Still here, + guest blogger access re Kalila

We're on the verge (next few days, I hope) of getting Kalila's surgery entirely worked out -- but I feel that my presence here may be essential to some of the details like getting visas, so I've postponed my trip north until it's all settled or very close to it.

Therefore, I am still blogging :-)

Also, FYI, I've given my mother and dear friend Libby Klein access to this blog so that they can keep you all updated about Kalila while I'm out of touch.

How to donate for Kalila

Amazing: With all pledges so far, along with $5K from Rotary, we are almost at $30K for Kalila out of the $36K necessary. Clearly we are going to make it. The time has come to speedily gather all of your generous donations and be poised to write a check to the hospital and bring Kalila here. She is at risk every day -- and the sooner we get the money in the account, the sooner we can bring her here and save her life, so please send checks ASAP.

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HOW TO SEND DONATIONS: My mother set up a special account for Kalila at the Old National Bank in Greencastle, Indiana.*

You can send your pledge in one of two ways:

1) Paypal.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to select "personal" and then "gift", instead of "purchase", when you get to the bottom of the payment screen. Also, please pay with your bank account if you can, in order to avoid the service fee -- but no worries if you need to use credit card:

2) Make a check out to KALILA MAHAMA HEART FUND and mail it to my mother** at

Kelsey Kauffman
609 Ridge Ave.
Greencastle, IN 46135

We want to convey the enormous gratitude of Kalila’s family. They are amazed that so many of our friends (153 at last count!) would care enough about Kalila to try to save her life. Kalila’s mother sent a very touching email to my mother late Friday night sharing her fears and sense of guilt that the problem had not been diagnosed earlier (despite her having taken Kalila to doctors repeatedly over the past 14 months). "I am a basket [case] when I am alone," she wrote. "I have learned not to breakdown in public... but whenever I am alone with Kalila and especially while I watch her sleep, I can't help but cry." Kalila’s grandfather, ever the optimist, has invited all of you to Ghana so he can thank you personally after the surgery!

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*Reverend Bill Wieland (St. Andrews Episcopal Church) and accountant David Bray (Bray and Associates) have kindly agreed to be co-signers on the account with her. All checks written from the account will need to be signed by both Rev. Wieland and my mother.

**She will record it, send you a receipt (in most cases electronically) with a copy to David Bray, and take it to the bank where the bank will stamp it "for deposit only."

Things Ghana does NOT have

(at least, not much/surprisingly little of.)

Note: This post is more informative in conjunction with the "Things Ghana Has" post.

Postcards
Religious strife
Atheists
Jobs
Visible crime/violence
Local premium chocolate brands (despite the massive cocoa farming industry)
Consistent running water in residential areas
Daylight savings
Strong distinctions between nuclear and extended family
Precise usage of the words "cousin", "uncle", etc
Very many purely-European-blood descendants of the first few hundred years worth of colonists
(most of them didn't bring their wives here. The only other white people I've seen while in Ghana have fairly clearly been tourists/expats.)
Rainforest (the wide belt of previous rainforest has been largely deforested)
Beggars
Street dogs (compared to other developing countries I've been in)
Visible drug abuse
Housing (ie, there isn't nearly enough of it)
Recycling
Readily understandable English
Cold
Good public transportation
Good urban planning
Mosquitoes (at least, during the winter/dry season, which is what it is now)
Reliable use of gendered pronouns such as "he", "she", "his", "theirs", etc

This one's for you, Dad...

Two days ago Nasir and I visited the University of Ghana campus just outside Accra. Nasir studied political science there years ago, and much of the family has some kind of undergraduate or graduate degree from the university, which is one of the best in West Africa.

I bought a couple of books at the bookstore and sat in on a geography lecture, but the highlight was definitely non-academic: We were driving past a 2-on-2 pickup basketball game and I joked "maybe I should challenge them" or something like that. Nasir took me more seriously than I was taking myself, and it also turned out that one of the players was a relative (nephew?). So we stopped and, clearly completely bemused, one of the guys gave me his spot. In my skirt and Chaco sandals, and Sarah's nice blouse which I had borrowed to visit the courts, I proceeded to go 2-for-3 from the field (draining and 15- and 10-footer), talked a little trash, and then decided that was as good as it was going to get and I was also in real danger of injuring myself and ruining my trip, and gracefully exited.

(Nasir managed to take that photo of me playing defense. Also, in the interest of fair and balanced journalism, I should probably mention that I did get dunked on, and also that they clearly had mixed feelings about even attempting to put any kind of pressure on me when I was shooting. But still, for someone who hasn't shot a basketball in a couple of months and is playing in sandals, I felt pretty good about the whole thing.)

Near travel-tastrophe

This morning, as I was getting ready to leave the house to go to the travel agent and buy my ticket from the Gambia back to Ghana (on Dec 18), I realized that I didn't have my trusty Lonely Planet West Africa guidebook. I sorted and searched all my things several times, scoured the downstairs of the house, involved the whole family... and finally gave up. It was nowhere to be found, even though all agreed that I had been reading it in the living room last night and hadn't left the house since.

Disaster! There is simply no way I can make it, alone on public transportation, through 3 of the poorest countries on earth, where they barely speak a language that I also barely speak, without a good guidebook. And despite having already been to several of the best bookstores in Ghana (listed, ironically, in the guidebook), I hadn't seen hide nor hair of a travel section anywhere.

I decided to go to the travel agent anyway (and hope that he could tell me where to get a guidebook), and luckily Kalila's mother Faiza discovered that the book had somehow made it into her car last night before she went home. Good thing, because the travel agent had never heard of Lonely Planet and didn't even know what a travel guidebook was. His suggestion was to buy a map of Accra...

Now that I've been through that experience once, I'm going to guard that book with my life.

PS - In a quasi-related experience, I had to visit 6 ATMs before I found one that worked in order to withdraw enough cash to pay the travel agent for the ticket. No one here uses or accepts credit cards, and I gather functional ATMs are only going to get fewer and farther between as I head north. Guess I'll be carrying a lot of cash...

We're at $24K for Kalila!

A $5K pledge just came in unexpectedly, putting us over 2/3rds of the way there. Amazing! And the family's fundraising here in Ghana has picked up steam -- they now think that they are over $5K themselves. We now have almost 150 donors -- and we're getting really close!

Later today, my mom will be sending a brief update to my friends who've pledged. Here's the version she sent to her friends and family two days ago (I haven't been online much since then, sorry!)

The picture is from this afternoon -- Kalila was playing with my sunglasses :-) Sorry I can't rotate the picture on this computer...

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My apologies to many of you for my silence over the past two days. Developments are good!

First, the response has been phenomenal. In just three days, 137 of Taren's and my friends responded to our emails with pledges of just under $18,000. That's half the amount we need in only 72 hours!!

Second, I am very hopeful that Rotary International may help. Rotary has a program called the Gift of Life that helps bring children with congenital heart defects from poor countries to the US for surgery--perfect for Kalila. The Rotary people with whom I have been corresponding are very impressed with everyone's generosity and I hope that they will be able to match what we have raised. My thanks to Elaine Peck, director of Putnam County Community Foundation for connecting me with them. (I've also applied to some other organizations/foundations.)

Third, people in Ghana have also been generous. The family's appeals through newspapers and radio have raised more than $2,000 (in a country where the World Bank reports annual per capita income as only $700).

Fourth, I'm still trying to work out where everyone should send checks. I would prefer a foundation (which is why I was talking to Elaine Peck at the local foundation) for greatest accountability, but if not ,I will open a dedicated bank account. Or if Rotary takes Kalila's case, the best method might be to route funds through them. In the meantime, please do NOT send checks directly to me. My house and brain are both too cluttered. Since this is a rather large amount of money to raise from a large number of people, I want to be sure to do this the right way.

Fifth, I responded to the first 70 or 80 of you with personal notes, but have since fallen behind. (Plus, the mold on the dishes was getting out of hand.) Please everyone know how much I appreciate you and I will write to each of you in the next few days.

Meanwhile, I will let everyone know as soon as I know more details.

Kelsey

Unwritten blog posts

I'm still doing way more bloggable things than I have time to blog about. So, here's a partial list of things that I haven't gotten a chance to really tell you about yet!

1) The press conference I stumbled upon by the CPP -- a minor political party that currently only has a single seat in Parliament but was the party of Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana after independence. Also, the old woman who sat down next to me and turned out to be one of Ghana's first female MPs, during the Nkrumah era -- we talked for almost an hour before the press conference actually started.

2) Nkrumah mausoleum -- fascinating memorial to Ghana's first president and one of the most influential Africans of the 20th century.

3) The courts/law firms -- I shadowed Sarah for half a day, through two court cases and at her very prominent law firm. Most surprising: The judges and lawyers still wear white British-style wigs when court is in session. Sarah and I are pictured; I'm holding the wig.

4) The Accra mall -- it's new and shiny and if you squint you'd think you were in Tyson's Corner.

5) The Burkina Faso embassy and visa-acquisition experience -- remarkably smooth and fast.

6) The voluntary service scheme -- I stumbled across the final round of the national selection process for the voluntary service year (kind of like Americorps).

7) Cape Coast and its castle -- 3 hours west of Accra, the Cape Coast castle is one of the dozens of remaining monuments to the horrors of the slave trade. Fewer than 7 in 10 of those held in the castle survived to make it through the door of no return onto a slave ship; even fewer made it to the New World alive. Pictured is the "Door of No Return" -- through which, after an average of 3 months packed like sardines in underground dungeons, you were herded onto a slaver. (Sorry about not being able to rotate the picture...)

8) WEB DuBois memorial & museum -- The house where DuBois lived out his last few years at Nkrumah's invitation is just a few blocks from my host family's house.

9) The National Theatre -- I stopped by this imposing Chinese-built structure to ask what the performance schedule was, and the guys sitting outside guarding the entrance had the schedule for the next few weeks printed on a single piece of paper in a binder, and didn't even have any way of telling me what the names of the movies coming up were.

10) Parliament House -- I toured Parliament House and observed Parliament in session for about an hour as they were debating a proposal to borrow money from other countries to expand Ghana's ambulance fleet.

11) Kakum rainforest -- one of the small surviving slices of rainforest in Ghana, Kakum is home to hundreds of species and has the sketchiest and most rickety-looking canopy walkway I hope I ever traverse. Pictured...