From July 27 to August 6 of 2002 I travelled to Ghana, West Africa as a member of a team of twelve Americans working for an organization called Wheels for the World, an program that was developed by Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic who is also the founder of Joni and Friends. Wheels for the World takes several teams a year to developing nations like Ghana, bringing donated wheelchairs and fitting them for individual persons, training them in their use, and fostering disability awareness through special community outreach programs.

In Ghana in particular the need for this kind of assistance is very great. There are numbers upon numbers of people who have been stricken by polio because they have not had access to a vaccine, or have suffered serious injury without proper treatment, and as such have no other means to move but to crawl or slither on the ground. For these people the mobility that is provided by a wheelchair (the cost of which could be up to several years' wages) can mean the difference between a life of begging on the street or actually becoming integrated into society, getting an education, learning a job skill and making a living for themselves. And the need for disability awareness is great. People who are disabled in Ghana are relegated to living on the fringes of society, and often are not even counted in the census. It seems that it is hard for the average Ghanaian to recognize that the lack of physical strength in a person does not also mean that such a person cannot be mentally strong, or able to be functional in society.

So much of our work was done in the context of helping the disabled by bringing them wheelchairs, and also showing them compassion and trying to give them a sense that they could do something great in the world, that their disability does not mean that they are disfunctional or unlovable. And we set up our three distributions in very public places, and made a great effort to draw people in from the community to see what we were doing. The easiest way was to start a ballgame with some local kids (there would always be curious kids coming by), and play with them long enough so that their parents would come looking. In Kumasi two of the members of our team spent the week running a sports camp, teaching wheelchair basketball to some of the local disabled athletes. Our last day in Kumasi we held an all-day wheelchair basketball tournament, right in the middle of town. There were hundreds of local people who came out to see what was going on; puzzled at first, but more and more excited about the games as the day went on.

I put up this photo journal mainly as a way to thank all of those who supported me financially and otherwise in making this trip. I had to raise over three thousand dollars to pay for the plane ticket, shots, medication, and expenses, but thanks to the help of more than a few people, I was able to put it all together. Thank you, enjoy, these are the fruits of your generosity...
The beach at Ghana's capital city of Accra, looking Southeast on the Atlantic Ocean. We flew from LAX to London, arrived in Accra on Sunday night, and looked around the city a bit on Monday before leaving for Kumasi.
Team photo : l-r, Shawn Cove, Rodger Lee, Susie Cove, Kim Griffith, Greg Lapp, Kris Tiner, Liz Hannah, Jamie Fast, Courtny Davis, Nate Olds, Brian Lapp.
A typical street scene, taken while we were waiting to exchange money in Madina, near Accra. The shack on the left is a music store, God Dey Sounds, and the Spicy Kitchen down from that. The green structure in the background is a mosque.
Listen to a sound file I recorded as I stood here...traffic noise and music pumping out of the record store.
This is Shawn and I at Echoing Hills Village in Madina. which is the WFTW home base in Ghana, where they restore and store the wheelchairs that are used on the distributions. Echoing Hills is a privately-run school for the disabled, and this guy (he doesn't talk much, so we didn't get his name) is one of their clients. Shawn and I played football with him and some of the other clients for about an hour while we waited for our driver to arrive.

above: I'm trying some of Greg's fish fufu, a popular local dish that's eaten with the hands, while Nate and Courtny look on, quite disgusted.

left: that's our van with a flat tire, hit a pothole at about 80mph on the way to Kumasi, and we were stranded for about an hour while our driver, James, went to find a new wheel. On the left is Coach Sam, a former Olympic athlete (he ran with Carl Lewis in 1984), and now the second in command of the police for all of Ghana. He escorted us from the airport in Accra, making sure we didn't get held up in customs, and rode with us to Kumasi on Monday night.
Our first day of work was Tuesday in Obuasi, a medium-sized town outside Kumasi. This day we started to get a feel for what the work was going to be like. We had a number of people show up, little kids to elderly people, and were able to accomodate everyone who needed a chair, twelve in all.
Rodger and I did most of the repair work and adjustments on the wheelchairs as they came through. There were a number of special cases, and a few times we had to improvise a bit with the supplies we had on hand. The little girl (top right) has polio that has straightened her knees. We had to find a way to elevate her feet so that sitting in the chair wouldn't put a stress on her knees, so we took an old armrest off another chair, bent it, bolted it onto the side of her chair, and adjusted it so that she'd be comfortable.
Here I am with Prince, a young boy who cut school in order to follow us to the site and help out with the work we were doing. He was quite helpful, grabbing supplies and translating for us to some of the more elderly people who came through.
These two girls came down to hang out with us that day, Kim taught the little one how to chew gum.
The next day we travelled to Agona, a smaller town, where we gave out 21 chairs, working closely with the local officials. We set up inside a town hall type of building. This day was much harder work, but we were getting into a rhythm with our jobs as we started to get the hang of what we were doing. Here I am fixing a makeshift footrest (of zip-ties and duct tape) to a chair; these two boys were very eager to help out. The one on the right is Fusu, he's 18 years old and we talked about his wanting to come to Chicago to be an architect.
We witnessed some remarkable healings that day - Reverend Emmanuel Addo-Newton, a local pastor who joined us at the three distributions, told us of two men who came in on crutches, both walked away on their feet and left their crutches after praying with the Reverend. Another woman complaining of chonic chest pains was healed of them that day. She had been seeing a fetish priest about her pains for 20 years.
MORE GHANA PHOTOS - (go to page 2)