Noeline explains how she got started in Ghana. “My mum died in 1994.  I received a letter in 1995 from the Rev Sylvanus Botsyoe from the ECM (the Evangelical Community Mission) in the Volta region of Ghana.

The letter said that Sylvanus had read an article in a magazine about how I was working with people with learning disabilities on an organic gardening project. 

Now Sylvanus had just left Bible College and was realising you can’t just preach “Jesus loves you, God loves you to people who are in dire need because they will look at you and say, “Well God loves you, you are looking quite well. Why doesn’t he love me? Why am I looking like this?”

So Sylvanus started working with the most marginalised people in his community. These included street children, lepers, women forced into prostitution trying to earn a living for their children and people with learning difficulties. His idea was to show people, “God loves you. Let me show how he loves you. He sent me to help you. Let’s get you on the ladder.”

One of his projects was teaching people gardening.  Sylvanus is an avid gardener.  He also started looking for outside help. He got the community to donate money for stamps and started avidly writing letters abroad. He wrote 199 letters and got no positive replies at all. The villagers were getting fed up with paying for the stamps and nothing to show for it. Sylvanus was desperate. After reading the article about me in the local library, he went back to the elders and begged for money for one more stamp. The community were fed up with paying for stamps. They thought it was a complete waste of money. But Sylvanus had a feeling about this last letter and managed to persuade the elders to let him try one more time. He knew that number 200 would be the very last letter.  Grudgingly, they relented and Sylvanus wrote to me asking could I take some of his people over to Ireland and train them to garden with people with learning disabilities. There was only one school in Ghana for children with learning disabilities and that is in the capital Accra.”

Noeline continues. “When I got the letter, I didn’t reply straight away. I went to Guards and to the Dept of Justice and all over the place to find out if I could bring Ghanaians in.   No-one would hear of it. Eventually, I wrote back to Sylvanus to tell him the situation and pointed out that really there wasn’t much point anyway as in Ireland we would work in a totally different way and have access to different resources.  I had written the first gardening programme which had got passed by the then EEC so I sent him that programme, some seeds and £100 of my own money.

Kwame (Sylvanus’ son) later told me how excited Sylvanus and the whole village was to finally get a response to all his letters particularly as I had been reared in Africa.

After a while the Government in Ho came to Sylvanus. They told him they liked what he was doing and would he be kind enough to take in a few street girls and train them. Sylvanus, pleased to get the acknowledgement, said yes thinking he would get 3 or 4 girls. When the children turned up though, there was a whole bus load.  

Sylvanus phoned me up and was panicking down the phone.

“What shall I do? What shall I do?” He was yelping

So I said to him “Oh for heaven’s sake man, start a home economics programme with them”.

Sylvanus did not calm down “But what do I know about home economics, I am a bible student.”  

“Teach them to sew.” I told him”