Day 31 11.45pm

Exhaustion, illness and a general air of petulance chased me today. A month into my adventure and I am finding my escape from the hustle and bustle of the UK has turned into late nights, early mornings and stressful situations, all things I was trying to flee from for a couple of months. I am sure however all the effort I am putting into raising awareness and fund of both LOVE KIDS ORPAHANGE and LOVE KIDS ACADEMY will be well worth it.

I have received a few lovely emails from people of Sussex whom have been reading my blogs and have offered their assistance in numerous ways, including fundraising and contacts with the Ghanaian government as well as receiving our first academy sponsor which we are hugely grateful for. I have set up a very basic, temporary website for LOVE KIDS ACADEMY at https://sites.google.com/site/lovekidsacademy2011/ and we are desperately appealing for donations of any kind, from old boots/sports clothes to money and volunteers to help with administration and coming to Ghana to aid coaching and education of the team.

We went to Hand in Hand community yesterday to spend some time with the children over there, they are genuinely lovely affectionate children,  but I still struggle to come to terms with the fact that they will spend the rest of their lives there. They are literally banished from society over fears that they are ‘bad luck’. Whilst there I tried to speak to someone about purchasing some beads and elastic for the children at LOVE KIDS to make bracelets and necklaces; unfortunately the person that runs the ‘workshop’ for the older children at hand in hand was away so we are going to pop down tomorrow to try and buy some. The workshop makes lots of African jewellery as well as clothes in order to create self sufficient within hand in hand community and all the children all seem to love getting involved with making things.

 I genuinely feel like one of the family here at LOVE KIDS ORPHANAGE and am still overwhelmed with how Comfort and Kofi (the mother and father of the orphanage) have made such an effort to welcome me despite my initial struggles