Chance

I had a really interesting Skype call with one of my online English students this evening, Pratap. He is from Bangladesh and told me that him and his friend are planning to set up an NGO to enable more children to be educated in Dhaka, at the moment they both self-fund 15 children to get an education. They pay for a teacher to teach them in a room beneath a temple which they have been able to use free of charge. Pratap has asked me to get involved with the project, see if I can help in anyway and of course I would love to. I love how just by chance, I have come across someone that thinks the same way as me, and I get to be his English teacher.  I really do want to be able to help as many people as possible across the globe, I know one day I will look back on my life and know that I achieved my goal. Even now, sometimes I just sit and think about what I have been doing with my life over the past two years and it really does make me happy, to know I have made a positive difference to the lives that are the future of our humanity.
For Larabanga at the moment, I have been in touch with an NGO based in Canada called BooksMatter. They ship books over to Ghana to benefit disadvantaged schools. Larabanga Primary School, is totally under resourced so for us to get this opportunity is amazing. Fingers crossed by the end of June, the school will have recieved lots of books! Just the organising to do, getting the books from Accra to Larabanga and finding someone with a camera so we can send photographs of the presentation to BooksMatter. We have to pay for the transportation of the books from Accra, which is a really long way, we weren't sure if we were going to have the funds to do this but a friend of mine, that I used to work with, Chris, is doing a sponsored expedition next month and told me he is going to donate his sponsor money to Larabanga Life Project. This will really help us to get the books. We're really lucky to have lots of people to support what we are trying to do.
Another thing that happened by chance. Here in Changsha, Hunan province of China, I've met a Ghanaian!! I was out with friends at a bar, I got chatting to a couple of people and we were telling eachother where we were from, when he said Ghana... I was so happy, literally all of my memories came flooding back. We met again the next weekend, it was great to be able to talk about Ghanaian stuff like... Jollof rice, Shatta Wale, Al Qaeda dance, CHARLIEEEE and Fufu, he actually told me that he makes Ghanaian food here.. Definitely going to have to try some. Ghana always follows me, homeland.So I got a call from Quame and he invited me to a seminar on Saturday which is being held by members of the Ghanaian embassy. It's going to be about gender equality and the empowerment of women. I'm so excited to go and meet people that really know what they're talking about, I love how opportunities like this are so random but mean so much.