From Jon

Hey everyone,


Second year for Alex, Cameron and I to be here and we are still impacted with a variety of feelings, starting with the hot humid air that blasts your face as you walk of the plane in Accra, Ghana. Whether you almost step on a chicken as it races across the road or you see a beaming bright smile from a 4 year old, sitting in abject poverty (don’t tell her, she does not know), there are innumerable “hits” that one takes as they stroll around the grounds at the Village of Hope, play basketball with the kids or look into the eyes of a fevered, 5 month old child who weighs 8 lbs!

Surprize: We did not have to work all day today, Monday, seeing medical patients as we usually do each day! So, we went to the “beach” down the road from the VOH. Really the beach is just a strip of brown sand littered with handmade wooden fishing boats and their nets, plus a little garbage and stray chickens/chicken manure! Yes, some of us went swimming in the ocean while the sane ones wondered if our wallets were in our shorts or not…I got in ½ way and cooled off, but Cameron got everything but her head and face wet. Walking to and from the beach we passed a grove of trees praying over multiple grave sites and sarcophagi, but a multi-level concrete shell of a church had been placed in the center of this sleeping ground of dead bones. Erie at best. Our feet innocently strode between poverty that makes the projects of Knoxville or any major city in the USA an upper-middle class, dusted with the soil that would be made into blocks and bricks to finish the church building shell or continued the block fence that seals of the beach resort ½ block before our descent through the “backyards” of the block houses of squalor. How can there be social justice, heavenly grace, and human love be mingled in this place? We cannot answer this question, but we are here to continue what was started here 6 years ago with FCC contributing time, $, and medical/optometric assistance to the VOH. Ours is to do what we can in a way that opens the door for Jesus to be seen. Therefore, I pray that God will turn us “inside out” as we continue this week to best reveal how God loves and can use even me. While giving of what we say is “ourselves”, we actually the ones taught, about love, contentment, and peace by those we came to serve. A spiritual irony whether in the VOH or on a dusty road to “the beach”.

Thank you for praying for us,

Jon Parham, DO