After another early start with a breakfast of banana pancakes, we began our first project; painting the classrooms. Our first task was to repaint the base colour of all the walls in the first block which took up till around noon. However, the overwhelming heat of being inside the dark-ish classrooms made some of us feel ill so we decided to all take a short break in between where we rested in the shade and/or played with the children. Once we had finished the inside of the classrooms, we began painting the outside of the school block. That surprisingly did not take as long as we had even more help from the Ghanaian children and helpers. Finally once all the block had been painted, we all stopped for lunch.
One memorable moment throughout the day was after lunch when all half of us went onto the field with the children to play football and the other had stayed to play board games with their buddies. Despite it being amazing playing and learning Fante (their home language) with the kids, I must say it was a bit embarrassing when we were doing arm wrestling and practically all of the children beat me – even the 7 year olds!
The day was topped off with another delicious meal prepared by our team and Augustina, and spending time around the campfire singing the song we learnt today about fire on a mountain, telling stories about Ghanaian animals and Henry’s occasional comments about how Dylan is a “sexual distraction”.
All was well and good whilst sleeping until the rain came at about 3am. Half asleep, we all hastily tried to get our tents inside the Mosque before the rain became really heavy which luckily we half managed to do. I was lucky because my tent didn’t get very wet although others got quite drenched.