My Trip to Ghana - Day 4 (part 1)

We travelled to Hohoe. Here we support an integrated education project, but the timing of my visit coincided with schools being closed other than for those taking public exams. So we visited a local orphanage where two of the children are blind and are supported by Sightsavers.



This was perhaps the most emotionally wrenching experience of the trip. The orphanage, run by Pastor Issa Anaabi and his wife, wins medals for its choir and they sang a range of gospel songs for us, including a rendition of ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ (infinitely superior to the Boney M version (for those old enough to remember!)). We spoke to the two children, Grace (17) and Michael (10). Grace had a beautiful voice and was clearly very bright. In answer to my question ‘what do you want to do when you leave school’ she replied ‘I want to be a journalist’. I asked if she could sing ‘Amazing Grace’, given her name. Of course I had forgotten the words until she got to them ‘I was blind but now I see’. I don’t know how I kept back the tears.

Michael was a much less optimistic story. He was blinded by his mother taking traditional herbs during pregnancy in an effort to abort him. She abandoned him when he was born blind, leaving him with his father and a new step mother. They were so ashamed of him they shut him in a room for several years, until someone mentioned the orphanage, so they took him there and abandoned him. He was clearly an emotionally damaged child (unsurprisingly), although he could write his name in Braille and knew his alphabet. He would clearly be loved and protected at the orphanage, but I found it hard to be overly optimistic about his long term future.

Finally, we visited Ivy, 10 yrs old, at her home. She has progressively deteriorating sight, and is expected to become totally blind so is now moving to Braille. The project workers and her mother said that she had a low IQ, yet when they showed me her exercise books, her maths was actually very good (although her English was poor). I was concerned that this was an example of a child who can’t see and hence finds it difficult to learn at school; the result being that they’re ever afterwards wrongly labelled ‘unintelligent’.