Leaving for Ghana Today

I woke up early this morning to review my checklist for my trip. I enjoyed a great afternoon with my daughter, Jessica, on a shopping trip to Roanoke yesterday. We didn’t buy much, but the company was great. We bought a couple of books at Barnes & Noble. It is good to spend time with the family before leaving on a trip to West Africa.

I will leave home at 7:15 AM today (Thursday, March 26, 2009) for the Raleigh, NC airport. I will fly to JFK Airport in New York and leave on a direct Delta flight to Accra, Ghana. We will arrive in Ghana around 7:30 AM on Friday. My cousin, Stephen Shipes, is joining me on the trip. Jim Niquette, the Director of the Carter Center will pick me up at the airport in Accra and will travel with Stephen and I to Kumasi, Sunyani, and all the way to Tamale in the north of Ghana.

I’m going to the school Jim supports in Accra before we leave for Kumasi. I hope to see the Barker & Siebel School in Amanfrom near Kumasi on Saturday. Our mission teams helped to expand that school in 2005 to 2007.

This trip will celebrate new wells and repaired wells. We will also dedicate new medical equipment at the Tamale Teaching Hospital and Tamale Eye Clinic. We shipped two huge containers of medical equipment and supplies to Ghana.

I hope to have time to preach in Kumasi, the West Mamprusi District, and around Bolgatanga on this trip. There are several places to preach on Sunday in Kumasi. I’ll have my Rotary hat on part of the time and my Pastor’s hat on at other times.
I have a feeling that we will be starting work on many new ideas on this trip. I like several women’s centers in Sunyani and in Bolgatanga in the extreme north. Women’s centers help mothers pay for food and pay for tuition for school. The orphanages need food, too. I’m getting an urge to understand child slavery in the gold mines and the fishing villages. I don’t know how I can help yet, but I can try to understand.

I received an email from a German Rotary Club that wants to build a bio-fuel plant for a technical school on the border with Ivory Coast in a town called Bole. A Rotary Club in Federal Way, Washington wants to build solar powered mechanized water systems to pump water into three cities. We will try to understand these projects and see how we can work together.