Where Shaving Your Hair with a Razor Blade and Eating Tooth Paste are Survival Skills
My experience working in a school in Ghana
Every morning the children were lining up in front of me. Each of them a toothbrush in their hand. Some of them busy shaking the dirt and sand off the brush. It wasn’t uncommon to see the toothbrush lying on the ground, in the sand. But hey, I had started something. At least during school days, these kids would get their teeth cleaned.
It was a different world over there. In the very north of Ghana. Where you were hours if not days of traveling in broken down and overfilled minibusses away from a supermarket, proper hospital, internet cafés, and any other luxuries of the modern world.
The struggle was real. Where water got carried in buckets on the head and electricity was not available. But not for the people living there. It wasn’t a struggle for them. Not in their eyes at least. They had the biggest smiles on their faces, all the time in the world, and were never shy of stopping by and giving you a lift. On the back of their bicycle. Or on a bike, if you were lucky.
I left all the comforts my upbringing in a western country had offered me behind and ventured off into the wilderness. The raw life of Africa. Where chicken sit under your seat in the bus…
