What better time to start a project blog than one week in?! After three nights in Accra we embarked on a sweaty bus journey and reached Abrobiano exactly seven days ago today.
The children were running towards the bus even before we stopped, waving and laughing. When we stepped off we were each greeted by a cheer from the crowd that waited there. It was overwhelming to see the number of kids there, all of them jostling and pushing to get near us, to meet us and talk to us. We managed to make our way through the crowd holding our bags, assisted by some of the locals who carried our matresses to our host homes for us. Straight away the Brits were introduced to the Ghanaian showering system 
Suitably refreshed, we settled down to bed and lay for a while, thinking about the exciting ten weeks ahead of us.
The next day we were invited to a formal welcome at the local school, starting at 10am. The whole town turned out to dance and sing and pray for us. The chief made a speech welcoming us as Abrobiano’s brothers and sisters, a great honour for all of us. Afterwards he invited us back to his palace, a well-built house in the middle of town, to welcome us in the traditional manner - by giving us whisky, sodas and a locally-made gin. We asked him to provide us with fifteen coconuts for Jodi’s birthday and he very generously gave us twice as many. Then we headed to the beach and cracked them open to drink as the sun set - it was very pretty. At 6pm we began our planning for the project! Our first action was to start planning the baseline survey, where we would go round the whole town and collect population, education, health and hygiene information.
The next day our team met at the town centre to help with a clean-up at 6:30 am and set marquees(canopies) for the community fundraiser happening later in the day. We then met at 9 pm for a team meeting only to get to know the intensity of the work we have to do. At the end of the meeting we decided to number every house in Abrobiano. We then went for the fundraising meeting. It was so nice because there was a lot of music and you could see every one contributing their time and their money to a community re-build project.. Everytime someone went in to give money, they were wrapped in a beautiful piece of African print. We had another meeting at 5pm and agreed to let the boys start the numbering the next day, which is a larger job than first anticipated.
We also met at 9am to discuss how to test the primary school children’s knowledge of hygiene and basic health education so we are able to determine what kind of topics to start teaching next week. The local schools had agreed to help us write test questions as well to combine with ours. In the evening we went to watch a local football game which Abrobiano won, 1 - nil - Wahoo!
It was a very cold night before our first Sunday in Abrobriano. We went to church in the morning, which was a great contrast to church in Britain - lots of clapping, singing and, especially, dancing. We’ve had a very celebratory week this week, with 3 birthdays - Jodi, James and Kim which has been great to spend quality time as a team.
The next day was Monday the 27th, we had 1 to 1 meetings with the team leaders scheduled for the afternoon. During our meetings we discussed our goals and how we felt about the future of the project which was nice. We’re all looking forward to our adventure and already feel so welcome by the community!
