As I write this, we are on the bus, bouncing and weaving our way around huge potholes, sometimes slowing to a crawl to navigate them. We pass children, some in school uniforms, and some wearing raggedy cloths, waving as we go by. We stop along the road in a small village to buy some yams from a group of women carrying them in large tubs on their heads. We've been driving for almost 2 hours, and soon we will arrive at the ferry crossing at Dambai, where the bus will drive onto the ferry for the trip across Lake Volta, Then it will be roughly another 7 or 8 hours ride back to CORM. It's been a dizzying few days for me. We left CORM at midnight Friday and drove all night. It's now Monday morning, and I think I've had maybe 8 hours of decent sleep in the last 3 days. On Saturday,we crossed the lake in a small boat to reach the tiny fishing village of Adakope, spent a couple hours there, and returned in the dark, in the middle of thunder and lightning.
And we returned without the two boys we had come for.
To be honest, I'm still trying to make sense of the whole trip. It's been quite an experience. Since I'm writing this to try to give an account of our trip to you, but yet keep it short enough to be a blog and not a book, I'll boil it down to one thought I've had this morning.
The heart of man is deceitful and evil.
Yeah, I know... that is no secret. We see it in every corner of the world, in so many different ways.
Let me back up for a minute and explain what happened(I think) this weekend. We came to the tiny village in a remote part of the lake to rescue 2 young boys who had been working as slaves for a fisherman named Delali. The groundwork for this rescue had started nearly three years ago. Several visits to the lake to talk with people in the village had yielded the information. There were already kids living with us at CORM that had come from this same village, and Delali had a reputation as a very hard, devious man. Two and a half years ago, when Dawn and the team from our house church had come to Ghana, they made the trip to this same village, and saw these two boys. They were not in good physical shape then, and had obviously been working on the lake then. The story was that they belonged to Delali as repayment for the mother's funeral that he had payed for. Their parents were both supposed to be dead, and the boys were to work off the debt. After several trips to discuss the issue with Delali, and then getting one of his own family members involved to put pressure on him to release the boys, our trip to make the rescue was set up. Delali, apparently out of fear of being arrested, agreed to a meeting and said he would give up the boys.
Fast forward to this weekend. When we arrived at Delali's house, it only took a couple minutes to realize that things were not going to go as expected. I'm not going to take time here to lay out all the details, especially since I don't think I understand them all anyway, so here is a short version of what happened. After he tried to give us three other kids (who were his sister's children!), he then said the boys were not there. He tried to deny that they even had been there, until we showed him pictures of the boys from one of the previous visits. After much more discussion and a couple tense moments, we learned that one of the boys was at another house nearby.
The bottom line is this: The boys were actually his brother's children. Why this didn't become known from previous trips, I don't know, but Delali had woven a web of lies that stretched even to some of his relatives that had been contacted for information. He and his brother had been fighting(for a long time apparently), and he was trying to give away his own nephews. Again, there are so many raveled ends to this tangled mess, I don't have it all straight. The sad truth is that there is more going on here than just a fisherman trying to make a living. What we finally realized is that there had been other NGO's (Non-Government Organizations )there as well, and we were now learning the painful truth behind what happens when some of these "well meaning" organizations try to rescue kids by paying for them. Delali has found that he can make money by selling the kids to these NGO's, and he thought we would pay for these boys as well. He had told the boys that he had already sold them to us and that we were coming to take them. They were obviously terrified. His brother(the boys' own father!) thought we were going to take them, he had been told that we already "owned" them. What a sad mess. These boys were being used by a man with an evil heart for his own financial gain, and as weapons in a family feud. I can't tell you how disgusted I was at how easily he offered up other children in their place.
Again there are so many more details to this story, but in the end, we are returning home without them. We can't take kids away from their families. Even though the boys may be living in a tough situation, their father is caring for them. Even in an extremely poor part of the world where there is little money, the love of money corrupts the heart.
So as I try to find a comfortable position to sit in for the rest of the ride home, I'm kind of in a mental and emotional limbo. Still trying to make sense. Bouncing around between disappointment, sadness and anger. Wondering what God is doing. Thankful that we learned the truth about this situation before we had actually taken kids away from their parents.
It's a messy world... Lord may your Kingdom come.
I'll have a few more posts about this in the next week or so.
In His Strength,
Cayle
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