Guest Post About YASC Trip to Ghana

Here is a guest post from Darcy Troy Pollock about her trip with the Yale Alumni Service Corps to Ghana this summer:

There is simply nothing that can compete with the feeling you get watching your teenage daughter inspire a class of literally dozens of Ghanaian children.  If you ever thought your children weren’t ready for a service trip, think again.  As Tim can attest, your kids will rise to the occasion…and knock your socks off.

Sophie and I were both pretty nervous about joining the Yale Alumni Service Corps on its trip to Ghana. YASC volunteers had the choice of joining the Education, Health Care, Construction, Business or College Mentoring teams.  Sophie chose Education.  We expected that she and her team would have classes of say 30 or so 7-9 year olds.  But Africa being Africa, they ended up with as many as 80 children, ranging in age from 7 to 12.  It was NUTS!  But, as the photo below attests, she did not shy from the challenge…

While Sophie was wrangling kids, I was coordinating site visits and advocacy sessions with the ONE Organization.  Founded by Bono and Yale alum Bobby Shriver, ONE is dedicated to advocating on behalf of the world’s poorest people.  Their slogan is “We don’t want your money -- we want your voice.”  ONE sent four team members on the trip and organized four site visits for us so that we could see the impact U.S.-funded programs are having on the ground.  It was pretty stunning to see the difference in the quality of life between villages where Feed the Future and USAID are funding programs that are teaching skills and providing tools for long-term sustainability, and Yamoransa, the village our YASC team was in,where no such help exists (well, at least until we arrived!).  In one cocoa farming village we visited, I asked one of the farmers how these programs had changed his life.  He patted his pocket and said, “I have enough in here to send my children to school.”  Pretty darn cool.  We will be continuing our partnership with ONE now that we are home, co-hosting events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC and New Haven.  I hope many of you will get a chance to join us for at least one of those! 

And what else did we accomplish?  Well, we poured the foundation for a new IT building, treated dozens (maybe hundreds) of patients in the medical clinic, inspired young women to apply to college and counseled local entrepreneurs on how to better organize, market and operate their businesses.  And almost as importantly, we became a team.  We made new friends (the teen posse cried when they had to part); we laughed and cried and ate cabbage & rice and killed ants and took photos and basically had a crazy great time. 

So maybe it wasn’t a fancy vacation.  But it was a wild ride, and a life experience neither Sophie nor I will ever forget!