Zoom zoom zoom!

I've borrowed from the famous Mazda slogan to describe the last few weeks. As you might imagine they've been very busy indeed. Since JC left I've had a brief while to just try and make sure that a few necessary things were done before going to Ghana for Julian and Liz's wedding (whom you might or might not know). I was in Accra, and the surrounding area, for about a week, before flying home to Durban and to my lovely Mandy, who greeted me with a big hug and a very personalised little lunch for us to have at the beach. Awww! Since then it's been a combination of catching up on all the stuff I've been letting go, catching up with people, and just this weekend going to a nice house in Salt Rock (up the coast from us in Durbs) with Mandy, her old housemates, and their respective partners. It was great to get some time away where I could actually relax rather than host, guide, photograph, or whatever, and great for Mandy to get some quality time with her nearest and dearest, as well as get some much needed R&R.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you a little about Ghana. I could tell as soon as I got off the plane that it is a very different place from SA, especially from Durban. On paper it's quite similar - coastal city, lots of people, tropical type climate. Still, it was worlds away in a lot of ways. Infrastructure was not as developed and nothing had that feel of a wealthy country. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but from the outset it does strike you that there's not a lot of room to make things nice, just to make them work. I didn't expect, and certainly didn't require, it to be a lot different, but with the African Cup Of Nations being held there only a week or so before I arrived I expected that there might have been a little more glitz to the place.

Still, after getting out of the airport from my late flight I was picked up by Julian's dad, who led me to the car where I met the rest of the troup. I was given a can of warm Guiness as a welcome (they love Guiness in Ghana and brew it there, to their own tastes, I'm sure). Even at 11pm or so there was still plenty of traffic (something that never changes in Accra) and we crawled along back to our hotel.

The hotel itself seemed quite reasonable, though I was soon to get a taste what the rest of the week was going to be like. After my lengthy travel I largely just wanted to sleep. However the air con in my room, which was supposed to be on before I arrived, was not even working. Sounds like a luxury, and it is, but in Accra in February it's a lot closer to necessity! Still, I wasn't too perturbed, knowing that most of Ghana does fine with no air con and so could I. I fortunately got a fan, and with that running on full power pointed right at me I could just about sleep! I thought Durban was hot, but this place was something else! Even at midnight it was so warm and so humid. On the flight home the plane gave stats about conditions and even at 1000m up after taking off from Accra at midnight, the outside temp was still 23C! Given that temperature is supposed to drop off at 1C per 100m, even at half that rate it was 28C at midnight! When I first arrived and came off the plane I noticed instantly that my cooled hand luggage developed dew drops of condensation before I even got to the ground! Because of this I managed to go through the best part of 45 litres of bottled water aside from what we had in restaurants or at stops in petrol stations in just one week! You sweat and sweat, but don't cool down. The one thing that is easier to bear than Durban is the sun. Because of the dust and the general cloud Accra always had this thin misty veil of cloud that was completely uniform. This did a lot to make sure that though it was hot, the sun didn't blast you too directly.

The next day we started to do the usual wedding preparations and that involved us driving to lots of places and often waiting around a lot as Liz and Julian and others did lots of stuff while I sat in the car with the leftover people and read (which I was glad to have the time to do). We got to see a lot of Accra this way, though it's always nicer to be on foot and meeting people. Through a communications mixup about measurements (easy to do when you don't have a standard on where to measure, say, the shoulders, let alone when you're dealing with people who don't have such a technical command of english to distinguish clearly between, say, waist and hips) none of the dresses made for the wedding fitted, and so had to be altered. One of them had no less than 4 attempts and only still got to barely okay!

Our hotel did us no favours too. We often found we had no running water because the pump had died (most water in Accra is supplied by outdoor tanks that are filled by delivery from a truck, not piped in underground). Other times the air con didn't work in one room or another. Other times breakfast would just be very late. Other times electricity would go out. This all came to a head when on the morning of the wedding everyone wanted to get ready and there was no water! After about 4 hours the water was returned and the hairdresser finally arrived. As they were working the electricity went out due to some seriously burnt out mains wiring! Not a good thing to be happening on your wedding day!

Still, the wedding itself all seemed to go well in the end, and there was a huge party at the end with the Ghanaian's really giving it some. I had by then changed into my own Ghanaian suit, which I had made for me during the week. It looks a bit like pyjamas, but it's cool. The fabric I picked out and then had it made by a guy nearby. Total cost - about £10! It's a little off in the shoulders, but for £10 I'm not complaining!

Ghana is a very religious country, with pretty much every shop, building, and tro tro (taxi/minibus) sporting a Christian type of name. Things like "To God be the glory Hair Salon" are not uncommon at all, along with "Washed in the blood Salon", or "By His grace Mechanics". Unfortunately it's a very superstitious and superficial thing in the majority of cases. People think that if they give a bit of lip service to Jesus he'll make everything go well for them like a good luck charm. The "prosperity gospel" is such an issue, it seems, in Africa - more than it is perhaps anywhere in the world. Of course, it's easy to point out specks and not see your own logs. Just as grinding poverty opens the door to prosperity gospel, so does western philosophical disillusionment breed a gospel of "self-fulfilment" or "inner healing" or just plain worldly leisure. As in all these things, there's a kernel of truth, but turned inside out and stuffed into a package of other worldly nonsense.

This is why I was so glad to be able to hook up with the Newfrontiers church in Accra. Of the many good things, I think they managed to contain the grain of truth that God's ways are good and pleasing and fruitful, without losing all proportion. You simply can't say in Ghana that God thinks your poverty is irrelevant and has no interest in changing it. It's not true, and it's unhelpful. For an affluent western church it may be that we give this very little thought, because, having everything we want, we devote ourselves only to matters of the soul, etc. But God made all things, visible and invisible, and all things He has made are good. If anything I think in the west we tend to oscillate between a thankless material greed and a superspiritual asceticism (rejection of material and boldily things) - neither of which glorify God. At City Of God Church it seems, as in Zim, they have well learned that God is keen to bless people as they fulfil his plan to work, to be fruitful and productive, and to supply the needs of others.

On the friday I went to see the school that they run, including the new site where they were building for expansion, and hoping to eventually move the whole school. This would then free up the buildings the school uses on the church site at the moment for other ministries. Looking around the site, and in fact all around Ghana, there were lots of unfinished buildings. The idea is that if you own some land you build something, anything, there and fast. If you don't then, because of the lax enforcement of land ownership, someone else will just come and build on there, or the owner will "re-sell" it and let the two "owners" fight it out. Some of the people in the church were telling of stories of this sort of conflict from their own building works, where groups have even come with machine guns and forcibly removed the construction crew (for all that Ghana is actually very safe).

The reasons for running the school are many. It's not first an issue of lack of availabilty. There are lots of schools, and many that are cheaper than New Nation School. But what they have in mind is to offer a proper education without cutting corners. There is simply no school like that anywhere nearby (where for example teachers don't slack off during the day so that they have reason to further educate the kids for a few more hours outside of school time and so get more money for more hours work). With the evident religiosity in the country, the school aims to bring faithful biblical teaching to a wide range of people and not leave them locked into a lifestyle of unbiblical fog that clouds them ever seeing the truth and gaining eternal life. The other big aim is to bring the kingdom of God into that society, particularly when it comes to tribalism. There are, I think, 76 tribes in Ghana, all of whom generally don't like one another. Most schools will by default (by being in a certain area, or by people moving their kids to places where their tribe is represented strongly) only really be suited to a certain tribe and not be welcoming of others. The church has battled hard, and continues to do so, in helping people to see the unity of all nations in Christ. They hope that if they can teach children at a young age to accept one another, that this could have much bigger effects across the society. In just a few years God's favour has so been on them that they have grown in the region of ten-fold (as a school) and continue to do so as they are recognised as one of the best in the area. Perhaps their idea of seeing thousands of people raised a different way is not such a crazy one!

On the Sunday I visited church itself, which was distinctly Ghanaian. Most stuff was done in english, but there were some other languages in their joyful celebration too. It was a very simple affair, but I instantly felt quite at home - much more so than I did at another church I went to while there. After the service I was invited to lunch at John Kpikpi's house, where I met his family and other guests. It was wonderful to be able to relate to all these people from all over the world, and I was so glad to really meet these people and just learn a little about where they are, what they're doing, etc. Just looking at how much I've written I can see that I've learned quite a bit and been challenged by yet another context, which in turn makes me see a bit more of my own outlook on the world.

So that was Ghana, in very short form. Lots more could be told, lots more went on, but for now that will do. It is a very cool country in a lot of ways, with welcoming people, and a rich culture. The evident chaos that is there is in a lot of ways part of the charm. May God bless the 76 nations there powerfully through the heirs of Abraham's promise in that place.

Coming back it was more rush rush. At one point it looked like I might miss my flight, which would have been disaster. Our van, which had driven us around all week, decided to go very funny and was struggling up even slight hills. The suspected culprit is water in the fuel tank, as it was fine before we filled up on our way to Kakum rainforest reserve. But it did look like we would break down about 3 hours drive from Accra! The grace of God alone got it back to Accra, and when it died finally I was able to jump out and get a taxi the rest of the way. Phew! Still, I prayed very earnestly at that point. It was again a prompt to both pray with that "God, you must do something here" fervency more often, but also to put myself in more situations like that - not breaking down in vans, of course, but in exploits to build the Kingdom that require that faith and expose me to that "risk" (though how can it be a risk when we can only ever gain?). Like I said I don't want to ignore the "prosperity gospel" of the west - the good life, the happy life, the life of ease and blessedness alone. Whether we know it or not we are prosperous, and we take our prosperity as a given and as a birthright. May it not cloud our view of eternal prioirties and choke down our faith.

Nonetheless I made it in good time for my flight, which was delayed, and which meant I missed my connecting flight in Durban. The back section of the plane from Accra had 90 seats, and there were three of us! Soon many people joined us three as we folded up the armrests on the bank of four chairs in the middle and got some kip! I think only now am I fully recovered though, with regard to sleep!

Got my folks coming out on Thu, then Pete and Emily a few days after my folks leave. There's the possibility of going to Zambia after that, but I think between money and time I won't end up going. Shame.

Anyway, much love to you all! Keep the emails and such coming - I do read them and do try to reply as quick as I can. Not long now until I'm back!

Oh, that reminds me, while in Ghana with the time alone to read and pray and think (so valuable.... I don't do it nearly enough), I decided that I feel God is still saying for me to head back to London in June, and take up teacher training there for a year and see where that leads. Mandy agrees with me, and neither of us want to compromise on God's purpose one bit. JC and the others at Beulah think this is right too. I think what's changed for me is that I'm now wanting to do it with my whole heart again - the way God delights in. Watch this space then, folks! Any prayers, prophecies, advice, etc would be welcome!

Peace!