Touch A Life in Ghana
Touch A Life’s work in Ghana, West Africa began when Pam met Mark Kwadwo, through a photograph in the New York Times. His image was on the newspaper’s front page, and it was heartbreaking and haunting: his frail, stooped body; his scarred skin; his terrified eyes. Mark was a six-year-old slave. Sold by his parents for the equivalent of $20, Mark worked and lived under the brutal tyranny of the man he called master: a fisherman who had purchased dozens of children to work beside him on Lake Volta, a large, sprawling lake in the northern region of the nation.
Mark was one of three children his parents had sold: his brother Kofi fished with him, and his sister Hagar worked as a domestic servant, helping to raise the master’s children and clean the fish for market.
Like the estimated thousands of other children sold into slavery in Ghana, Mark worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. He was beaten and malnourished, deprived of an education, and a family’s love.
Pam was deeply touched by Mark’s story, and plagued by a desire to help him – but how?
Nine weeks later, Pam was on a plane to Ghana, where she forged an unlikely and life-changing friendship with George Achibra, Sr., a Ghanaian anti-trafficking crusader. Together, Pam and George worked to rescue Mark and six other children.
Today, Mark is no longer a slave. Through the work of Touch A Life, he is a happy, healthy, and thriving seven-year-old student at the Village of Hope orphanage outside of the nation’s capital city of Accra. With his siblings Kofi and Hagar—who Pam also rescued—and the other residents of the Village of Hope, he is in school, living with supportive, loving houseparents, and enjoying his freedom (as well as his childhood). Since then, the Touch A Life Foundation and their partners in Ghana have gone on to rescue more than eighty children from Lake Volta, and they continue to work every day to find additional resources to rescue the thousands of children who remain in bondage there.