Abundant rain the last few days has provided a fun swimming opportunity for these rural children who are thoroughly enjoying themselves! They invited us in, but . . .

Last week we attended the national gathering of the Women's Fellowship of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana which was held this year here in Tamale. We were invited to sit on the platform and bring greetings from the Presbyterian Church, USA. All these women (500+) wore matching outfits, a sign of their equality and unity. The theme for this year's meeting was "Be Filled with the Holy Spirit." In this photo, a song leader is teaching them a special song written by one of their members for the occasion.

Last weekend we visited the "witches camp" in the village of Gambaga. In traditional African understanding, when bad things happen (deaths, accidents, diseases, etc.), they are often attributed to witchcraft. Villagers identify unfortunate women as the suspected witches and often banish them from the villages as a means of self-protection. These women are left with no homes, no families, and no means of support. More than 100 years ago the chief of the village of Gambaga began permitting these women to come and live on his land.

Twenty years ago the Presbyterian Church of Ghana began a ministry to these women. A woman pastor/social worker has been caring for this community of women for the past 20 years. Through her efforts they have been able to become self-supporting, receive medical care and education for their children. She is a truly remarkable person who is deeply loved. I had the privilege of preaching at her church on Sunday.    

This is the church building in the rural village of Nyerzee. On Sunday morning it is a lively place bursting at the seams. Dozens of children meet outside under the trees for Sunday School. Adults squeeze together on benches inside. The congregation is thriving and growing and needed more space. They prayed and gave and saved and worked to build a new, larger chapel adjacent to the current one. A foundation was laid and slowly walls began to rise.

 Last month through a gift from the Outreach Foundation of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. they were able to add a roof and have begun to worship in their new church home.

This is a group of students at one of the Presbyterian Junior Secondary Schools. Jerry, Rose and I have been doing morning devotions at one of the schools each week. While there is 80% illiteracy among adults in northern Ghana, the next generation will be different. We do our devotions in English and the students understand us very well. There are also at least 50% girls in these  schools which is a credit to their churches and families. The students are enthusiastic, attentive, and definitely know their Bible!

This is a typical school classroom in northern Ghana. Actually is is probably better than most. At least it has desks for both students and a teacher. Each desk is shared by 2-3 students. The only teaching resource is a chalkboard. Teachers bring their own chalk. Students bring workbooks. Discipline is a priority. Teachers all carry canes or switches which they use to whap anyone who gets out of line. This is a P-4 (Primary 4) classroom. Students must pass exams to move to the next grade. No social promotion.

This is a village woman from Yapala, one of the rural villages with a Presbyterian church near Tamale. She has collected shea nuts for processing into shea butter. Shea butter provides a source of income for many rural women in northern Ghana. She will boil and stir the nuts for many hours over a hot fire. It is arduous and time-consuming work. Despite many efforts reported on the internet to organize "fair-trade" cooperatives for shea butter production, these women see little of the profits from this highly sought product. It has been called "women's gold" but instead has been a golden opportunity for exploitation.

Motorbikes are the primary means of both transport and traffic congestion in Tamale. They are also a big hazard for pedestrians. Just crossing the street can be quite a challenge. My current strategy is to get into the middle of a big group of people and cross with them! These motorbikes are passing the downtown market which is a crowded colorful collection of carts and stalls with piles and piles of random items. It is definitely an experience in impulse buying. You can't find anything you are looking for but see everything from TV sets to Legos!

This photo is of the Central Mosque in downtown Tamale. While Ghana as a whole is 70% Christian, this northern region is 70% Muslim and the culture is Muslim. Ramadan began last Saturday. Jerry, Rose, and I were taking a taxi to town on Sunday and Jerry was chewing gum. The driver asked, "Aren't you fasting?" The daily calls to prayer are heard throughout the area, the first beginning at 4:30 am! We were asking our English students about their birthdays. Most of them do not know by our calendar dates. They only estimate them in relation to the number of "moons" before or after different Muslim festivals.

Just a warning to the squeamish - this post might gross you out, so maybe you want to take a pass! But if you want to read on, Ghana seems to be home to a large portion of the world's termite population. This photo is just the beginning of a baby termite hill. Before long these host trees will be dust and all that will be left will be a mountainous termite home. Despite treating wood that is used, we were told that not long ago one of the bookcases in the Training Center library collapsed from termite damage and all the books in it were turning to dust.

During heavy rains the termites are forced out of their hills. They are drawn to light as we discovered one evening last week when our living room was invaded by hundreds of them until we realized we needed to turned the light off. Fortunately they don't bite and they die quickly. In addition to the ones we swept out, there were literally thousands of them on the ground outside the next morning. We were told that villagers often collect them, pull the wings off, and fry them for a treat to eat. I know that God provides, but really?

Last week was the halfway point of our time here in Ghana. So we took a 2-day break and visited the Mole (pronounced "mow-lay") National Wildlife Park. We got to see elephants, antelope, monkeys and baboons, warthogs, and some beautiful and unusual birds. What amazing creatures God has made!

We found a restaurant with pizza!  Heaven!

This is Sunday School in the small rural village of Yapala. The teacher is an amazing young woman. She is one of the girls who was baptized on Mother's Day in Adubiliyili. She attended a training for children's leaders at the Training Center and has been riding her bicycle from her own village 5 miles away each Sunday ever since to Yapala to teach these children who would not have Sunday School otherwise. Her class has grown each week.

There is no church building in Yapala. Sunday School and worship are held under the trees. While the children are in Sunday School, Jerry is preaching to some of their moms (and a few neighboring cows!)

Yams are a staple of the food supply in Ghana. They are a root vegetable, but not like the orange sweet potatoes I usually think of. They are white and more like potatoes. You can do pretty much anything with them you would do with potatoes - boil, mash, make french fries, etc. Our favorite so far has been using leftover mashed yams to make pancakes. For Ghanians, however, their favorite is to grind them and pound them to make flour for fufu, a rather indescribable dish you just have to experience!

Our visit to Kalende included attending the ground-breaking for a new church building. In Ghana the term for ground-breaking is "sod-cutting", though it didn't look like there was much "sod." Rev. Solomon Sule-Saa, the chairperson of the Northern Presbytery, is doing the honors. Their commitment to build a new church is a tremendous act of faith on the part of this congregation. Their goal is to have a dedication ceremony by the end of next year.

Most of the Presbyterian churches in Ghana  have what we would call blended services. They have two choirs, a traditional choir like the one pictured and a contemporary praise choir called a "Singing Band." The traditional choirs are a legacy of the missionary movement and sing traditional anthems and hymns. They all wear black robes and mortar boards and process with the clergy at the beginning of the service. This is the choir from the congregation at the Kalende church, rehearsing before the service on a Sunday morning. The Singing Band wear casual clothes and lead the congregation in praise choruses and dancing.

We were invited to attend a wonderful African tradition, a naming ceremony for a new baby. It is the custom for the father to choose the name for the baby and to keep it a secret until it is announced at the ceremony. Even the mother doesn't know and the name isn't spoken aloud until it is announced.  The father in this case is a staff member at the Training Center. In honor of having some Americans at the Center when his daughter was born, he asked us for suggestions of American names.

So we did some internet research and gave him a list of the most popular baby names in the US last year. We were delighted when he chose the name Isabella, the name of of one of our granddaughters! One of my favorite parts of the ceremony was when an elder in the family, in this case the baby's grandmother, shouted her new name in her ear three times! I had the honor of offering a prayer for baby Isabella and her family.

One of the challenges for the Northern Presbytery of Ghana is language.  There are several different tribal groups in the north, each with its own language which is different from the rest of the country. It is difficult for the churches to worship or work together when they don't share a common language.  Jerry, Rose, and I teach two sections of English each week for church leaders.

Rose has made many new friends here in Tamale.  Goats and chickens roam all over the Training Center grounds.  As you probably know, Rose has a special affinity for God's creatures and the goats have been a source of unending joy, entertainment, and sermon illustrations!

This is a church in one of the rural villages called Adubiliyili. Our experience worshiping with this congregation last Sunday was amazing.  The people there worship, sing, and pray with all their hearts. The chapel is simple but well-loved. Some cows ambled by and looked in the door during the Scripture reading. The only instrument they have for music is drums. Yet God was so powerfully present among them that we were profoundly moved.

Dianne had been invited to preach at Adubiliyili last Sunday for a baptism service. Twenty-one people were baptized, most of them teenagers. Since the village does not have their own pastor, the baptisms were performed by the visiting District Minister, Rev. Haruna.  It was thrilling to be part of this special day in their lives. Please pray for this faithful congregation and these young people as they take on the challenges facing them as Christians in this area.

One of our favorite discoveries in Tamale is this bakery.  These are the ovens, heated by firewood.  Our favorite bread is called "tea bread," perhaps because people have it for breakfast with tea. We can take an early morning walk to the bakery before breakfast and bring back warm bread right out of the oven.  It has no preservatives so with the heat and humidity here it needs to be eaten that day, but that hasn't been a problem!

Our water for drinking, cooking, and brushing teeth comes from Living Waters for the World.  This ministry from the Synod of Living Waters of PCUSA has provided life-giving clean drinking water for the people around the world for more than 20 years.  This is Susanna.  She is a member of the Training Center housekeeping staff who brings our water for drinking, cooking, brushing teeth. We are very grateful for her.  We estimate that each jug weighs at least 40 pounds. She joyfully delivers them for us carrying them on her head. We manage to tote the empty ones back which only weigh a few ounces.

Ghanaians make the most of Easter! Easter Monday is the annual Tamale All-Church Picnic.  All the Tamale churches gather for music, dancing, food, and games. Church teams compete in volleyball and soccer tournaments. Others play cards and board games. The day ends with a dance group competition for children's and youth groups with a big crowd of proud parents cheering them on. My favorite event of the day, however, was the women's weightlifting competition!  Wow, those Presbyterian Women are amazingly strong, but then, we knew that!

Good Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays in Ghana.  We attended Good Friday services today from 9 am to 1 pm. Everyone dresses in black as if attending a funeral, hence our attire.  On Easter Monday all the Tamale churches gather together for a big picnic and celebration with food, music, dancing, and games. It will be held here at the Lay Training Center this year.  Apparently all the churches are practicing up for the big church soccer tournament!

There is a saying in Ghana, "Life is religion and religion is life." So pretty much everything has a religious bent to it. Last week we discovered a group holding a Bible-reading "marathon" in downtown Tamale. (It sounded like they were in Leviticus when we stopped by.) The heat has made it really hard to exercise. Would this qualify as "exercising our faith?"

The Northern Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana is holding their annual meeting here at the Lay Training Center in Tamale this week. The Northern Presbytery is the largest presbytery in Ghana in geographic size. There are 61 congregations and 32 preaching points served by only 19 ministers. So leadership in the churches is dependent on lay ministers.  I was invited to bring greetings to the assembly on behalf of Chicago Presbytery and PCUSA.

We are blessed to be sharing this adventure with our good friend Rose Taul.  What fun! Rose is a world traveler.  When she worked at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Louisville, she visited Jamaica, Indonesia, Brazil, the Soviet Union, India, Czech Republic, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. But of all these places, she says "Tamale is the hottest spot of all!"

Home sweet home. Here we are in front of our guest house at the Presbyterian Lay Training Center that will be our home for the next six months.  We share it with numerous bugs, geckos, and other of God's critters, but are very grateful for it. As our friend Rose reminds us, 90% of people in the world would consider it a mansion.

We've jumped right in! We preached our first Sunday here at Trinity congregation in Tamale. The pastor, Rev. Abraham Berinyuu, has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He also spent some time at McCormick Seminary and Fourth Presbyterian Church.  The three of us preached a dialog sermon and had a lot of fun. The congregation was made up of lively young adults.

We arrived in Tamale, Ghana on Wednesday, March 26 along with all our luggage. Hooray! We will be serving at the Presbyterian Lay Training Center.  The weather is a shock - it is hot, hot, HOT! It will take some getting used to. Ceiling fans are the only relief, but the electricity is erratic so you can't always count on them. There is no worry about cold showers. No water heaters are needed. The water out of the tap is plenty warm!

St. Simon Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church of Palatine blessed and commissioned us as we prepared to leave for our stay in Ghana.  PCOP hosted a reception with pizza, cake, and ice cream, three things we won't be having for a while!