Today 3 new volunteers from Switzerland joined our team. They are my age and getting their degrees in Education. They’re doing an internship with CORM which will include teaching classes for the next month. It was really great to watch them see the school and the children for the first time. They had all of the same questions and thoughts that I had two weeks ago. CORM truly is so eye opening. I can understand how the slow-pace Ghanaian culture can be hard for some people to get used to. At CORM, all you need is an open mind and trust in God.
At school today I continued to work on the mural. I went around to more classrooms and set up the handprint activity again. I thought it was so beautiful how many of the kids would write things like “God is Good” or draw crosses on their handprints. I love how present their Christian religion is throughout the course of their days.
In the evening I got to talk to Stacy a little more which I am thankful for because I feel like I only ever see her in passing and she is such an amazing person. We began discussing the governments role in Human Trafficking. I asked if they encourage adoption. To my surprise, I learned that adoption is not a thing. If a woman truly wants to adopt, she will leave and come back and pretend as if she had a baby. With this method, she cannot come back with a child any older than two or it will be too suspicious. Thus, adoption is very rare and only truly exists for newborns. This does not help the thousands of children on the lake who are older, normally age 5 and up. I asked her if children are ever adopted internationally. I wondered this because I think it would be very difficult to take a child out of their culture and society. She explained to me how a few years ago they actually ran into huge issues with this. Only two children have been adopted out of CORM which is when Stacy and Johnbull learned about the legal side of it. Foreign adoption became a form of Human Trafficking itself. Foreign investors would “adopt” a bunch of children, being them back to let’s say the U.S., then start an orphanage with them. Eventually, they would then “re-sell” these children and make a very large profit. She heard about a situation a few years back where children that were taken to the U.S. under this system would then be adopted and later on start talking about their “mom and dad” back home. This was obviously a big shock to the adoption parents. One set of parents tried to “return” the child after the child told them they have a mom and dad but were told to lie and say it was their aunt and uncle.
I participated in bible study with the older kids this week. The structure of their meeting follows a “see the story, hear the story, join the story” outline. We began with a quick recap from last week. Then we watched a video that depicted a chapter in Psalms. They do a new chapter each week. This video was very entertaining and the creator had incredible artistic skills that kept everyone engaged from what I saw. After the video, the kids acted this out by each having a different assigned character with a given script. I found this to be a fun and effective way for them to remember the story that they just heard. They had a big screen projected so everyone could follow along with the script. After this, we broke into small groups to discuss. This is where we talked about ways to “join the story” meaning how we can apply the messages we just saw and heard into our own lives. The themes were prayer, struggle, and thankfulness. Despite our cultural differences, I’ve learned during my time here that we all pray for similar things, struggle with similar things, and are thankful for similar things.
I wrote down some of the admirable quotes that I heard the girls say tonight:
“I’m waiting for God to use me for his plans.”
“God is with us no matter what happens.”
“We have to help others understand the way we see it; we cannot blame them if they do not.”
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