During my sophomore year in high school, I got an amazing opportunity that has changed my life since. However, I did not think something that I would become so passionate about would come from my least favorite class: environmental biology. During this class, each student had to do a project. We had a few options, such as book reports and other monotonous academic busy work. However, there was one project we could do if we signed up for it. It was learning about the ecology of Ghana, a country in West Africa. Sounds boring right? Not at all! Learning about the ecology of Ghana was only a small part of our mission.
With this, we got paired with a school down there and stayed in contact with them for the length of the semester. We sent them books and pictures of our lives. And we heard back from them! All the kids just wanted to hear from us and wanted to feel loved, and it was awesome to offer that. After our trimester in biology class had ended, all the students involved with this project, including myself, decided we wanted to make this endeavor in to a club at our high school. It came to be what was known as "The World Outreach Club of Vashon High" Upon formation, I was voted in as President. We continued to write letters to the kids down in Ghana and send pictures too. We even decided that we were going to raise funds to hopefully go visit them! We did bake sales and money collections jars. These were nice, but we wanted to do something big, something that would get our whole community involved. In response, we started planning an auction dinner. This took a lot of planning! We found a woman to speak at our event that had lived in Ghana for many years working with people down there. We also made the upwards or ten baskets and items to auction off to raise money. Some of these baskets were gardening items and cooking items. We also prepared an entire Ghanian Dinner. It was awesome to see how many people from the community showed up and supported us! People from our high school, churches and familiar faces came to support us in our efforts to reach out to the world community.
Even though we did not make the trip down to Ghana, we used all the money we had raised to buy items that the kids needed, everything from soccer balls to pens and markers to health items. It was because of this project that I have a huge heart for Ghana. I now sponsor a six year old boy named Prince who lives down there, through Compassion International. I will visit him while I am sponsoring him, and hopefully I can more than once! Doing the Ghana project changed my life in a way I never thought it would. I would love to reconnect with the kids that we had contact with years ago. God works through anything, so my hope is that I can be a light to anyone down there in any way.
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