Girls' Night!
Hello friends! McKenzie here. For those of you who do not know me I am a recently graduated mechanical engineering student and this is my second year at The Village of Hope. I know you won’t be reading this on the day I wrote it because of the Wi-Fi here has been out for several days, but I am so happy to report that we all have had such a great day here.
Our day started out with work on the clarifier tank. In short, we cut some pipe to make the weir in the tank as well as glued some of the pipe that would return some of the waste water. Billy had to get in the tank for a little bit and let’s just say PVC glue in a small space in African heat is not a fun time. As always, Billy was a trooper and completed the task.
Afterwards we went in to lunch and I might or might not have taken a power nap on the freezer (I totally did). When we finished lunch we had our tasks to work on. The first one was to cut the corrugated pipe that will act as the media for the system. Media is basically cut up corrugated pipe to go into the filter tanks. This media grows bacteria, or “bugs” as George explained it, that clean the black water and eat away at the nasty. The pipe came all rolled up in several rolls. We need about three cubic meters cut up for the sanitation system. We calculated that it took 30 minutes to cut up 1/100 of a cubic meter. To save you the math, we calculated that it would take 46 hours with 6 people working to get everything cut up. Y’all... that’s a lot of time. So, we have to figure out how to get all of that media cut. Once we calmed down from our minor panic attack of the time it is going to take, we continued to work on the tanks. Billy climbed back into the tank while Hanleigh, Sam, Joe, and Austin helped. Salah and Carson stayed inside to work on the control panels and coding. Kirsten prepared for STEM at the high school. Stephen decided to put me in charge of building the instrument well for the ammonia sensor. I recruited Kyle and Leah to help me drill the holes and cut the flanges. The instrument well essentially is going to house the ammonia sensor to measure the ammonia concentration of the out coming water once it has been clarified. The task of putting the flanges on with gaskets to make the box water tight should have been a simple 45 minute task, but with my limited knowledge it took 2 hours. Regardless, Leah, Kyle, and I had a good time bonding while doing it and got a few laughs in. Kirsten, Salah, and Carson went to the high school to do STEM and teach 50 students about solar power and renewable energy. Salah did a bomb job teaching and the students were super interested in the subject.
Around 3:30pm Ghana time (so 10:30am Central time), the children in the village got out of school and were starting to swarm towards our house. They do not understand that being near power tools is dangerous, so we had to explain to them that we had to work and they needed to stand on the sidewalk while we worked. Joe, Hanleigh, and Austin were able to play with the children while the rest of us finished up some work. We all had the opportunity to play with the children before dinner. It was rejuvenating to a lot of us to be able to just hang out and take a break after a long day and be loved on by some of the children and talk to them before going in for dinner.
After dinner, the general team had planned on the girls doing a girls’ night for the mothers in the village and asked our girls (Hanleigh, Kirsten, Leah, and I) to help. To be honest, I was nervous about interacting with the mothers since I hadn’t really spent much time with them, only the children. Girls’ night consisted of us giving the mothers pedicured and offering them face masks. At first it was a little quiet and awkward but once the six mother walked in, the mood lightened and people started to talk more. The mothers had so much personality when they got in a room all together. They were so grateful for what we were doing for them. When I sat back and thought about it, it is such a small thing for us to give them. The first woman I gave a pedicure to was Cecelia. She is a mother of Christine at the Village of Hope. Christine is the one special needs child at the village. I could tell that Cecelia wanted to just relax at first so I tried to not bother her with too many questions. Just by her body language I could tell that she was very tense and it was hard for to relax. At the end when everyone was finished getting a pedicure the mothers, specifically Betsy, told us to go around and introduce ourselves by saying our name, age, and whether we were dating or not. It was so fun to see how excited the moms got over hearing our answers. They were so happy for us and told us that they wanted to be invited to the weddings and that they would cook us traditional Ghanaian dishes at our wedding. Then they went through and introduced themselves and the house they were mothers at, along with how many children and how long they had been both married and at the Village of Hope. At the very end the women prayed for us. They were so grateful for everything God had given them and so thankful for us coming and serving them. It was touching to see how faithful these women were and it was amazing to be around them and get to experience a girls’ night with them. Once we got back to the house the boys told us about their adventure at the CDH house. They went to see the boys there and ended up helping them with homework and spending some time with them.
On the second night of the trip I started asking everyone to share their highs and lows of the day as well as answering a “question of the day.” It is really cool to see everyone’s different perspective on the day and get to hear the good and bad of the day. Tonight almost no one had a low, and if they did it was turned into a high which was absolutely amazing. The “question of the day” today was “where did you see God working today.” Hearing each person’s answer was neat (there’s your word, Dad) and powerful.
Finally, I just want to thank everyone for their support to our team through leading up to this trip and our journey. It means so much to our team to having people reading our blog and interested in hearing what we are doing. You give us a reason to reflect on the day in words on paper and we could not be here without y’all. Please pray for these following days. That all of our work gets done, that all of our health stays high, and that we remember to look for God in everything we do.
P.S. I held a lizard today and it was a big deal because it was my first lizard to hold. So I included a picture.
Okay, now some personal notes:
Mom and Dad: I love you and miss you both and can’t wait to be back in sweet home Alabama with y’all. Better be ready for lots of stories when I get back!
Mason: Thank you for letting me borrow your hat. Though I look ridiculous in it and it smelled strongly of cologne I appreciate it and it has kept me from having a nasty sunburn.
This is the team unloading the rolls of media we received. To make the job a little more fun, we made a line of throwing all 57 rolls.
This is me and the first Lizard I ever held. His Name was Edward.
This is Salah working with some of the high school students on the STEM education.