Mr. Iddrisu’s wife is pregnant. I am not sure how many children this makes for him but it has to be number 6 or 7. I will ask Zorash tomorrow when she comes to work how many children he has. The only way we know that she is pregnant is that she came to the Child Center this morning; she wanted money to have an ultrasound of the baby. We denied her request because ultra sounds are free in Ghana. She said that she did not want to go to the Yendi hospital to get the scan, she wanted to go to a “private” clinic to have the scan. We told her that was silly and a waste of money.
Zorash did not come to work today; her aunt that lives in Zabzugu is sick and her mother asked her to go to Zabzugu to check on her and see if she needed to go to the hospital. I gathered that she is an elderly woman.
Abochi, the carpenter came this afternoon to give us an estimate for putting the roof on the new building. We gave him the money to buy the lumber and we went to town and bought the roofing sheet, plywood, nails and other supplies that will be needed for the roof. Figuring the amount of wood that we needed was easy this time because we are building an identical building to the one we built 2 years ago. Of course the cost of building materials has jumped in price.
While we were out buying supplies we passed a lunatic walking down the road. He was unwashed, unkempt, he had on filthy clothes and he was carrying all sorts of empty bottles and plastic bags that he had picked up along the way. His biggest problem was that his pants were holey and worn out; they would not stay around his waist. He was shuffling along, encumbered by the pants around his ankles. Steve stopped and gave him some money even though he was not begging. He was so pleased with the money; he was all smiles. He squatted down to thank him and almost fell over because of the ragged pants. Of course he was barefoot. I told Steve that we should go to the house and get a pair of his pants and a shirt and come back and give them to the man. While I was in the house gathering the clothes I found a burlap bag so I added that to the treasure we were going to give him. We thought he could use the big bag to put all the small bags and stuff he had collected in so it would be easier for him to walk. He had not made much headway while we were gone because his pants were preventing him from walking very fast. We parked the truck and walked to him with the gifts. When I opened up the pants and showed them to him his eyes lit up and he smiled. I said, “For you!” We opened the shirt and gave it to him. The look of surprise on his face was priceless. Steve handed him the sack and he tried to put the clothes in the sack; I picked up some of his rubbish and tried to put it in the sack but he was having none of that. He put the clothes in the sack. He then sat down in the gutter (fortunately we have not had any rain for several weeks and the gutter was dry); he laid his head on the burlap bag with his new clothes and started patting the bag. At which point I had to turn and leave because the weeps got me! That gift made his day; probably his year!
Have a great day!
In His Service,
Steve and Kandie
