I’m home! I’m back to my home at Loyola as well as my home in America. I spent the summer abroad in Ghana, Africa. I was in Ghana for two and a half months, both volunteering and studying abroad. I studied through a program called USAC that Loyola partners with to help students go global.

I spent the first month of my time in Ghana volunteering at an orphanage that also functions as a primary school during the day. I helped take care of the children there in the mornings/evenings and during the day I had the opportunity to help teach. It was definitely one of the most amazing and rewarding experiences of my life. I volunteered through a program called IVHQ. They are a relatively cheap organization that has program sites all over the world.

After my time at the orphanage I moved to the capital city of Ghana which is Accra. I lived in a student hostel on the campus of the University of Ghana. I took 6 summer credits while there: African Literature, African Music and Dance, and a Service Learning. For my service learning I worked with a local NGO called S.I.S.S. or Self-help Initiative Support Services. S.I.S.S. works with people who live in the slums in Accra. It puts them through a program that not only teaches them about vital things such as work ethic and motivation but each participant learns a trade that they are able to make money off of after they graduate from the program. Some of these trades include things such as bead making, batik fabric making, and catering.

I also had the opportunity to travel almost every weekend. I spent some weekends on Ghana’s beautiful beaches, visited the Cape Coast Castle where slaves were held before being shipped to the Americas, saw elephants in the northern regions and monkeys in the eastern regions. I also was able to take a weekend off of traveling toward the end of my trip and make it back to the orphanage to visit the children that I had grown so close with.

I did so many amazing things in Ghana and had so many experiences that I could not go into detail about in this post. But don’t worry! I will definitely write another blog or two describing some of my experiences in more detail in the near future. In the meantime, welcome back to school and I hope you are adjusting better than I am! I still need to get my notebooks!