Last night Alan and I went to a birthday party of one of his colleague's husband, Gregor. A little background...Gregor and Rebecca are from New Zealand and are only here for 6 months. They have also only just arrived in Ghana about a month ago. It turns out that Gregor and I are both going to be volunteering with the same NGO, Chance for Children (http://www.chance-for-children.org/en/index.html) which we found independently of each other. The NGO works with street children in Ghana who often live and work on the street and aims to help them either reunite with their family or find alternative living arrangements as well as receive schooling and vocational training. He has experience working for NGO's in London and will be assisting them in writing the processes and procedures into a handbook of sorts that might help other similar programs. We attended a meeting together with the founder and director, Daniella, on Friday and discussed what my work was with street children in New York and what my work with this NGO might consist of. I am really excited about what they are doing and they are quite well-established and have been existence for 12 years. I will be presenting my work in New York to the NGO's managers in about a week and then will begin collaborating with their outreach team and drop-in center staff to see if there are some new ways in which they can approach their work. So I assume that Gregor and I will also get a chance to work together over the next few months. His wife Rebecca is consulting in the marketing department at Guinness and is very nice and it turns out the apartment they are renting is down the road from where we live so we hope to get together with them sometimes.
Anyway, so it was Gregor's 40th birthday and Rebecca really wanted to make it special so she invited Guinness folks, some people from Chance for Children that Gregor has been working with, and the dancers/drummers that are friends of Alan's colleague, Joanna and her fiance, Bobo. They were asked to perform at the birthday too.
I offered to make the cake and spent a lot of time trying to perfect my cake so that perhaps I could wow the guests and get a little cake making business started with some of them in the future! In fact, Joanna, who is engaged to Bobo, talked about having me make their wedding cake for the wedding in June!
They have a great backyard garden at their apartment complex with lush foliage, orchids, and guinea fowls!
The dancing and drumming was even more amazing than their last performance at the Chinese restaurant.
This time, Bobo, who does the acrobatics did a whole routine with rings of fire and demonstrated his impressive fire eating. I've never seen fire eating to this extent before. Sometimes a bit of fire would get on the grass and Bobo would just pick it up and eat it instead of stomping it out! He then jumped through rings of fire and balanced the rings on his forehead. I was quite scared we'd turn the lush backyard into a fireball but it all turned out fine.
We dined on skewers and sausages that were grilled in the backyard and cooled off with ice cold keg beer from the brewery. And of course Alan got in on the action too again causing the crowd to break out in laughter!
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