FREEDOM STONES…A TRIP TO GHANA

Hello Friends of Freedom Stones,

As promised I wanted to run down what was accomplished on our trip which we came home from last month.  As mentioned in an earlier blog we had an incredible team with us, each member having diverse talents and skills.  Upon arriving at Village of Life, in addition to teaching the teenagers there who had been rescued some skills in jewelry making, each member of the team was utilized to put together an updated electronic file of each child in the home for the benefit of the Touch a Life Foundation.  Trish Trueblood, who is a nurse practitioner was able to do medical assessments of the children as well as treat some of the common ailments these children contracted when working on the lake such as skin problems and parasites.  It was at times very difficult for all of us to see first hand the scars on these children from beatings from their masters or witness even the emotional scars each one of them carried.  However, it was also encouraging to see them in a safe place and to see what a family they all had become to one another.

We were really pleasantly surprised with how much learning the teenagers had retained from the workshops I did last year in jewelry making.  It was relatively easy for them to pick up where they left off and their skills became even more finely tuned this time around.  Again, several of them were natural leaders, particularly some of the older kids like Jacob, Daniel, Happy and Janet.  As we continue establishing operations in Ghana we are starting some small scale operations at Village of Life with these teenagers.  We will soon be test-marketing pieces these teenagers are making.  The teenagers will receive a fair wage for each piece made during this testing period, which they will be saving up to jumpstart their vocational dreams in the future (whether that be used for their education, for training in an apprenticeship or to start their own small businesses).  We will continue testing out their skills for the next several months and will re-evaluate at the end of the summer whether this program will truly be beneficial to them and if we will continue with this group at the Village of Life.

After leaving Village of Life in Kete Krachi our team traveled back down to the capital city of Accra to interview additional possible partners for our future operations in Ghana.  We had a great meeting with Fred Asare at Village of Hope which is another partner of the Touch a Life Foundation.  Fred connected us with one of their programs that works with street kids in Accra.  In this program they have a fully functioning vocational training center for teenagers where they learn indigenous handicrafts as well as other holistic skills.  The staff of VOH were very interested in exploring the possibility of adding Freedom Stones jewelry to their mix able to really gel as a teamof training and product lines as it could be a great income for the teenagers while they train and it is a very easy skill for them to learn.

Much of our remaining time in Accra was spent meeting with other possible partners for future jewelry production and holistic training.  We were encouraged by the good work we see going on in Ghana and that there exists many excellent indigenous community based organizations that are interested in the Freedom Stones model.  We also spent time on the back end putting into motion other logistical and operational items that will ensure we are able to effectively export jewelry from Ghana to the US.

What was perhaps most important in this trip was the time FS staff got to spend together as a team.  We felt after this trip we really knew one another better and were .  It was at times a difficult trip in seeing the state of human trafficking in Ghana in addition to the heat and just general difficulty of being in a developing country, but it was an important trip and one in which we do feel we accomplished what we set out to do as well as things we hadn’t anticipated.

A slideshow introducing the problem of human trafficking and a strategy of prevention through Freedom Stones’ work around the world to provide livelihoods and holistic training to victims or those at risk. Slideshow created by Leah Knippel. Several pictures used by permission from World Concern. “Lost” music by Coldplay.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT FREEDOM STONES…CLICK HERE

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 1:13 pm and is filed under DEF Blog, Diamond Empowerment Fund, News and Upcoming Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.

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