SOS Children’s Village, Weekend #2

After a rather long work week, a nice relaxing weekend would have been lovely. However, not wanting to waste any of our precious time in Ghana, we made this weekend as hectic as the last.

On Saturday, we organized a last minute visit to the SOS Children’s Village in Accra. SOS is an organization that runs orphanages around the world. Instead of “Oliver twist” style dormitories, SOS Villages are arranged into small houses, with each house containing between 8 and 12 kids. Each house then has a house mother, who is responsible for running their particular household and caring for the kids. The idea behind this is that it mimics the family environment as closely as possible. Kids stay in the village until they’re 16 or so, when they’re moved to accommodation nearer to high school.

All twelve of us headed off to the village, and after a quick tour of the primary school, it was time to visit the houses. We entered the first house and greeted the mother. The kids, who were watching TV, looked as equally shocked as we were; the flash photography from some of the others didn’t really help. We introduced ourselves individually, which added to the shyness, and then after some awkward attempts at conversations, we proceeded to the next house.

And then kids started to come up to us. They were incredibly fascinated by the array of cameras we were wielding. From tiny point and shoots, to big SLRs, they loved them all. We watchfully handed them over, and 260 shots later, they filled up my CF Card. The little ones just wanted to push buttons, but the older ones were more interested in how the camera worked.

Once, the cameras had exhausted their appeal, some bright spark thought it would be a good idea for us to have a soccer match in the 32 degree, 90% humidity weather. I’m unfit at the best of times , but running around with a bunch of people on a soccer field was particularly challenging.

Unfortunately, it was soon time to leave, but I could have spent all day there. We dropped off our rather large box of presents, and then headed to the bus. The little 4 year old girl who insisted on holding my hand all the way to the door wasn’t too happy to see us go.

PS: The kids took almost all of these photos.