17. January Part 2 – Visit to the Mother Florence Memorial School in Ho and to our long-time friend Theodore
After our successful video conference, we visited an old friend in Accra. Theodore, with whom we have a long-standing friendship and whom we support as best we can. Theodore lives in a district of Ho and involves us in his family’s hardships from time to time. Theodore comes from Togo, was a head waiter in a hotel, but was made redundant due to financial difficulties. He is currently trying to support his three children and his wife with odd jobs. His wife “N’tsukpo Cecile” is a self-employed seamstress and contributes to their upkeep with her work. In her spotlessly clean one-room apartment, she has set up a corner where she does great work on an old hand-operated sewing machine. She actually lacks everything: sewing materials, fabrics, threads, scissors, needles, a better mechanical sewing machine, etc. If you have anything you would like to donate, please contact us (spenden@hita-ev.org). We are also looking for sewing machines in good condition, preferably mechanical, for other projects in the area of “equal rights”.
One problem for the family at the moment is raising the school fees for their eldest daughter. 580 Ghana Cedis school fees including meals for 4 months? At the current exchange rate, that’s between EUR 35.00 and EUR 40.00. Assuming 100 school days per term, that leaves less than 37 cents per day for the school children’s meals. What seems very little to us is actually very, very much when you consider that the regular monthly wage for service staff in the catering industry is currently between 600 and 900 Ghana Cedis. It is always inexplicable to us how it is possible to send children to school on such a low income. Against this background, the aspect of compulsory education and/or child labor sometimes needs to be discussed in a completely different way.
After visiting Theodore and his family, we were keen to visit the school that Theodore’s eldest daughter attends. The principal was already waiting for us. He told us that there are currently 45 pupils being taught by 6 teachers at the school. The circumstances are almost indescribable and can perhaps be guessed in the background of the pictures in this report. We are not quite sure whether the entire school complex was never completed or has already been destroyed again. There is nothing at all in the classrooms, and some of the furniture for the children is even missing. A storm recently destroyed the roof of one of the buildings. There are no funds to rebuild it. We don’t know exactly how we can help the school. But the gratitude for the little that we had and were able to hand over was indescribable. This reaction in particular encourages us time and again to do everything we can to help these wonderful people in some way. We realize that this can only be the famous “drop in the ocean” – but it is one!