I am just back from what has got to be the highlight of the week - distributing toys to two World Vision schools.

My 5 year old nephew had recently asked me in an email "Aunty Emma Do they go to a school? What kind of equipment is there? Because in my school there are lots of learning toys like magnets, bricks, and toy dinosaurs."

My response was to tell him...

"Some of the children do go to school. They go after all the chores they have to do such as fetching water from the borehole and helping to clean the house, so they get up at about 5am, and do all their chores before having a bucket bath and putting on their bright coloured and very smart school uniform and walking or cycling to school (even the very little ones ride big bikes sometimes!). Their schools have very little in them. Some schools don't even have chairs or desks and the students sit on the floor. There are blackboards, but sometimes the teachers don't have any chalk. There are about 80 children in each class, and some classrooms are small so some children have to sit outside and look in through the windows. At some schools the small children about your age all have their lessons under a mango tree because they don't have a classroom. The children love school though, and they love to learn new things. They don't have any toys at school, but they play games like clapping and skipping with each other at break times and have a lot of fun."

When I next spoke to my sister she told me that Oliver said "I have eighty toys and games I do not use mummy, can I give them to those eighty children in Ghana?". Aww!

Little did I know that less than a week later I would see lot of small children receive lots of new toys for their school, and see their little faces light up with delight as they got to play with them for the first time.

For weeks they had sat in Sergious' office, huge big brown boxes, taped up tight and bursting at the seams, containing at least a hundred toys for children in some of the most deprived areas. Almost every day for two weeks now, I was told I would be needed to help with the unpacking and sorting of all these toys, but every day in the busy-ness of things, something else seemingly more pressing would come up and my colleague would say huffing and puffing 'tomorrow, tomorrow'.

So eventually we got around to it, and the toys were exploded all over his office. Even the staff helping us to organise them all had not seen some of them before, and insisted on having a few moments of childish enjoyment before we packed them up again and shipped them out to the schools. There were all kinds of things, from trucks and toy phones and buckets and spades, to jigsaws and puzzles, and electric guitars. Everything you could possibly think of had made its way into these boxes, it didn't even matter that half the toys needed batteries; the children here wouldn't be worrying about that. I did wonder about the journey these toys have made, most were made in China, but then packaged and sold in the US or UK, and so god only knows how many different countries these little Barbie dolls and building block sets had made to make it here to Ghana.

We delivered the first lot to Googo Kindergarten. As I entered the classroom the childrens eyes widened at the sight of me (a white person) and they stood up and did their little chant of 'Good morning madam - how - are - you?" to which I replied "I am fine, and how are you?" and they said "we-are-fine-and-how-are-you?"...we could have gone on for some time.

I noticed there was a nursery rhyme on the blackboard, so in an attempt to mask a mobbing attack on our driver (who was desperately trying to unload the boxes without attracting too much attention from the hundreds of kids that had swarmed the classroom block to take a look at the nasara), I asked the class "who knows this nursery rhyme?". I wasn't expecting them to understand what I had just said as although many of the children speak English, my strange Blackburn accent is often far too difficult to understand! But sure as day one little girl tentatively put up her arm up, and with a nod from me stood up and marched with pure confidence to the front of the class and began to lead them in a huge chorus of tiny little voices, bellowing out the verses. "Two little dicky birds" she commanded, in the cutest of little but loud voices. She was tiny and barely even reached the blackboard, but used a stick to point to the words. "TWO LITTLE DICKY BIRDS" the whole class boomed. Wow. I had no idea so many little people could make so much noise! Watching that gorgeous little girl lead them sternly through the whole of the nursery rhyme, it was the cutest thing I have seen since I arrived.

Nursery rhymes over, and colourful toys sprawling over the floor at the front of the class, the headteacher came in and told the children they could all come up and pick up one toy - to look at, before they would be put in the cupboard ready for play time. And so that was it, they swarmed and jostled around the big Christmas pile of goodies, their little eyes bright with curiosity and huge white similes lighting up the room as they clutched at their new arrivals.

There was only one thing in the back of my mind...here in Ghana there is a horrendous problem with resources being pilfered away or locked away and never used...I really hope that does not happen here, it would be really heartbreaking. The head-teacher doesn't seem to be that kind of a guy, so I'm pinning my hopes (as well as those of all these many teeny children) on him!

With love from Googo,

Em

xxx