Volunteer finds 'home' an ocean away

[Cranbury Press]

Friday, June 13, 2008 11:54 AM EDT
By Maria Prato-Gaines, Staff Writer



A few students from the Cultural Centre play the drums.

CRANBURY — Nearly 5,000 miles away from her quaint hometown of Cranbury, one local woman discovered a second home on the Gold Coast of Africa.

At 19 years old, Kat Kehrt had seen some sites in Europe but nothing that would prepare her for her experiences with volunteer organizations Kids World Wide and later United Volta Organization, which took her to an orphanage in Nepal and most recently to the soccer fields of Ghana.

Ms. Kehrt describes her first volunteering mission in Nepal, where she spent about a month and a half caring for 15 orphans, as an “eye-opening experience.”

”People lived on the streets and in houses made of mud,” she said. “There were 15 kids (in the orphanage) all under the age of 14. There were five beds with about two to three kids to a bed — all the other kids slept on the floor.”

But when she came back in September, saddened by the condition of the people she met in Nepal, Ms. Kehrt said she decided to get back on the horse and make her way to the culture center and soccer academy in Kwhu-Tafo, a town in the eastern region of Ghana, through the same volunteer organization.
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Ms. Kehrt said she stepped off a plane in February in the nation’s capital of Accra.

”There’s a few big buildings and public transportation,” she said. “That kind of blew me away. It was very westernized.”

Ms. Kehrt said the country had most of the amenities one would find in the States but a kind spirit among the people that seemed very foreign to her.

”Even if I didn’t know them they would say ‘Obruni (white person) come here and eat my food,’ “ she said. “These people had nothing.

”A lot of people did not have electricity. They had a lot of kids and no food. But they were still like ‘I don’t know you but I want to know you.’ Everyone was so nice.”

A three-hour drive north of Accra, Tafo was a place where there was no shortage of teen pregnancy and disease.

When Ms. Kehrt reached the center and academy in Tafo, she quickly realized that their mission was to house, feed and educate impoverished boys from the town and the neighboring villages, she said.

Volunteers like Ms. Kehrt, who paid $650 for her four-month visit to the country, fund these children’s basic needs as well as their education, she said. .........

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