A Visit to the Rain Forest

We woke up early, really sprayed ourselves down today to head to the rainforest. It was a three hour drive to the Gold Coast—where the midwives are actually headed on Monday. On the way there we passed many different shanty towns along the road. Some of the shacks are built out of wood planks while others are made of mud and straw. There are also many cement brick homes in the construction process. You can tell homes take a while to build in Ghana because it seems people build as they get the money so it could be 5 years before they have a completed home.

We finally arrived at the rainforest where we actually got a discount because we are an NGO. We’ve gotten some discounts when people had figured out who we were. For instance Robin and Sue started a conversation with one of the owners of the internet café, Busy Internet, and all of the Project HOPE team got free hours on the internet. At the rainforest we began an uphill climb. The climb wasn’t too rough. We knew we had to eventually cross a rope bridge but we had no idea what we were all in store for.

The rainforest itself was beautiful and green with lots of bird noises and we even saw an of army ants. Many of us stopped to stare at the ants before were reminded how they can devour a cow in minutes, so we moved. Once we got to the top, seven, yes seven, wood and rope very narrow bridges all connected and wrapped around the canopy of trees awaited us. Joy was a little worried about the heights but she kept moving. They were I think 18 meters off the ground. The bridges could only fit one person behind another because they were so narrow and they all creeked and swayed when you got off balance. It was absolutely beautiful up there and was worth the climb. I got some great pictures of everybody up there.

After the hike we headed to lunch at the Coconut Grove Hotel. We had wonderful local fish and hung out looking at the beach. It was interesting to see goats on the beach and also how at the hotel the beach was clean and beautiful but just down the street the beach was picturesque but was littered with trash. At the hotel it seemed like a completely different world from the rest of the coast which was so very poor. Joy said it best when she said “the difference between the have and have nots.” We left the gold coast shortly after and encountered massive traffic on our way home. When we got home we all were still full from our wonderful lunch and most of us headed off to the shower and bed. There we were met with a power outage on the women’s side of the barracks. We made the best of it, it was actually kind of funny.

--Marisol Euceda