We had to go back to Tamale today to pick up our passports from the Immigrations office and to renew our “non-citizens” cards. The original plan was that Steve and I would go to Tamale and Jack would stay at the mission house and help Mr. Iddrisu and Zorash run the Child Center. Meri did not come to work yesterday and she would not be at work today because her son Aliu is in the hospital. Aliu has sickle cell disease and had a bad crisis which caused him to be admitted to the hospital. Well, you know how it is; plans change. We woke to the sound of rain. Actually it had started raining yesterday evening and rained most of the night. We could tell that the rain was going to be here for awhile. When it rains the mothers did not bring their children to the Center and when it is raining heavily like it was this morning the workers do not come to work because they have to ride bikes, motorcycles or walk to get to work. We woke Jack up and asked him if he wanted to go to Tamale with us instead of staying in an empty house by himself. He got dressed and made a cup of coffee and we were out the door.
We decided to stop at Timothy Niligrini’s house on our way to Tamale and have a Child Center board meeting. Timothy is one of the board members and Divine is another board member. Divine spent the night at Timothy’s house because it was raining when they arrived from Tamale yesterday afternoon and Divine did not want to ride the 15 miles to his house in the rain. Steve figured this was the perfect time to meet with the guys and find out what they learned about registering the churches. We also needed to discuss the upcoming seminar.
The meeting took longer than we expected and we arrived in Tamale shortly before noon. While we were in the Immigrations office Jack walked over to the cultural center and did some shopping.
We were successful in getting our passports renewed for another year and also getting our non-resident cards renewed. They said that they would have to use last year’s photo because it was dark outside because of the rain and the machine that takes pictures does not work well in the rain. Whatever! I think they did not want to say the machine was broken.
We went to Wooden for lunch. Wooden is a small restaurant that is owned by a family of Lebanese. The service is so slow but the food is always good. We ordered some pizzas to bring home with us for supper. Now the pizzas here are a bit strange but after you have been in Ghana for a while they are not too bad. It takes a couple months before you can enjoy them. Ha!
Take care and thanks for all you do for us and for the work.
In His Service,
Jack, Steve and Kandie
