Melor Vinye Wo

Yesterday was an incredible day. It started out with a glass of wine and a shot of gin before 7am, which is something I don't recall doing even during those early college years. The whole thing is a bit surreal, but I am so excited, humbled and just plain giddy about the future that I can hardly put it all into words, even though, yes, the gin has worn off.

We traveled to Tafi Atome again on Sunday and spent Monday enjoying the area. We visited people in small roadside stores, met new friends from Germany and Holland and even played a little frisbee in the cool afternoon breeze. In the evening, we enjoyed a great meal of rice and bean stew prepared by the Queen Mother.

Tafi Atome is a scenic little village located in the jungle-covered mountains about 20 kilometers south of Hohoe, a city situated just on the other side of a mountaintop that divides Ghana from it's French-speaking neighbor, Togo. Tafi Atome is best known for its monkey sanctuary, which was established in the late 1980s with the help of a forward thinking volunteer and the Peace Corps. Hundreds of years ago, the Tafi people migrated to this area of jungle, where they found hundreds if not thousands of mona monkeys. The monkeys are incredibly intelligent and personable, and before long, they began to recognize the monkeys as messengers of a god that would protect them. This was a time when fetish gods and traditional religion ruled the land.

The monkey fetish became highly regarded by the people, and, they believed, it protected them from Ashanti raids that were rampant at that time due to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ashantis had befriended the colonials and captured many people from outside tribes to trade with the whites for spices, gold and other goods. The Tafi people escaped this fate. They are Ewe people (pronounced eh'-way) and would have, no doubt, been susceptible to the Ashantis and their weapons had they not hid deeply in the jungle. They followed birds, who were also messengers from the gods, to safe places and went about establishing peaceful lives, weaving kente, hunting and eventually farming.

In the mid-20th century, Christianity came to the jungle. Christianity in much of Africa is a strange mix of traditional and primarily Old Testament beliefs. The Christian God here is a god who punishes for wrongdoing and is always judging. In most places, the Western version of God as a loving father does not exist. To prove their loyalty to their newfound religion, people in the area began to kill the monkeys. By the early 1980s, there were only a handful left. It wasn't until volunteers arrived and encouraged the people to preserve the monkeys and the trees by setting up an ecotourism site that the monkeys began to repopulate. They now come into the village every day, coexisting with locals and making for an interesting morning stroll down the dirt roads.

Tafi Atome feels good. Our whole group agrees. The people are friendly. The children are respectful. There is a wonderful sense of community there that is rare to find in Ghana (or many other places, for that matter). Drumming can be heard on most any night, and their culture is very much alive amidst the blue jeans and bottles of Coca Cola.

Deb and I met with the seven chiefs of Tafi Atome and an ambassador of the high chief at 6am yesterday. We greeted them with a bottle of wine, as it is traditional to bring a bottle of alcohol (usually gin) to a chief when meeting them. A glass was passed around, and each of us drank some. The chiefs knew why we had come and we'd received a message from Emmanuel, our friend in the village, that they were happy about our plans.

I told them about our plans to build a home for child slaves who had been released from their masters. There are currently about 150 children (we still do not have an exact count) from one village area alone whose masters have said they will release them if there is a place found for them. We still need to research each child and make sure they are a) truly child slaves (sometimes parents just want someone else to send their child to school and care for them)and b) have nowhere else to go. We spoke to 32 children already, and were so touched by their stories (I wrote about it in a different note).

Our plan is to build the site in a safe place far away from Lake Volta and far away from their masters. We will start with 30 children and grow as funding and support allows. Like other organizations we've talked to, we will have house parents living with the children so that they have a sense of family for the first time. They will be educated and cared for, and most of all, loved.

Most of these children (if not all) have never had someone in their lives who loves them. Some of them hugged us so hard when they shared their stories that I could not let go, especially knowing they would return to their abusive masters and dangerous, hopeless lives that same day.

We shared our plans with the chiefs, who smiled and nodded in agreement while we talked. In the end, they granted us a beautiful plot of land located off of a small road in the jungle, just on the other side of the monkey sanctuary. The land had been used as a poultry farm years ago, and one two-room structure remains to this day. We marched in a procession to the land, and both Deb and I had tears in our eyes. It's perfect.

When I was a child growing up in Missouri, I used to wander through the woods for hours. I loved the crunch of leaves beneath my feet and forging paths through the wild undergrowth shaded by the treetops. Walking through our new land, I felt very much the same. Life has a way of going full-circle when you are on the right path. Everything up to this point has happened to prepare you for this moment.

We spent some time at the site, then emerged from the jungle back into the village center. As is tradition, we made another toast, this time with gin. We toasted to the ancestors and to our new relationships, and to the children we will be helping. Then, feeling a little dizzy, we went to breakfast.

While at breakfast, we decided to formally come up with a name for the home. We'd been thinking, but nothing seemed right. It was Joshua, our friend and a former child slave himself, who came up with the perfect name.

"Melor Vinye Wo," he said. "In Ewe, it means 'I love my children.'"

We all looked across the table at each other and smiled. It was right.

So "Melor Vinye Wo" it is. We can already imagine the slave children's faces when they hear they are going to Melor Vinye Wo. That day is coming, and although there is a tremendous amount of work and a few miracles that need to happen first, I am so humbled to have a chance to make a difference.

Amanda Christmann Larson is director of Compassionate Journeys. She lives in Anthem, Arizona and contributes to ImagesAZ regularly. For more information on this project, email amanda@compassionatejourneys.com.