Wanted: 597 Ghanian Cedis ($409)

Originally Posted on August 31, 2009:

Quite some time ago, I started corresponding electronically with a young man in Tamale, Ghana, who wanted to expand his horizons and get to know people from around the world. This was possible via a computer center that the local embassy provides.

A high school graduate with decent grades, Amin desperately wanted to attend university. However, financially, this was out of the question for his family. A less attractive but still reasonable option was the Tamale Polytechnic school. Several months after we’d started communicating, he asked if I could help pay the tuition for the polytechnic, which costs about $650 for the three-year program. Tuition has to be paid up front.

Amin Issah, Ghana
Amin Issah, Ghana

There are a couple of things to bear in mind here: Americans have the reputation for being extremely wealthy the world over. In Mexico, for example, we are often stereotyped as having montañas de oro (mountains of gold). The other thing to remember is that Ghana is well known as one of the centers of internet fraud, especially so called “friendship” scams. I did a lot of investigation to see if everything was on the up-and-up, which is difficult in a developing country. I quickly came to learn how much I depend on the Internet for verifying just about everything, and this was impossible for much of Ghana’s infrastructure. I even called to see if I could pay the school directly, and it cannot be done.

But, other than due diligence, I had no reason to distrust Amin, and his work for the past six months has completely borne out my trust. I also felt this would be a good way to show the love of Christ in an unexpected and unanticipated way.sowever, I simply couldn’t afford to help him out completely. But he did have an uncle who was willing to foot half the bill, and I had some extra cash I could put into the second half. Amin has completed one semester at T’Poly, as it’s sometimes called, and managed to get all As and Bs. (I told him I expected As next semester.) Partway through I sent enough cash to cover a bicycle so he could get to the school and back for early classes (hitchhiking was unreliable, and the school is about 20km from his house). However, his grades were good enough for him to get chosen for a short, special field program in Navrongo, about 5 hours away by bus.


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His work in the field program was evaluated well enough, and he has been offered an entry into the Land Management and Real Estate baccalaureate program at the University for Development Studies in Tamale.

To do this, he needs 597 GHC (Ghanian Cedis), about $409 by September 1. This isn’t that much money, except when compared to what I actually have at the moment.

Until now, I haven’t even told people about this unusual missions project, opting to see quietly and unobtrusively how God would work. Now I believe it is time to project this to a larger audience, who also might be able to help.

Update (September 3, 2009):

I was finally able to get through by phone to the University office in Tamale … and they confirmed that Amin was on the acceptance list as a Freshman student in the program. (I already had scans of his acceptance letter, so this was just a formality.)

I’ve received a couple of generous donations from our at-work small group Bible study that helped immensely with the money I sent to Amin mid-day yesterday. Ghana is on GMT, so it was nearly closing time when he got to the bank. There were many students there trying to do the same thing … so he was able to get the Western Union transfer and have the bank keep it to avoid carrying around such a large sum of money, but he wasn’t able to pay his tuition until this morning.

Payment Receipt for Amin's Tuition

Amin wanted me to pass this along to you all: GOD help them tooo when they in a bondage like how i was and u all came together and resqued me through the powers of GOD. (His spelling is usually excellent; he obviously in a hurry.)

Amin leaves on Saturday to take up residence at the university in the city of Wa. He’ll complete the on-site admissions process on Monday. After that, he will need to pay his residence fees and medical fees, about another $175.

He is very excited and very grateful for our help.

I am grateful as well—the contributions made so far are a big difference for me. (Of course, I’ll be happy to accept further donations.)

You Can’t Touch This


This comes from deacon Greg Jones …

Darth Vader: World's Greatest Dad
And ol’ Gungan buddy Mark Sohmer let me know about this gem today. Head over to Zazzle.com and pick up one. (Better yet, send one to me.)

Yes, I can really procrastinate …

So, I tend to run a few minutes late for things (for which I blame Nichelle), but these Outlook reminders really got my attention this morning … The 20 hours overdue is because I was out sick yesterday, but 135 weeks?!

very_late_meetings

ASD Students to Kick ’Bot with Robot Sumo

On Tuesday, June 16, from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., students in the Robotics course at the Academy for Science and Design Public Charter School in Merrimack, New Hampshire, will go head to head against their peers and with engineers from Kronos Incorporated of Chelmsford, Ma., in a Robot Sumo competition. Anyone with an interest is welcome to watch.

The students will be using robots they have designed, built, and programmed over the last 6 months using Lego MindStorms kits, having learned mechanical and software engineering along the way, and often discovering their final design differs radically from what they first envisioned.

Robot Sumo begins with two autonomous robots in a round douyou ring, a white circular area measuring 36″ in diameter. The first robot pushed out of the ring loses. The students have been working in teams of 2 or 3 to create and improve their robot designs. A number of students have also created second robots of their own to compete. Robot Sumo has provided students with a unique design and programming challenge, requiring extensive hands-on work from each student.

Few things, however, have given the students more pleasure than seeing their robots beat the one designed and programmed by their instructor, Kronos engineer Doug Wilcox of Nashua.

The Academy for Science and Design is a tuition free open enrollment chartered public school for grades 7-12, specializing in science and math with algebra, biology, chemistry, and physics taught beginning in 7th grade.

Academy for Science and Design
316 Daniel Webster Highway
Merrimack, NH 03054
603 262-9162


Update:

The Robot Sumo event was a huge success, and we even got some great press from it.

Young designers learn it’s about more than building best ‘bot’,” by Mark Oullette, Union Leader.

Mr. Oullette prepared a great video, available on YouTube.

Academy of Science and Design class makes machines worthy of battle,” by Dana Smith, Merrimack Journal.

中文 Homework (Showing Off)

Okay, I’m going to show off a bit.

My Mandarin homework at the Chelmsford Chinese Language School this week was to write a paragraph about Naomi. Most of this we have covered in class, but I got some help from my friend Shenghan to make sure the grammar was correct, and still managed to make one mistake in with the suì character, which I have since corrected.

我

有

一

个

女

å„¿

。

她

叫

娜

奥

ç±³

。

她

五

岁

了

。

她

é•¿

着

黑

黑

çš„

头

发

。

她

喜

欢

è·³

舞

。

娜

奥

ç±³

是

一

个

亮

é—ª

é—ª

çš„

女

å­©

。

Here is the same text with the pinyin inserted:

wÇ’

yÇ’u

yī

gè

nÇš

ér

tā

jiào

我

有

一

个

女

å„¿

。

她

叫

Nà

ào

mǐ

tā

wÇ”

suì

le

娜

奥

ç±³

。

她

五

岁

了

。

tā

zhÇŽng

zhe

hēi

hēi

de

tóu

fà

她

é•¿

着

黑

黑

çš„

头

发

。

tā

xǐ

huàn

tiào

wÇ”

Nà

ào

mǐ

她

喜

欢

è·³

舞

。

娜

奥

ç±³

shì

yī

gè

liàng 

shÇŽn 

shÇŽn 

de

nÇš

hái

是

一

个

亮

é—ª

é—ª

çš„

女

å­©

。

Mandarin makes learning Spanish seem very easy by comparison. There are no Chinese-English cognates, and just learning the different tones is daunting. The “pinyin” phonetic aids help, but I still struggle with pronunciation, and, ultimately, need to memorize all the charcters. (Growing up in China, my teacher learned each character by being required to write it 1,000 times.) Of course, I occasionally have my rudimentary Chinese good-naturedly laughed at, such as a few weeks ago when I said, 我的太太不好。 My wife is no good, rather than 我的太太不舒服。My wife is not feeling well!

I’ll post a translation in the comments in a few days. In the meantime, you might have fun figuring it out. (Hint www.chinese-tools.com offers some excellent tools for working with Chinese, including a dictionary and input method editor.)

Just the Facts

The other day I was talking to someone who said he had heard on the radio that the US Federal government was going to give free digital television converts to welfare recipients, and that they were spending $100,000 each on plasma TVs in prisons. This came from what was described as “the most trustworthy radio news source in the area.”

Frankly, I couldn’t believe it. There was a coupon program to buy converters at a discount, but the program used up all its money, and had been discontinued. (Recently, it has been given more money by the federal bailout, and is operating again.) However, these coupons are available to anyone who desires them, so it’s hardly being targeted to those receiving government assistance.

But I wondered what the origin of these stories had been, so I hit the internet.

It turned out that millions of households on welfare might be given free digital television converters—in Japan sometime before their digital switchover in 2011. The prison story was a little closer to what’s real—the state of Florida’s department of corrections is spending $100,000 total, approximately $1 per inmate, out of its $2.3 billion dollar budget to convert existing television to digital.

Our opinions are often based on incorrect facts. Part of this is described in basic psychology—it’s called confirmation bias—how we filter evidence that strengthens our preconceptions.

But also our incorrect knowledge of history, various sciences, and current events allows us to hold on to incorrect opinions.

This is especially true in “popular knowledge”—think about all those e-mail forwards you receive that 15 seconds at about.com or Snopes could easily refute. Think about all the people who believe wearing a magnet on their wrist will make them healthy. Or all the “Christians” who espouse the heresy of the Prosperity Gospel and can even quote Scripture out of context to support it. Or that rubber tires protect vehicle occupants from lighting strikes. Or that a metal vehicle acts as a Faraday cage. (It doesn’t.)

At any rate, I have been thinking much of late that we should all do more analysis before we speak.

I wish we could all just be smarter.

I wish I could just be smarter.

President Obama’s Big Day: Off to a Good Start

After being up until 1:00 a.m., our new President attended a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral.

He issued several executive orders, including:

  • A freeze on salaries for White House staff earning $100,000 or more.
  • New Freedom of Information Act rules, making it harder to keep the workings of government secret. (And requiring a third-party ruling before declaring communication or meetings secret.)
  • Saying, “The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable,” he ordered new ethics rules for “a clean break from business as usual”—tighter ethics rules governing when administration officials can work on issues on which they previously lobbied governmental agencies, and banning them from lobbying his administration after leaving government service.

He also drafted an executive order calling for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison facility within a year, got things rolling on the economic stimulus package, and spoke with a number of Middle East leaders.

Despite what I would have predicted, I think I am going to like this guy.

(See http://www.cfrb.com/news/56/861993 and http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/01/21/pm_first_day_q/ .)