Striped Purple Uniforms: Goodbye Water, Hello Mud

I went back to the school on Sunday and there’s unfortunately still a ton of work to be done before classes can start again. I stepped over the gutter into the schoolyard and my shoes began sinking into the mud (and sinking and sinking) until I got my way over to the path that someone had cleared over the weekend. From the path you can see that the rest of the yard is covered with a good foot of mud that has somehow stayed wet in the incredibly hot and sunny weather. Beside the mud, there are ruined notebooks, torn apart benches, pieces of the destroyed fence and garbage from the river scattered everywhere.

The path dug out from all of the new mud and weeds hanging from the power lines.

The schoolyard. There was a fence on the left side but it's been washed away.

No worries, there are still chickens here.

The home and office building. You can see the line of dirt above the door that marks how high the water reached.

Broken chairs, tables and benches.

Kids' notebooks were scattered everywhere. Many of the students have these pink notebooks that say "Ghana Schools" with Obama's face on the cover.

What the river looks like now.

I was in Togo this weekend so I didn't get to see the effect that the flood had had on the office building before it got relatively cleaned up, but dirt on the wall shows that the water reached almost up to the roof. Apparently there was also mud a foot deep inside the building, but that has all been cleared. The school's books are always kept on a very high shelf, yet they all had some contact with the water and many were destroyed.

The house is fairly cleaned and school supplies that could be saved were piled on tables.

All of the books got wet, but many are still usable.

Mollishmael (center) looking at the damage done to the office, which also serves as his home and a place for volunteers to sleep. The books and notebooks were all kept on those shelves, yet you can see by the line of dirt high up on the wall that the water almost reached the ceiling.

Things that the water fortunately hadn't taken away.

And some more things saved from the mud. The building has this small kitchen, the office/bedroom, and a bathroom.

As I've said before, I've met an incredible number of amazingly giving people through GGYN. For instance, I learned that the man who had woken me up the night of the flood was literally just a neighbor of the school. A construction worker who's been building a house next door has been working especially hard this weekend to help clean up the school, and when I had finished taking these pictures he paid for a cab to take us over to the neighborhood where Karen lives and even escorted me to her house. There's an Akan saying, "Woforo dua pa a, na yepia wo," that means "When you climb a good tree, you are given a push." If you can measure the goodness of something by how much others are willing to help you out, then GGYN is off the charts.

I went back to the school today to help clean up the mud, and a lot has really gotten done. However, school still isn’t scheduled to start until Monday as the benches, tables and fence need to be fixed and we have to buy new books and supplies. The effects of the flood will obviously be felt long after classes start again, but what I find the most heartbreaking is that this flood is not a one-time thing. GGYN has suffered this much damage before, and unless the school building is built before the next huge storm, there’s not much that can be done to prevent this from happening again.