Missahoe Charity Home

Posted by Shelly, England, on July 10, 2008

Initially I was very scared of going to Africa alone as it was something that I had not done before. I didn’t know what company to go with as there were so many to choose from on the internet. There were many unreliable companies that I emailed asking for more information about the trip etc they never got back to me and many of the telephone numbers were from abroad so I could not contact them due to the expense of the telephone call and the time difference. This wasn’t too comforting and I wanted to talk to a ‘real’ person before I paid my deposit to anyone. This is when I came across a highly affordable company ‘United Playground’. It had a British number which I called straight away and had a lengthy chat with Camille.
 

I found out that this was one of her passions that had developed in to her business. She has been travelling around the world visiting orphans and she knew what she was talking about and gave me really helpful advice. The price also of the trip was the cheapest that I had found and trust me – I looked!

 During my time in Ghana I felt safe from start-to-finish. A coordinator met me at Accra Airport and was very welcoming considering that I was a bag of nerves on the day. At the orphanage, Baby and Mowsi were kind and wanted me to enjoy myself as well as teaching the children at the local school. I think that you have to be very pro-active at Missahoe as everybody including the kids, are very self sufficient and I felt that I was needed more financially than in body. I did find myself twiddling my thumbs sometimes but you can always grab some true Ghanaian culture and help with the cooking, the clothes washing (the Ghanaian’s are well known for this), walking with Richard, feeding the goats, going market shopping and so on.

The children at the school were enthusiastic to learn and were very excited to see a ‘Westerner’. Some of the children were left behind in their class so I tried to focus on them especially. I found it tough to deal with occasionally when the teachers decided to not turn up for class and I had to figure out what the class would be learning for the day but the kids were more than happy to read or even do sums as long as it was made in to a game.

In my three weeks in Ghana, I booked some trips to the waterfalls as we were allowed weekends off and generally played with the kids. They loved skipping, volleyball, football, anything that a normal child would love doing and found it hilarious that I was attempting to carry water on my head like them. This was a brilliant experience to know that I helped and made the kids laugh.

I was very sad to leave everyone as I had an amazing time that I will never forget. I plan to go out there again in the near future to see them and hope that I gave them as much of a fantastic time as they gave me