Books, Waterfalls, and Monkeys!

Hi all,

So much to say! So little time. How do I even begin to organize everything I want to share?! I guess I will stick to my default bullet-style update.

-Announcement-
We are trying to raise money so that each of the girls can have their own English workbook for school. It is $5 per book and there are 150 girls in our school. Right now the girls have notebooks and pencils. While this in itself is a blessing since they can practice in their notebooks and can copy down exercises or short stories, it is very time consuming (and wastes a lot of class time) when I have to write something on the board for them to write in their notebook so that they can practice reading. So...if any of you would like to help us buy books for the girls we would greatly appreciate it! If you send a check to my parents house made out to me, my parents will keep track of how much money comes in and then I can withdrawal the money here to buy the girls books. Any amount will help. If we cannot afford to get books for the whole school then we will focus on one class (my class has 34 girls.) Please do not feel at all obligated to donate! I just thought I would let you know in case anyone wants to donate.

As for what has been going on with Dave and I, this weekend we went to visit the Kintapo waterfalls and a monkey village! We organized a small bus to take us, two of our Ghanaian friends, two of the other volunteers who have been living with us (Christine from Germany and Nir from Isreal), and four other volunteers who we just met. It was perfect that the other volunteers could join us because it made the trip much cheaper and it was nice to talk to a couple of new people about their projects. We drove 4 hours to the monkey village and stayed the night there. In the morning we drove on a bumpy dirt road to the village. There were SO many monkeys! There are 2 different species of monkeys in that forest. One is small, friendly, and LOVES bananas and the other is big and black with big long tails. We fed the monkeys bananas, hiked in the forest, and climbed one of the 300 year old trees. One of the most interesting things about the visit is that the villagers believe that the monkeys are the children of the gods. So they see them as sacred. Therefore, when a monkey is sick or getting ready to die it comes to the village and the villagers bury and mourn the death of the monkey.

They waterfall was also wonderful. It was really nice to cool off. We even climbed underneath the waterfall! Getting down was a bit tricky but was well worth it. I will post pictures on facebook soon. Maybe in a week? Then I will try to figure out how to post pictures on the blog.

I was planning to write more but time has slipped away from me so I will try to update about school, the girls, the orphanage, and food next time.

For now, we miss you all but are still having a wonderful time!