the workshop the next day. Samuel wanted me to take a picture! The excitement was really nice to see. Everyone here wears used clothes. There are no clothing stores. You either buy them used from the market or buy some material and take it to a tailor - a much more expensive option. But for an obruni like me, even taking material to a tailor is an affordable option. No more and often less than buying clothes at home.

On that note, it is quite a challenge becoming used to the fact that I am now a rich person. I live a privileged life and everyone knows it. Some of you shudder at a shower without hot water, but the fact I have a shower at all is a bit of a luxury. And I can afford to eat whatever I want. And of course, I afforded a plane ticket to get here. So the fact that you are white means you have money. And everyone wants to befriend the white person, or "obruni". As with all the other obrunis, I am always being asked to take people to Canada with me. And many times guys are telling me they want to marry me. That is the first thing out of their mouth after "Hello, how are you". They don't even know me! And I can't help but feeling some sense of responsibility about being a person of wealth. Still trying to figure out how to deal with it all. It is a part of my prayer these days. I am always challenged by Jesus call to love and hope that adventures like this will only make me better at it. But it's a challenge you have to work at - isn't it.

This week I started a Christmas choir with the caregivers. They are very keen and it is a lot of fun! We started last Sunday and that is why I did not get to the internet cafe. I've also started taking drum lessons. It is a pretty cool experience, but not at all what I expected. It is cool because I am taking lessons at PCC. While Paul is the main teacher, others drop buy to play the other parts and sing along. So I'm getting the full meal deal! I thought coming to Ghana there would be drumming and dancing everywhere. But that is not the case. I don't even know where you can buy instruments. In all the cities I've been I have not seen any. But from the tro tro outside Kumasi a couple of weeks ago, I saw some on the side of the road. While many people can play the drums, they can't afford to buy them. And when it comes to technology, they are far behind. Since no one at PCC has a music player other than a small cassette player, I went looking at the market this week. There are no CD players. They are all cassette players. I could have brought my old cassettes that I never use anymore and they would have been put to good use! But get this - I found a cassette player with a USB port so I could play my ipod in it. It was rather expensive and no guarantee it would work so I didn't get it. Maybe I will ask a caregiver to try and get a "local" price on it for me and see how expensive it is then.

I've taken to baking. So I'm sure any weight I've lost will soon go back on! Having lots of bananas, flour and sugar I thought I must be able to make something that would pass as banana bread. It actually turned out really nice. I took it to choir practice to see what the caregeivers would think of it. I'm not sure if they liked it or not. But all the obrunis like it. Today I made chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips. The first batch were plain and the rest had toffees. The toffees were not a good idea. They melted through the cookies and all over the pan. Now they are very sweet! These are things you will not find in Ghana. Ovens are not a common household appliance and there are no cake pans or cookie sheets at the market. We have a silicon cake pan that one of the volunteers had sent from Germany and I use the movable shelf in our oven for a cookie sheet. It looks and works just like one.

Getting my photos up has been difficult and time consuming. The "PCC" Friends folder didn't load in it's entirety and so I didn't get them labelled as to who is who. Hopefully I can get that done at some point.

Love from Nkoranza,

Debbie