Volta Home offers a special opportunity for a volunteer wanting to visit a home for homeless children where most of the cultural features of the surrounding community have been retained.

It is a unique experience for a volunteer with an open mind and a teachable spirit who is willing to observe and learn a new culture.

Gifts a volunteer can give these children:

Self esteem and confidence through play

Language and classroom skills

An understanding of the value of teeth cleaning, washing and covering open wounds

An attitude of kindness towards animals

Positive and non-violent examples of discipline.

Volunteering here at the Volta Home Orphanage is not for the faint hearted -

but it will be a very real experience of Africa  

The orphaned children at Volta Home live on a beautiful traditional farm which appears like a small community of mud brick cottages, open-air kitchens, and bamboo shelters all scattered amoung the trees. Water is collected from the river each morning and is carried by the children in the traditional manner  -  on their heads.  Chickens and goats roam freely everywhere.

The basic living standards at this little orphanage reflect the conditions for 85% of all children in the surrounding farming communities, so that a volunteering experience here is a very real experience of life in rural Africa.   However, at this orphanage, there are simply too few adults to give these children the attention, care or love they would get in a normal family household. And there is certainly no government help to pay for extra staff.

Pastor and Mrs Annabi have a traditional understanding of childcare and hygiene which is slow to change in many poor, rural areas of Ghana. There is also very little money available to ensure much improvement in the near future

For example:  Unlike more wealthy orphanages, Volta Home does not have refrigeration or running water.  Infections such as ringworm and impetago, and illnesses like malaria, will often go untreated due to lack of money for medications.

At Volta Home, beatings and verbal abuse of children is no longer a daily occurance, but is still (sadly) a fact -  just as it is in most homes and schools in rural Ghana.

For these reasons this experience requires understanding, motivation, energy, patience and resourcefulness, but it offers many rewards.