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We are almost home

We are almost home! By this I mean we have just about completed the first part of our work for Books For Africa. We brought the books from the port to Hilda’s hometown of Kukurantumi last Friday. Hilda and I are about to drive back to the port of Tema to settle accounts with the clearing agents and this will conclude the first part of the work. The second part is sending the books to the towns that have requested them. Before this happens we have to visit the towns and determine if they have done their part in preparing the library building and furniture.

It is a two and a half hour drive ot the port, and along the way we are going to stop in Somanya to meet with their library committee. We have accepted their application to receive books this year and so it remains for them to show us that all the requirements have been met. Today we will not do the official inspection but do an initial evaluation of their library. These advance meetings with the Library Board of Trustees are helpful in convincing the boards that we are serious about the requirements. Hilda and I have strictly enforced the procedure that if a town has not built the bookshelves, benches, and tables for reading nor hired a librarian, then they do not receive our book donations. Furthermore, we tell them that they will only receive the number of books that their shelves will hold. With a month to go before the official inspection we are hopeful that they will build enough shelves so we can give them 4,000 to 6,000 books.

Yesterday Hilda had her third meeting with a youth group that she has started. Every Sunday afternoon from 4 to 6 pm she meets with a local group of children ranging in ages from 7 to 14 and numbering about twenty youths to teach them traditional dancing and crafts. This is one aspect of Hilda’s recovery from her brain tumor that also glorifies God. You see, the youth of today in Ghana are caught up in cultural conflicts just like the youth of America. The mass media promote the commercialism of American culture and lifestyle. Sexual mores and traditional values have eroded just like in America. Hip hugging skirts and drooping jeans are appearing in Ghana. Everybody wants a Walkman and a TV. American slang and style are the rage.

When I came to Ghana in 1967 as a young US Peace Corps volunteer the traditional ways of Ghana were still strong. Traditional prohibitions in favor of modesty, honesty, and chastity were widely accepted and generally practiced. As the population grew with better health care, and families became more mobile, traditional ways and influences waned. Today, their peers and the mass media heavily influence the young people. It sounds familiar to Americans doesn’t it?

So, Hilda’s youth group is a response to the erosion of traditional culture and values. Most young people do not know how to dance the traditional dances or how to play traditional drums and percussion instruments. Hilda has made a study of traditional dances over the past seven years. She has taken lessons from professionals in Ghana who have organized themselves into traditional dancing troupes. She has taught traditional dancing to elementary students in Akron for several years before I retired from the school system two years ago.

Yesterday afternoon, Hilda called together her youth group and some local musicians and dancers who helped her teach the class. It was beautiful to see these young children dance the Adowa dance, which is several hundred years old. Every tribe in Ghana has their own dance step and drum music, so these young people are also exposed to the different steps of the regions in Ghana. Unless the young people are taught to value the traditional ways, these ways will be forgotten. We can’t stem the influx of the international culture, but we can keep alive what is good in traditional culture.

Coming back to the purpose of our trip to Tema today. We have now taken delivery of the container full of 26,000 books. Last Thursday we went to the port of Tema having procured the necessary papers from the Ministry of Social Welfare, the Ministry of Manpower and the Ministry of Trade and Industry. The process of getting those papers involved three trips to the capital in the weeks running up to taking our delivery. As I have described in previous letters, the process is daunting and all along we have recourse to prayer, and God helps us. Last week was no exception. Here follows one such:

Friday afternoon we were down in the port. One has to picture the situation. This is not the office of SDV, which is air-conditioned, has tables and desks and bathrooms and telephones. The port is the bailiwick of the longshoreman and the custom official that is slow to do "the right thing" unless there is money from under the table passing into his hands. It was obvious from the start though that God was taking care of us. When we went to the port one of the first places we went was to the Director’s Office. This man was young and dedicated. When the agent from SDV led us to his office, she begged the man to give us some consideration because of the nature of our non-profit work. The Director called us in and saw that Hilda and I were the ones who were managing the non-profit organization. I spoke Hilda’s language of Twi to him and encouraged him to call me brother-in-law in view of the fact that Hilda and I have been married for thirty-five years. He warmed to us and told our clearing agent that he had us "firmly in hand." He said that he couldn’t keep some of the officials in the port outside his office from demanding bribes, but he would give us his second in command to help us with the process. It didn’t take long for us to get the picture.

Since it is getting to Christmas time, the port is especially busy with mercantile imports; we found it crowded. Again, you have to picture a large lot crowded with metal shipping containers stacked four high, each one twenty or forty feet long and weighing tens of thousands of pounds. These huge containers are hoisted above your head by a huge machine while you scurry around to avoid being run over by its ten-foot tall tires. Each importer among this crowd is trying to get the attention of the driver of the huge machine so that his/her container can be unstacked and inspected by custom agents who are also scurrying around doing business. Having the Director’s assistant on our side helped a lot. Why should the machine driver pay attention to us who haven’t sent him any bribe? The assistant actually got on the running board of the machine and stayed there until the driver moved to our container, removed the three containers stacked above it, and moved it to an open area where it could be inspected.

It was during the inspection that we ran into trouble. We were told that there wasn’t time for the inspection that day. It was 1:30 in the afternoon and we were still hoping to get out of the port with it before six. Our agent took us to one of the top custom officials. We had already declared the value of the items in our container and he was suspicious that a forty-foot container was valued only at several hundred dollars. We knew that books could come into the country duty free so we didn’t understand his concern. He thought that we might have hidden some contraband somewhere amongst the books. He ordered a 100% inspection, meaning that the entire contents of the container had to be unloaded and personally inspected by the custom agents. When we complained, he told us that that was the law; in fact, he said he personally wanted to inspect the load. We couldn’t argue with a top official without getting into more trouble. Fortunately, an official next to him made a suggestion that a normal port agent could do the groundwork and then call the top man out to see the completed work.

Can you imagine a thousand boxes of books on the pavement in front of the container midst the scurrying people and machines? It was a mess and one had to be alert that none of the boxes "walked off" with the many people around. The normal port agent sent the order out to have the contents pulled out of the container. We started to do this, but I became disheartened with the enormity of the task. It had taken Hilda and I five months to pack these thousand boxes of books, and it had taken a crew of fifteen people four hours to pack the container when we loaded it in our driveway in October. The clearing agent and I went to beg the official for some leeway. I spoke to the man about Books For Africa Library Project and he relented. We only had to empty half the contents to where he could see through the container to the far end and so check for contraband. When the container was half-emptied and you could see to the back we sent for the customs official. The man asked our clearing agent if there was any contraband in the load. Upon hearing "no" the official ordered everything put back into the container. It had only taken an hour.

We were in the middle of refilling the container when we received word from the top customs official that he wanted to see the load personally. So we stopped the reloading and waited for him. Hilda and I then had recourse to the Helper that we turn to every time we encounter difficulty. We asked God to take care of us and find a way through. After waiting an hour our agent suggested to Hilda and I that perhaps he forgot about us. We should go and ask him to come, inspect the load and then sign the papers so we could be on our way. Our clearing agent and I met the man outside the main office. He said he was just on his way. I fell into step with him and started to tell him about the work of Books For Africa. He seemed to be more receptive than when we first approached him in his office. I asked him what town he was from. When I found out that he was from a village in the Upper East Region, I told him we had wanted to establish a library in Upper East or Upper West. I asked him if he knew Stephen Ayidia. He said, "Yes." Stephen turned out to be a mutual friend. I then asked of another man Hilda and I knew from the Upper East. "Yes," he knew that man too.

By the time we had arrived at the container the top customs official was much at ease. After I had shown him one opened box of books he told me I could put the rest away, he was finished. God had made a way. Such miracles have been happening all the time on our trip when we encounter problems. Life is bound to throw us such opportunities to call on God for help, and if we don’t immediately get the answer, then we continue to trust and seek God’s will. This is what I’ve been learning.

I am writing this paragraph a day later. Yesterday Hilda and I made the trip to Tema to finish accounts with the shipping company. It was instructive in that I had several more opportunities to grow in faith. This is what happened.

We had put a $400 deposit down on the steel shipping container so that we could keep the books inside and send on the whole load up to our warehouse in Hilda’s hometown. The driver of the tractor-trailer carrying the container was supposed to have returned the empty container to the port and give the receipt to the business office so we could get our deposit back. When we arrived at the business office yesterday we found that the driver never handed the receipt in. Did he return the container at all? We didn’t know. We met with our clearing agent and together with her we started searching the port area for the truck. We knew the license number of the truck and we went up and down. There was no sign of the truck or the driver. Hilda and I prayed. Our clearing agent then checked the records of the security officer at the gate of the yard where the containers are returned. There was no record that the container was returned.

We made another sweep through the port area looking for the truck. Then the clearing agent suggested that we go to the work shed inside the return yard and see if there was a record of the container being returned. This time our clearing agent found a copy of the receipt and we thanked God for His help. We returned to the business office then with a copy of the receipt and took it to the cashier. She sent us to an office on the next floor for an authorization for a refund. We saw a number of people on that floor and were told that six people needed to sign a form to release the money to us and that we should return in two days for the money. We appealed to the head accountant who told us the best he could do was to have it ready for us by the afternoon of the next day. When we explained that we didn’t live in the port town but two and a half hours away and that we were supposed to start preparing the books for dispersal, he told us again that the best he could do was the afternoon of the next day. In the face of this "No," we could do no more than pray and accept. And keep on praying.

We returned to Kukurantumi empty handed yesterday, and I will make the trip to the port again this Friday. We don’t know why some things happen. Sometimes we have challenges that we pray over and God acts in power to move the obstacle. Other times we wait and walk through the obstacle trusting that all will work for the good.

To conclude this piece I will share the results of our meeting in Somanya. We did meet with part of their Board of Trustees. The library has ten stacks that can hold about two thousand books. There is enough space in the room for another fifteen stacks and so we encouraged the Board to build them. This would bring the number of books they could receive up to five thousand. Hilda and I strongly encourage towns to meet this number as a minimum. It gives them a sufficient number to have a children’s section, a youth section, a reference section, a fiction and biography section and a complete range of adult non-fiction.

Season’s greetings and prayers for God’s blessings on you,

Kirt and Hilda

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