Greetings from Tamale, Ghana! We are team 1, also known as team sparkles and we are made up of Alex, Kelsey, Olivia, and Zoe. Along with our fearless translator Wahab, we are working in the village of Garazigou (though we have come to find out there are numerous spellings of this village which made for an interesting time) . It seems like our weeks are just flying by here even though here in Ghana, as one of our fellow teammates put it, “It’s a Ghana (gonna),”mainly because here everyone takes their sweet time getting from place to place! However, we sped through the building process of the base for the polytank and then began to train the women who are going to be running the center how to make the alum balls that would be stirred into the drums and how to than transfer that water to the polytank where the water is treated with chlorine.
After we had a very long day of distributing those well-known blue buckets, we waited in much anticipation for one of the most important days of the whole trip…OPENING DAY! And thankfully the day was a huge success! We had a great time entertaining the children while the mother’s filled the buckets with clean drinking water which were all accounted for! We also learned later in the week that a baby from our village was born on opening day. It’s a great feeling to know that this baby boy is going to be able to have safe drinking water for the rest of his life in the village!
We are now focusing our sites on the last few days here in Tamale were we are beginning to monitor the people and make sure they are using the water correctly and getting everything else in order for the CWS staff to step in and take over. We have been overwhelmed with the amount of responses we have gotten from the villagers. Many to thank us for bringing them clean water and helping their children stay healthy. It’s when you hear replies like that make all the hot weather and pure exhaustion so worth it in the end.
Though our time here in the village has come to an end, we look forward to hearing from the CWS staff all the progress our village has made in its implementation process.
