Only 45 more days until Journey for Change!

Journey for Change, a Future of Africa (FOA) initiative, is a service-learning trip that allows participants to experience first hand the day to day life, issues, and challenges faced in an African country, while striving to create and improve opportunities (and opportunities for empowerment) for local youth and children. The 2011 Journey for Change team will be traveling to Ghana, located on the West Coast of Africa, for an 8 week long service based trip, departing June 20th.

The first two weeks of the JFC experience will be spent in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, where we will be meeting our “FOA Buddies,”  Ghanaian university students who are also dedicated to Future of Africa initiatives. During these two weeks, we will be collaborating on an Expose Your Toes campaign to raise awareness about the number of underprivileged and barefooted children in Ghana, symbolic of the barriers to education created by poverty. We will also be organizing a concert with local celebrities, benefits from which will be donated, in part, to providing shoes and slippers to those who have none. In order to make a more sustainable contribution, however, a large part of the proceeds will be directed toward assisting in easing tuition payments for disadvantaged children in order to make an investment in the education of African youth (aka…the Future of Africa).

The JFC team will then move from urban to rural, spending the next four weeks in Lolito, in Ghana’s Volta Region. Here we will be working with Smile Foundation– a school, a boarding school for some (students may be, but are not necessarily, orphans), as well as a general community space– where we will assist with a variety of renovations and repairs, the specifics of which will only fully come to fruition upon our arrival. Working in conjunction with Smile Foundation and Lolito residents, tasks may include  repairing dormitories, latrines, and classroom areas, painting, and making other improvements to amenities and fixtures. The time spent in Lolito will also be an excellent opportunity for the JFC participants to engage in the local rural culture and learn about the community on a first hand basis.

We will conclude the service portion of our trip in Lolito, and the final two weeks of JFC will be focused on “winding down” and reflecting on our experiences. Although reflection will take place regularly throughout the duration of the trip, these final two weeks not only provide an opportunity for travel and relaxation, but more importantly, allow some time for us to think about what we have done to affect change, how we have been impacted, and how we will translate the learnings of the trip back to our own lives and communicate the experience to others as a means of education and inspiration to act.

With only 45 days remaining until the commencement of this once-in-a-lifetime experience, I don’t even know how to feel or what emotion to express. Uncertainty? Excitement? Anxiety? Unpreparedness?

I think the answer is all of the above, and I’ m okay with that.

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