Jim and the Medical Team in Ghana Update

This will be the last email from me from Ghana. I will not have access to email before we leave. Thank each of you for praying for all of us.

Today, we went in two directions. Linda and Rusty Simpson and Barbara Graves have been working with a village east of Accra named Mamakrome. They have gotten every child in the village sponsored by World Vision. They went there today to visit. They had raised money to drill a water well for the village. We all got back so late that we did not get to hear about what all transpired but will tomorrow.

The rest of us went west to Cape Coast. We visited one of the slave castles on a rocky beach bluff. It is a beautiful structure and very well maintained and preserved. However, as you hear of the horrific conditions and treatment, its beauty diminishes greatly. The men's dungeon held about one thousand men at a time in a room no bigger than most of our houses. The rocks on the floor are worn smooth from hundreds of thousands of footsteps. They were herded down a tunnel to THE GATE OF NO RETURN, loaded onto boats, and then placed onto ships. It gives an awareness of man's inhumanity to man that still exists today. There are over 26,000,000 slaves in the world today. There are probably 50,000 in the US. The slaves were herded by other Ghanaian tribes to he castles and shipped literally all over the world. All told, somewhere between 12,000,000 and 26,000,000 were shipped from twenty or so slave castles over 300 years. I write all of this to make us all aware of that inhumanity still exists in many countries all over the world.

Today, I asked Pastor Lewis why Ghana has had political stability since March 6, 1957. His answer was very simple, "by the grace of God." Pray that God will continue to grace Ghana. This is an election year for them. They have discovered 600,000,000 million barrels of oil in the Atlantic off their coast. Pray that a leader will be elected that will us the tremendous resource wisely and not just for personal gain. Also, pray that the US will turn back to God and not be like post-Christian Europe.

God bless each of you.

Jim Howard for Mission Builsa Team 2008