When the five buses roll into the Ghanaian town of Yamoransa, hundreds of children are waiting on the red dirt plaza in front of a low-slung concrete-block school building. The children bob and shout as 160 Yale volunteers climb off the buses and cautiously skirt the steep open sewer that separates the highway from the plaza. For five days in late July and early August, in this impoverished town on Africa’s Atlantic coast, this scene will repeat itself every morning: the volunteers plowing through the throng, the Ghanaian children reaching out for handshakes, saluting the visitors with high fives, and sometimes crowding around two ten-year-old volunteers to touch their long hair. (The Ghanaian schoolchildren have buzz cuts, boys and girls alike.)* * *
After a month back home in California, Darcy Troy Pollack ’87 remembers the trip as exhausting. “It was not a vacation. It was a life experience,” says Troy Pollack, a member of the AYA board of governors. “In the middle of the trip, if you’d asked me, would I go back, I’d say no way.” Now, she says, she’s already planning what kind of protein bars to pack for next summer.
Yale Alumni Magazine: Far From Home, Briefly (Nov/Dec 2012)
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