Cape Coast · Ellis House, Block B
Two girls from Ellis House
In 1836 a young Englishwoman named Harriet Wrigley arrived in Cape Coast with her husband and started teaching twenty-five Ghanaian girls at the Manse near Victoria Park. She was dead of malaria within five months. Elizabeth Waldron took up the work and carried it for forty-three years, and out of that stubbornness grew a school that has been shaping Ghanaian women ever since. It asks them for four things, and it has never changed the list: Live Pure, Speak True, Right Wrong, Follow the King.
A hundred and fifty years after Harriet Wrigley died, two teenagers arrived at Ellis House, Block B, and were assigned the same dormitory. One had come from Christ the King International School. The other had come from Accra Ridge Church School. Neither had chosen the other. That is how boarding school works — you are handed your people, and then you spend three years finding out what you were handed.
They were fourteen. They made their beds to the same standard, sat the same prep, kept the same silences and broke the same rules. Then school ended, as it does. One stayed and became a surgeon. One left for America and became a physician assistant. An ocean, two careers, marriages, children, decades — and the friendship simply did not lapse.
In July 2026 both of them walked back through the gates of their own primary schools, within a week of each other, each carrying what she had spent thirty years learning how to give.
Sight
Dr Gwendolyn “Wendy” Asiedu is an ophthalmic surgeon in Accra and the founder of the Hopeful Sights Foundation. She went back to Accra Ridge Church School, where she had learned to read, and offered its teachers free glaucoma screening and glasses for those who needed them. A teacher who cannot see the board cannot run a club, and a child cannot learn from a teacher who is going blind quietly.
Emergency surgery took her away from the Jack & Jill and Christ the King donations; she was in theatre on both days. Her patients came first. Any Old Girl would tell you that is exactly the correct order, and that she would have been ashamed to choose otherwise.
Vision
Rebecca Markin-Newsome, PA-C had been building the chess programme at home for years before this trip — the boards, the coaching, the plan to put a trained teacher in front of every club. What she did not have was a door into the right schools. So she asked the person she had trusted since she was fourteen which schools in Accra would use the game well.
Wendy answered with more than a list. She opened her own primary school, and she introduced Gifty and Brian, who now deliver the sets, hold the school relationships between visits, and are vetting the next phase — while Rebecca works in the United States raising what the programme runs on.
Two foundations, two disciplines, one dormitory. Hopeful Sights works on what a child can see. The Markin-Newsome Foundation works on how a child thinks. Neither of them set out at fourteen to build something that would cross an ocean. They were only trying to get through prep — and being taught, without ever quite being told, that the point of being given an education is what you do with it afterwards.
