In just over a week I will be leaving to write the next chapter of Hope for Ghana’s mission. Only six months ago a community of Chiefs, community elders and school administrators gathered together for a presentation to Hope for Ghana, making their plea for Hope for Ghana to help raise the educational standard in their rural Ghanaian village. And so I return to a land I have come to love, to build Hope for Ghana’s fifth library and computer lab at Ashiata Municipal Assembly Basic School, a kindergarten, primary and junior high school serving 800 students. I have never forgotten the last speaker at that presentation. She reflected on the day and said, “This is a life changing day. Today there is hope.”
Twenty years ago I had the privilege of meeting an inspiring woman in Calcutta who in only a couple of minutes touched me and changed my life forever. She prayed over me and invited me to one day visit her Children’s Home to offer medical care to the children she brings in off the streets. Though she died the next year I promised myself that I would return to Calcutta. Ten years ago I returned to Calcutta to fulfill my promise to her and medically care for those children in need. After all, you don’t want to disappoint Mother Teresa.
I remain humbled by my journey to Calcutta twenty years ago and today I am still coming to understand how those few moments with Mother Teresa touched my life forever. Mother Teresa’s words were quite simple, expressing the obligations we have to each other. Perhaps my favorite of her quotes is, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.” Though I always thought I would be in Rome when Mother Teresa would finally be canonized, on that very day next week I will be arriving in Ghana. I chose exactly the right place to be on that day.
The last days and weeks before leaving to Ghana are always filled with the anxious anticipation of starting a new project. A new library and computer lab will bring to a community opportunity they have dreamed of for a long time. I will agonize over what to fill my suitcases with, and wonder what I left behind. And while in Ghana, I will plan for Hope for Ghana’s future and work with local Chiefs, community leaders and schools to find and meet the most urgent needs of the community. I will be overwhelmed daily by the vast needs I’m faced with at every turn in this complicated land, and struggle with how to find answers to all of these problems.
But each day I will have reason to remember that “today there is hope.” I’m reminded every moment of every day in Ghana that Hope for Ghana is not merely about books or libraries or computers. It is well beyond anything I will put in my suitcases. It is indeed about hope. Perhaps just a drop in the ocean.
