After the past three weeks of grueling travel throughout northern, western and southern Ghana, and before Ash’s conference and exploratory trip to Liberia next week, we have been enjoying a week together at home in Kumasi.
It was one of our hopes for our time in Ghana is that we would spend more time together as a family (not an uncommon desire of American families!), and it has really been a good thing. The late youth ministry pioneer and guru, Mike Yacconelli, said that “efficiency is the grease of non-relationship”. It really is true how in our culture of convenience in the US, the casuality is often our relationships.
But in Ghana, we have found that the “lack of efficiency” has strengthened relationship.
As mentioned before, it takes a lot of time to just do the basics of living here: going to the market at least once a day to buy food and stuff for the house, managing the steady stream of neighborhood children that run through our home, the needed car maintenance, Katie’s reading lessons, trying to keep up with communication with everyone in the US, and planning and discerning YLI’s direction for 2009… whew. The basic tasks of living just take much more time here, and if you only look at the number of completed tasks each day…well, on the surface its hard to understand how we could all be so tired at the end of the day!
But what makes it enjoyable is the fact that there are few daily tasks that we can complete alone, so we need to work together. Instead of getting in the car and running errands for three hours by ourselves as often happens in Atlanta; Ash and Churcher will get in the car to get some parts to fix a ceiling light, and Carrie will walk with Abraham to buy some tomatoes and limes from the produce lady along the road, and Rose or Maame Jane will take Katie and John Mark for an afternoon walk.
Let the reminder of today’s anniversary help us remember what is really important.
Here are a few more photos of our family and extended YLI community…
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