Back Home!

After 34 hours of travel, we arrived back in Chicago safe and healthy. We have now been home for more than a week and have finally recovered from jet lag.

One thing we didn’t expect to experience when we got home was reverse culture shock. Here are a few of the things that we noticed:

1. Grocery shopping – The variety of food products available in grocery stores in the US is amazing. You can choose from six types of apples, a dozen brands of toilet paper, an entire aisle of cereal, and much, much more!

2. Water – It is great to turn on the faucet and not worry about the quality of the water. We didn’t have problems with access to water while we were in Ghana, but we saw a lot of people drawing water from community wells and from rivers. The availability of clean water is a challenge throughout Africa and much of the developing world. There is a great Christian organization focused on training, equipping and consulting nationals to develop sustainable, participatory water systems. If you’re interested, we’d encourage you to check out Living Water International at http://www.water.cc.

3. Restaurants – In Chicago we can find restaurants with food from almost any country in the world. The US is such a diverse country and we are blessed with the ability to enjoy food from other cultures. This is truly amazing! (However, the first thing we wanted to eat when we got home was a cheeseburger.)

4. Church – We were excited to return to our church, the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, but the one-hour service seems so short! We really got used to and enjoyed the 3-4 hour services in Ghana, especially the fun worship bands.

Most of all, we miss the good friends we made during our trip to Ghana. Their kindness, hospitality and faith have inspired us to become better people. We are excited to stay in touch and continue to help them however we can. We have challenged ourselves to never forget the invaluable lessons this experience taught us and we dedicate ourselves to a life of mission in the U.S. and around the world.

Since returning we have been catching up with friends and family. It has been wonderful seeing our friends in Chicago and telling them about our experience in Ghana. They have been eager to hear about our adventures and see our photos. Here are links to our online photo albums:

Accra: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031921&id=1161645550&l=af0bc8a3b3
Cape Coast: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2032684&id=1161645550&l=a0d59526b5

We are now in the process of moving closer to downtown. We had to find a new place when we returned, and we prayed that God would give us a sign for the place where we are meant to live. We saw almost 20 places in three days, and then went to a duplex in Wicker Park. The place was perfect! As we were leaving, we noticed a sign on the front fence that said “Evans Properties”. We immediately started laughing and said “looks like God literally gave us a sign”. We are moving on Sept. 3 before we go back to work on Sept. 8.

We will post blogs occasionally as we continue our work with GHAFES and begin speaking with graduate-level student groups. Please post your comments – we love hearing from you!

Leaving Ghana

It is hard to believe that tomorrow is the last day of our mission trip in Ghana! The three weeks here have gone quickly.

We had our last meeting with GHAFES today, and walked them through steps for strategic planning. At the end of the meeting they said that they are feeling more confident about being able to work through the process, and this made us really happy. We have agreed to play an advisory role through the remainder of the year to help them complete their strategic plan. We’ll maintain communication with them via email and Skype as needed. Tomorrow we are meeting with Femi Adeleye, the Associate General Secretary of IFES, to present the results of our work. We prepared recommendations on how IFES can roll out similar training modules in communications, fundraising, and strategic planning to other national movements around the world. We’ll also share our recommendations on building an internal IFES website for national movements to share best practices, and a couple other projects.

Our experience in Ghana has been amazing! A few people have asked us whether we have been impacted more or made more of an impact by this trip. While we pray that we have made a lasting impact through our work with GHAFES, this experience has enabled us to learn about a new culture, meet new friends, strengthen our marriage, reflect and deepen our faith, and use our skills to help a non-profit Christian organization. There is no doubt that this trip has changed us forever!

We will always remember the outstanding hospitality that everyone here has shown us. We really hope that they will visit us so we can repay the favor one day.

While praying the other day, God put “7-7-7” in Loralynne’s mind. She looked in the Bible for the 7th book, chapter and verse, and found the following:

“I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.” (1 Corinthians 7:7)

We feel that this verse has helped solidify the purpose of our trip. While God called us to serve

in Africa, we realize that it is not for everyone. However, God gives everyone their own gifts and each person has to decipher these gifts and how to use them. As we return to Chicago, we will continue praying that God will guide and show us how to continue our mission work.

We are eager to return to Chicago and tell our friends, family, church members, and Kellogg colleagues about this experience. We will continue updating the blog as we give these presentations and make decisions about future mission projects.

Thank you all for your support and words of encouragement throughout this process. Please pray that the GHAFES team is successful with their strategic planning, that we have safe travels back home, and that God guides us with ongoing mission work.

Culture Shock

Like all international travel, there is bound to be some culture shock. To prepare for our trip we read several books and spoke with other people that had traveled to Ghana, but we have still encountered several cultural shocks that we think you will find to be humorous.

• Traffic – the traffic in Accra is unlike anything we have ever seen before. The average commute to work is 2 hours! Naturally, people try to beat the traffic, so people off-road on the shoulders of the road. It is really funny to see buses of people bouncing down the side of the road.
  
  
• Street vendors – Since people are stuck in traffic for so long, vendors sell various goods to people in their cars. You can buy apples, pillows, toothbrushes, toilet paper, and even puppies. You can get a lot of your weekly shopping done while in traffic!
  
  




• Store names – The Christian faith is very strong in Ghana and they use different Biblical sayings to name their stores and also on the back of their cars. Some of the names are hilarious, such as “Try Jesus Passport Photos” (there was a sign with a picture of Jesus in a passport) and “Lord, Remember Me When I am Dead Beauty Salon”.
  
  
• Eating with our hands - The main local dish is Fufu, a corn and casava paste, in a soup with meat (chicken, goat, fish). Traditionally, you eat it with your right hand, which takes practice - especially when the soup is really hot! We are still amateurs at this, but we are learning.
  
  


• Street signs – Only the main streets have names, but none of the streets have signs and roadmaps don’t exist. So when people give directions they use different markers, but if you are not from Accra then it is really hard to understand what they are talking about. One of our hosts received directions that were “Go to Tema, then go over 4 humps, take a right, a left and a left.” Invariably, we have to ask people on the street for directions, and it can take a while time to find someone’s house. Also, it is possible for roads to change overnight if someone decides to build a house in the middle of the road – yes, it happens!
  
  
• Things not working – We have learned that just because something exists doesn’t mean it works. You have to ask if it works. For instance, if a hotel says that it has AC, you should ask if the AC works. They may very well have an AC, but not necessarily a working one.
  
  
• Wrong number – People in Ghana are very friendly! There have been a few cases in which our host has received a wrong number phone call, but rather than hanging up the person on the line will ask our host how he is doing and engage in conversation.
  
  
• Animals everywhere - It is really common for people to let their goats, chickens and cows to graze in public space. We asked one of our hosts how people keep track of their animals and know which ones belong to them. He told us that some time people will mark the animals, but mostly people just know their animals.
  

While some cultural differences can be frustrating, they are mostly just funny. We have learned to roll with things and follow the lead of our host. When in Rome…

Making an Impact!

Thanks for your thoughtful comments! We are encouraged by your thoughts, questions and prayers. This has been an incredible experience for us and it means a lot to be able to share it with you.

To answer Pat’s question, we have been inspired by the joyful personalities, incredible hospitality, and dedication of the GHAFES team. They work incredibly hard and we are amazed at the impact they can make with very modest resources. It is clear that they are fueled by a genuine, all-encompassing love of God and desire to make the world a better place.

Our sessions with GHAFES staff on Friday proved very successful. We built on Thursday’s sessions on strategic positioning with discussions on communications, fundraising, and alumni tracking principles and tactics. For communications, Sam outlined several basic principles, including:

• Rule of Three - you should give three information “gifts” before asking for anything
  
• 360-Degree Touch - the practice of examining how your target “consumes” information and then identifying the most effective communication methods to use with your target
  
• Message Overload - the need to streamline our message content and volume, and to consider “what’s in it for them”.

We split the staff into three groups to identify how these principles apply to students, younger alumni and older alumni. They really enjoyed mapping the communications methods, and it was a good learning experience for us because we learned that university students in Ghana don’t use email like students in the US. Rather, they rely on text messages and poster boards around campus.

Then Loralynne led an interactive session on fundraising to identify how GHAFES can move from “fundraising” – asking for money – to “friend-raising” – developing relationships, cultivating interest and inspiring trust as a more organic process to grow support. She led the group through some different approaches to fundraising, and they staff then broke into three groups to brainstorm fundraising strategies specific to the three stakeholder groups. Throughout the session we tried to emphasis that it is important to remember that people contribute in different manners – money, time, prayers, in kind goods, and to ask people for the type of giving that is going to work for them. It is also crucial to recognize people for their contributions, especially the people that have been supporting GHAFES for decades.


The last hour on Friday was an open discussion on how GHAFES is collecting and updating alumni contact information. We first mapped the current process flow and identified key problem areas. Then, we split into three groups, and asked each group to identify three major challenges and two potential solutions for each challenge. As we reconvened it was exciting to see agreement on the major challenges as well as resolution on solutions to those challenges. We proved them with the idea to develop an Alumni-in-Training program to meet with the final year students at each campus, directly gather their contact information, give them information on benefits of being GHAFES alumni, and articulate the importance of alumni to GHAFES. They seemed interested in this idea!

We concluded our sessions with GHAFES by passing out a one-page strategic communications plan template, and helping them fill-in the information based on the outputs from all our sessions. It was powerful to see the lights go on in their eyes as they understood how it all comes together!

On Saturday we attended an all-day strategic planning offsite with senior GHAFES leaders and the Chairman of the GHAFES Board of Trustees. The chairman, a very successful entrepreneur, is an energetic visionary and was thrilled with the output of our sessions this week. We and the GHAFES leaders firmly believe that God has called us here and aligned us all to accomplish something together. Perhaps the most powerful moment was when the Chairman asked how they would communicate the value GHAFES delivers. The General Secretary volunteered that GHAFES is about developing the next generation of Christian leaders with integrity, who will change Ghana and the world. Our hearts burst to hear him say this because it was a direct result of our sessions! Wow! That got everyone excited and kicked off a discussion about further strategic planning that lasted late into the night.

So our work is far from done! We agreed to advise GHAFES leaders as they develop the organization’s first comprehensive strategic plan. And we are developing recommendations to present to the Associate General Secretary of IFES next week to roll out a similar process in the other 153 IFES national movements around the world. We are not sure how far God wants us to take this, but are prayerful to discern His will for us.

This has been such an amazing experience! It is incredibly rewarding to use skills and techniques we learned in the classroom and the workplace to help a non-profit organization we believe in, and we have developed an even deeper appreciation for GHAFES’ mission. Developing Christian leaders with integrity who will be change agents in Ghana and Africa to overcome corruption and encourage progress is a powerful proposition. GHAFES alumni are some of the most successful leaders in Ghana, including businesspeople, government officials and pastors.

We strongly believe that if we can help GHAFES and other IFES national movements instill Christian values and leadership skills in students, we can be part of something much bigger than ourselves - we can truly help change the world. The Chairman said something that really hit us and we encourage you to think about this: God blesses us with wealth and opportunities not to improve our standard of living, but to improve our standard of giving. And it is through our faith in God that we are able to succeed.

How are you using the many blessings that God has given you – money, education, talents, connections, etc – and your faith to make a difference and give to others?

Us with the GHAFES team

Day One of GHAFES Sessions

After several days of preparation, today we were excited to have our first consulting sessions with the Ghana Fellowship of Evangelical Students (GHAFES) organization. Rev. Emmanuel Alijah, General Secretary for GHAFES, picked us up this morning and drove us to the GHAFES office in downtown Accra. When we arrived at the office, all of the staff were having a morning devotional session, so we joined them for the last few minutes. There is something really comforting about having daily prayer and Bible Study before work each day!

Rev. Alijah asked us to advise GHAFES staff on communications, fundraising and tracking alumni. The sessions we facilitated today focused on helping GHAFES staff analyze their stakeholder groups and develop positioning statements for each group. As a group we brainstormed the stakeholder groups’ needs by adopting their perspectives, rather than the perspective of GHAFES staff. We then discussed how GHAFES might expand its ministry to meet some relatively unmet needs of their key stakeholders. It was the first time the majority of participants had done this type of analysis, so it was a new experience for them. The sessions were very interactive and we shared a lot of new thoughts and ideas. By the end of the day, we had drafts of positioning statements for three key stakeholder groups: students, young alumni (under 40), and older alumni (40+).

It was a highly successful day and we are eager to build on these stakeholder positioning statements tomorrow when we talk about strategies for communications, fundraising, and tracking of alumni.

Rev. Alijah (end of table) addressing the staff

Sam facilitating a session

Trip to Cape Coast

First, thank you to everyone that sent us notes of concern. We are okay! We apologize for not updating the blog for the past seven days. We have been in Cape Coast without Internet access. Here is an update on our recent activities.

On Friday we traveled to Cape Coast with Femi, Dave and Isaac. Femi was very kind to take us on the 3-hours journey! Isaac, Training Secretary for the Ghana Fellowship of Evangelical Students (GHAFES), graduated from the University of Ghana, Cape Coast (UCC) and was a wonderful guide for the weekend! Isaac has been very involved in GHAFES for the past six years, so we were able to learn a lot more about the organization which will inform our projects.

On our way to Cape Coast the five of us stopped at Kakum National Park, where we hiked the canopy walk and saw some monkeys. Despite his acrophobia, Sam was able to handle the 40 meter high rope bridges without incident! Once we arrived in Cape Coast we met with a group of GHAFES alumni at the home of a retired UCC professor and long-time time friend of Dave. These alumni have one of the few active groups in Ghana, so this was a terrific opportunity to pick their brains about what they feel are some secrets to success and best practices that could be replicated across other campus groups. Not to mention that Auntie Agnes prepared a delicious dinner!

(Monkey in Kakum National Park)

(Sam on canopy walk)

On Friday evening we bid adieu to our mission advisor, Dave Ivaska. He had to return to the US on Saturday to attend an InterVarsity conference. We are so grateful to Dave for all his work in helping lay the foundation for this trip and for accompanying us for the first week! We appreciate Dave making introductions for us and preparing our daily devotional, which we continue to follow each morning. And, as anyone who knows Dave will tell you, he’s quite a joker! We’ll miss his [sometimes corny] jokes. And yes, Dave, we’re compiling a quote board!

Saturday was amazing! Isaac took us to see the Elmina and Cape Coast slave castles. (President Obama visited the Cape Coast castle during his visit.) The Elmina castle is the oldest European building in Africa (built in 1482) and the largest of the slave castles in Ghana. Visiting the castles was difficult, but an important cultural experience. We were appalled to learn that slavery was practiced for more than 400 years and that an estimated 25 million Africans were captured into slavery. Of those 25 million, half died between marching from their village to the slave castles to then getting on the slave boats en route to the US, Brazil, the Caribbean or Europe. Walking through the “Door of No Return” was very powerful.

(At the Cape Coast Castle)

("Door of No Return" at the Elmina Castle)

Another thing that shocked us was that the Europeans built churches on top of slave dungeons in both castles. In fact, the Cape Coast castle has a trap door outside the church to view the slave dungeons. How can someone feel justified in worshiping God and then turn around and commit such crimes against humanity? It was really a difficult pill to swallow.

Saturday was also Sam’s BIG 3-0 birthday!! We concluded the day with a nice, quiet dinner overlooking the Atlantic coast. (It’s strange to view the Atlantic and know you’re facing South, not East or West!)

On Sunday we attended worship services at the University Interdenominational Church with Isaac on the UCC campus. What an experience! The service lasted from 8:00 am to noon, during which time we had worship and communion, saw the presentation of a couple that got married the day before, transitioned student leadership of the campus ministry program, and did fundraising for a new Christian magazine. Wow! It was definitely a powerful, joyful experience and a real blessing. One thing that we realized is that their weekly church service is more like a congregational meeting. It includes the traditional worship aspects, but also includes a lot of church business. After the service we met with the pastor, who was interested in learning more about why we’re here. (Interestingly, our Ghanaian friends are just as intrigued by our calling to come to Africa as our American friends!)

(Wedding Party)

Yesterday we traveled back to Accra by bus with Isaac. We were a little nervous about traveling by bus because the schedule was not fixed and traffic can be really crazy, but thankfully it went very smoothly. Once we returned to Accra, we met with Reverend Emmanuel Alijiah in his office to share our experiences over the weekend and discuss our progress on our projects for GHAFES. He had some good feedback and builds on our project, which we’re excited to unveil this week!

Last night Isaac took us to meet with a fellowship of pre-med students at the University of Ghana. They are in the midst of final exams and were holding a prayer meeting. It was definitely a new experience, with about 30 students praying out loud at once in several different languages. Hearing so many simultaneous prayers really drives home God’s omnipresence. The student leaders asked us to give brief testimonials about why we’re here. Seeing their reactions reminds us that just the fact that we came all this way to be with them is powerful to them. I hope our presence and appreciation for their culture encourages them. They’ve encouraged us!

We spent today working on our projects and will take tomorrow to put the finishing touches on our lesson plan for Thursday and Friday. This Thursday and Friday we are facilitating five 90-minute interactive sessions with 12 GHAFES staff members. Within the over-arching goal of “Building Sustainable Support,” GHAFES’ General Secretary asked us to help them develop a communications plan and methods to better track alumni. So we are building five sessions: three sessions around segmentation (targeting and positioning GHAFES for students, recent alumni and older alumni), a session on principles of effective communication, a session on fundraising principles, and a session on tracking alumni. Through these exercises, we hope to align GHAFES staff around an annual communications plan with specific tactics to follow-up on.

This is a pilot project. If it is successful, there is a possibility that we could create a more extensive training guide for IFES to conduct with other national movements. (And perhaps we could even be involved on an annual basis.) Femi and the GHAFES staff seemed to be really excited about this so far, so we pray that the sessions are a hit!

Getting Down to Work and Touring Accra

Yesterday was our first day meeting with Femi Adeleye, IFES General Secretary for Partnership and Collaboration and our host in Ghana. His office is conveniently located in the guest house where we are staying, so it was very easy to wake up, eat breakfast, and meet in his office. (Considering how insane Accra traffic is, this proximity is a huge blessing.)
The focus of our meeting was to discuss Femi’s position, which is new to IFES, and how we can be of the greatest assistance during the next three weeks. Through our conversation with him, we honed in on two key projects:

1. Provide recommendations on best practices in building sustainable support through examining other organizations as well as national movements within IFES.
   




2. 
   
   Provide recommendations on how IFES can develop an internal web page for sharing best-practices, templates, and other documents to support external outreach and partnership-building.

It was a highly productive meeting and we are excited to have set expectations and deliverables!

In addition, we are going to work with Affy, Femi’s wife, on a project she is doing with HIV/AIDS education in Ghana. We had lunch with Affy and Bernice, the HIV/AIDS educator with GHAFES (Ghana Fellowship of Evangelical Students) and learned that it is difficult to do HIV/AIDS education in Ghana because the government refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem. Of the African countries, Ghana has one of the lowest percentages of people with HIV/AIDS, but in order to maintain this track, more education needs to be done.

We had dinner in the home of T.B. Dankwa, one of the first IFES Regional Directors in Africa, and met the current General Secretary for GHAFES. It was a pleasant evening with a traditional Ghanaian dinner of jollof rice, baked chicken, beef in a spicy tomato sauce, fried plantains, and salad (which we couldn’t eat since it consisted of uncooked vegetables . . . how we long for salad!) We talked about the challenges and opportunities that GHAFES and IFES have faced during the years as well as the changes they are currently experiencing. One key difficulty is that when GHAFES first started at the University of Ghana there were only a handful of Christian organizations on campus and 10-20K students. Now there are 40 Christian organizations and 40,000 students. There is a lot of competition for the involvement and financial commitment of students. GHAFES has seen a plateau in the number of student members and local contributors – despite the growth in the student population. This is something they are trying to figure out.

(Back: T.B., Femi, Sam, Emmanuel, and Virginia (T.B.'s wife)

Front: Kemi, Affy, Dave, Loralynne)

Today we met with the nine GHAFES team members located in Accra. We started with a nice devotional service led by Dave Ivaska, our mission mentor and member of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff in Chicago (He has been instrumental in helping plan our trip and came to Ghana with us for the first week to make introductions). They asked us to share our testimonial about our faith and what we are planning to do in Ghana. It was really moving to tell them about our experiences and see how interested they are in why we have decided to make this trip to Ghana.

After the devotional, Emmanuel, the GHAFES General Secretary, gave us a tour around Accra. Our first stop was a fabric/clothing store so we could get Ghanaian attire. Loralynne found a traditional dress in an orange material, Sam found a shirt with the map of Ghana and the words “Yes We Can”, and we bought black/white materials to have a dress and shirt made so we can attend a funeral. (Funerals are huge public celebrations/all day parties in Ghana and we would like to attend one before we leave to have this cultural experience.) We then went shopping along the street and were quickly surrounded by persistent salesmen selling everything from African masks to limes. We ultimately had to buy a bracelet with the Ghana flag and Sam’s name because the salesman wouldn’t let us close the door to the car without buying it.

We ate lunch at a traditional Ghana restaurant. Sam had fufu (paste made from ground plantain and cassava) with chicken in a peanut soup, and Loralynne had waayke (black bean and rice mixture) with chicken. It was really good!

We then experienced the traffic of downtown Accra. Thankfully, Emmanuel was driving, because it took serious guts to cut into traffic and at times drive on the shoulder of the roads in order to get around the city. We will never complain about Chicago streets and traffic again! Most of the roads aren’t wide enough for two cars to pass, so drivers essentially play “chicken” all the time. There are very few traffic lights, so you have to yield to the bigger vehicle. Oh, and we were stopped by a herd of cattle casually crossing the road! (Not renting a car = good idea.)

We drove by the Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, visited Independence Square where all of the big national events are held, saw the red sand beach, and toured the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to independence from England in 1957 and was elected the first president of the country. He was ultimately overthrown by the military and kicked out of the country, but then brought back posthumously to be buried in his home country. The memorial (see picture below) is designed to look like a tree trunk that was cut off (like his presidency and dream for a united Africa). The statue shows Nkrumah pointing forward to encourage progress. The statues in the fountain are of trumpeters used by tribes to announce when a great leader is coming as well as his death, and they are kneeling to show respect.

Independence Square

Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park

Trumpeters

In honor of Obama's visit to Accra, there are billboards everywhere with pictures of President Obamas and President John Atta Mills, President of Ghana, and the word "Akwaaba" which means "Welcome" in Twi. There are more pictures of Obama in Accra than we saw in Chicago during his Presidential campaign!

It was a very insightful day and we greatly appreciate that Emmanuel took the time to show us around Accra and share his culture with us!

**One special note: if you’re following this, we’d love to hear your thoughts and questions. Please feel free to type a comment on the blog. We hope this can become more of a dialog than a monologue!