The Journey Begins

Friends, family, and REACH for Ghana supporters: thank you so much for your encouragement, contributions, and words of wisdom over the past year as the 2013 team prepared for our three-week journey. It means the world to all of us to have you all cheering us on back home, and we can't wait to get to work putting all our planning over the past year into action. We're excited to share our journey with you via this blog, and we hope you'll check back regularly to see how we're putting your generous donations to use in Ghana!

By way of introduction, my name is Shikha Gupta and I am the 2013 REACH 4 Ghana team leader, and I'll be the primary blogger for our trip. The seventeen members of our team (pictured below) all arrived safely in Accra over the past few days, and we didn't lose a single medical or personal bag (or team member!).

Our first family photo.

The 2013 R4G Team plus Zack, our Board representative on this trip.

We're currently staying in a great hotel in Cape Coast, and we just finished our first breakfast of spanish omelets, fresh-squeezed orange juice, avocado, coffee, and fruit (not too shabby, right?!). It started pouring as we were eating breakfast outside, but we're braving the rain for a Canopy Walk in Kakum National Park and a tour of the Cape Coast Castle. Pictures and a recap to come as soon as we have WiFi again!

If any of you are interested in being added to the list of people receiving our team e-mail updates, please feel free to leave a comment here or send me a message (guptas9 [at] vcu.edu). Keep in touch and keep reading- I'll try to update as much as possible!

Getting crazy at one of our fundraisers this year at Jumpology! Thanks for jumping with us!

Thanks again for all your support, love, and encouragement- we couldn't have made it here without you!

- Shikha