President's Blog

Last month when I was in northern Ghana, I visited about six different villages to assess our programs and to learn about some of the challenges facing the communities where we are working in partnership with the Anglican Diocesan Development and Relief Agency (ADDRO).

After one has been on a few of these village visits, which are usually very moving, one quickly discerns what I might call the “Liturgy of the Village Visit.”  First one arrives and the village is called together to greet you.  There is usually a short introduction of some of the projects and challenges and then one sets off on a tour of the village.  Generally one is accompanied by a large crowd as one makes one’s way from hut to hut meeting the people, the children and talking with them about their lives.  The particular villages that I was visiting on this trip are participating in the NetsforLife® program and so we were learning about the challenge that malaria poses to families with young children and pregnant women.  Virtually every family that we visited had lost a child to malaria and so the NetsforLife® program is making a huge impact here.

Once the “walk about” is complete, one usually is offered the seat of honor (often the only chair in the village) at a “durbar” which is a gathering of all the people in the village and their elders and chief.  The people of the village put on a performance of their malaria education play–which generally stars the local village hams and gets a lot of laughs.  Drama is a critical way to teach people about malaria and how to prevent it.

Then follows a few heart-felt testimonials about how NetsforLife® has changed and transformed life in the community.  Always there is dancing.  Once everyone has had a chance to show off their dancing talents and encourage the foreign visitors to dance, things generally wrap up with a few brief remarks of thanks from the villagers.

In the last village visit I made, I had just delivered my formal remarks of thanks and greetings from the Episcopal Church and I was gathering up my hat and camera to make my way to the vehicle to leave.  At that point the village headman came forward to say that he had a presentation to make to me on behalf of the entire village.  I was a bit taken aback.  This was definitely not in the “Liturgy of the Village Visit” that I had experienced previously.

As I sat down, the headman said that although they had a gift to give to me they were very embarrassed as it was such a small and poor gift.  He told me that they had wanted to give me an elephant as a gesture of thanks as that was the grandest gift they could imagine presenting to show how important the malaria nets were to their community.  However, they were too poor to give me an elephant.   (I was trying to imagine what I was going to do with an elephant!)

Instead all of the family heads of the village had met that morning to discuss what would be the most valuable thing that they could give me to show their gratitude for all that had happened in their village as a result of the net distribution.  They had decided to collect all of the eggs laid that day and present them to me in a bowl. 

He explained that the eggs represented the entire village’s wealth for that day and while it wasn’t very much, it was everything they had.  They had painted the bowl in vibrant colors and included a picture of a flower growing out of a pot of soil.  He told me that the flower represented the abundant life which the Episcopal Church and NetsforLife® had brought to their village.  He asked that I bring the bowl back to the United States and show it as a sign and symbol of their love for us and our partnership.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.