One bad apple didn't spoil the bunch!

I am unexpectedly writing my final blog from Leeds, UK after a drama and an emergency flight home, arriving yesterday morning. As I tried to keep my blog focussed on the positive experiences Jonny and I were having and the work we were doing, I did not include as much as I could have about the charity we were working with in Ghana.

It did not take long for us to figure out that the projects the Ghanaian charity claimed to have in the marketing material, upon which we’d both based our volunteer applications, did not in fact exist in reality. When we arrived in Ghana another one of the volunteers explained his frustrations to us about the lack of real work he had to do. He ended up leaving 2 months before he was due to because he had nothing to do and did not want to support the charity. Jonny’s own proactive approach established his football coaching project pretty much from week one and my pushing meant that the charity had to find me a teaching position. However, this left a lot of the claimed projects, including the ones we’d applied directly for, non-existent and left us with a lot of questions.

We put these questions to the workers at the charity and at first, they were met with vague answers about what had happened once in the past, what they intended for the future and how there were cultural differences we needed to consider. As time went on, our continuing questions were met with angry meetings and increasingly aggressive charity workers! We realised this was nothing really to do with cultural differences.

Jonny and I decided that we wanted to make the most of the experience and so to ignore the charity and carry on with our projects, the teaching, coaching and the local orphanage, none of which had anything at all to do with the charity really. The charity was meant to pay all our expenses for the projects as they are sent a hefty amount of funding from the European Commission for us to stay there and volunteer. However, when we asked for transport costs etc we were met with more aggression. We then started to have people approach us in the community to say that they had not been paid for their various services to the charity- a perplexing situation knowing just how much money the charity were receiving on our behalf alone and in addition to private funders’ donations. The most personally upsetting situation for Jonny and I was that the lady who was cooking for us had not been paid for 6 months. She was a very poor lady, who was not managing to live without the money and who had also been intimidated and bullied by the director to not tell us anything. However, she could not carry on with no money and explained to us what was happening. We encouraged her to say something to the management and she was then told to leave her job without any of the pay.

Partly due to feeling uncomfortable in an increasingly hostile situation and certainly to do with not wanting to support such a charity morally and financially, Jonny and I moved out of the guesthouse and in to a local hostel about 2 weeks ago. We carried on with our separate projects quite happily from there and intended to do so until the end of November.

When we were moving out of the guesthouse, Jonny bumped into a new volunteer arriving from the States. We met with the cook, Millie and she told us this lady had come to the charity 6 years in a row and had some sway within the organisation. We asked to meet with her and explained how Millie had not been paid and asked whether she could put any pressure on the management to make sure she got her money. The American lady started asking us lots of questions about our experiences with the charity as it turned out she was a main financier of the organisation. She was less than impressed with what we had to report and the charity workers obviously caught wind of this as one of them stormed into the meeting and tried to take the lady away.

The next day Jonny and I received two emails- one from the director and another from one of the charity employees. They both threatened court action in Ghana for defamation but the one from the director threatened our lives, stating that if we did not stop talking we would be ‘running for our lives through the streets of Sogakope’. Now I am home, I can laugh about the ridiculousness of it but at the time I was pretty distressed.

We had to tell the English organisation what had been threatened and they immediately offered to fly us home for our safety. It was a very difficult decision. Both Jonny and I had so much more we wanted to do and had planned to do in our last two weeks. Jonny had a school football gala to coach, I had an exam to set and prizes to award for my best pupils. We did not want a bully to be able to intimidate us and harm the very community he professes to care about and work with. But in the interests of our safety in a country and culture that was not our own, we decided it was best to take the flight.

Angry and upset that our trip was cut short, Jonny did his last coaching session with his team, we took the orphanage on a big trip to a nearby swimming pool (which they loved but being responsible for 30 kids ranging from 2.5- 12 years old, none of whom can swim, was a lot to cope with!) and I presented my awards early to my pupils. We left Sogakope on Monday afternoon sad but also relieved we were safe and happy to be coming home.

Our time in Ghana was incredible; not easy at all but a real learning experience on many levels. The only negative we had was with the few people within the charity we were affiliated to. We have met some very special and inspirational people, many of whom we now call friends, and will continue to stay in touch with them. And for now, I am very much enjoying cold weather, hot water and the sofa!! Thanks to everyone for reading my blogs and supporting us in Ghana. I hope to see you all very soon x.

Red Card

My crusade to ban caning in my school continues. Some teachers have really taken it on board but some remain surgically attached to their canes! I have resorted to walking around the campus every morning to take all the canes out of the classrooms. I am asked about suitable disciplinary methods all the time, which can be difficult as I have very little experience as a teacher and not much with kids at all. But in my classes I have introduced a yellow and red card system. Most of Ghana love football so they understand this rule pretty quickly- yellow card is a warning, red and you’ve gone too far! I am happy to say it’s working with one of my classes very nicely. My older class is a little harder to control and despite having the entire class, bar about 4 people, scrub the long drop toilets for not doing their homework, this week they have not handed in their work again. I sound mean but I asked them to come up with their own ‘Code of Conduct’ for certain rule breaking and they came up with scrubbing the toilet!

I have been asked by the headmaster and proprietor to come up with a solution for the poor time keeping in the school as well. Currently there are two breaks in the day and the kids are fed full meals twice. The cooks do not turn up on time which means they cannot prepare food in time for the timetabled breaks. This results in the breaks lasting until the food is ready; I have been in school when break has lasted the entire afternoon so classes have missed 6 lessons in a day! It’s not just the cooks, the kids have no qualms with turning up 2 hours late for school. For some, however, it’s because their parents make them rise early and farm before they can come to school. This is where the laid back attitude of Ghana has negative consequences, when children miss out on their valuable education. So that’s this week’s challenge!

As I have said before, as children start school at different ages and are placed in classes according to their ability, I teach kids ranging from 13-18 in one class. This can be very difficult and embarrassing for the older ones and only serves to limit their confidence even more. I have an older guy like this in one of my classes and have arranged to have extra lessons with him until I go, which also start next week. I have also started a debate club at the school- next week we debate the positives and negatives of television.

This week the girls in my empowerment club wanted me to talk to them about HIV/ AIDS. I had a lot of swotting up to do as I have never really learned about it myself. We had a long chat about causes, effects, treatment and prevention. They all tell me that there is no way they will ever, ever have sex before they are married. I tell them that whilst I respect that and believe them, it’s best to be realistic and prepared. HIV/ AIDS is on the decrease in Ghana but is still a very real risk. It is most prevalent amongst women (56% of all sufferers in Ghana are women) and in the age group of 25-34. I informed the girls that, before marriage, the best thing they can do is either abstain or use a condom. They told me that their pastors tell them that using a condom is tantamount to abortion and therefore is an abomination. Whilst I see the positive influence faith and Christian morals has on this country, this upsets me greatly and is a hard one to argue against when they have been told this since birth. I managed to circumvent an entire debate about religion and my personal beliefs (one I am now very much versed in) and lightened the session by showing photos of my family, Jonny’s mum and my friends-Flick and Verity, as they’d requested I brought them in last week. They were fascinated! Next week they want to discuss teenage pregnancy and how to prevent it- I don’t think they’re going to like my answers!

Film club was a huge hit at the orphanage again this week with the airing of a classic- the Jungle Book. They loved it and it was so funny seeing which bits they were in fits of laughter about. They were not at all keen on the snake; it got a pretty bad reception, which I can only think is down to their learning of the book of Genesis. While they happily watched the film, I found the two 6 week old puppies who are the newest residents at the orphanage. They are so beautiful and can be seen on Jonny’s facebook pictures. The poor things had about 100 ticks in each ear so I removed them all as I couldn’t imagine how annoying that would be for them.

My school took a mid-term long weekend this week so I have had a good and welcome rest. However, it’s now Monday and I still have a lot of planning to do so best crack on! Happy Halloween everyone!

Spare the Rod

The night before my meeting regarding caning at Sanity School, where I am teaching, I was doing some pretty thorough research on corporal punishment. As expected, the research shows that it does little to discipline and in fact, creates a cycle of violence and dissident behaviour that endures through adulthood, not to mention pain and fear. Armed with the statistics and my counter quotes from the Bible, I entered the meeting with the headmaster, proprietor and 10 teachers.

The headmaster introduced me and explained why we were there. I continued in explaining the research that I had found about the long term effects of caning. I was all but laughed out of the room by the entire staff! Unfortunately, the use of the cane is deeply engrained in Ghanaian culture, introduced by the colonialists, and it is very alien for them to hear that it is wrong and harmful to children. This is not helped by the Biblical endorsement encompassed in the much quoted ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’. I countered this argument with my newly acquired knowledge of the Bible which disintegrated into a bit of a witch hunt as the headmaster announced, to a shocked audience, that I was not a Christian; another alien concept in Ghana.

The headmaster and teachers attempted to convince me that African children were different and that, and I quote, ‘Africans were born to be caned’! I was very vocal about the fact that I did not buy that explanation and that a child is a child regardless of country of origin. They ended the meeting by marching a young boy into the centre of the room and explaining that he had been amongst a group who had kicked down a school wall. They turned to me and asked what his punishment should be, if not caning. I suggested that the boy should have to be involved in the re-building of the wall to learn his lesson. This resulted in another great guffaw from the teachers. I was pretty downhearted by the end of the meeting and although I did not want to preach or appear self righteous, I felt that my view had not been listened to and that I had wasted my time.

To cap it off, after school I walked to the taxi rank to get home and grabbed a coke at a local spot bar. I was unfortunately accosted by a slightly mad man who was shouting at me and then started pushing me. The local people protected me and in the end I got home safe, tired and feeling a little defeated.

The next day I arrived at school to find a meeting of a few parents in the headmaster’s office. The headmaster explained to me that he had called the meeting to discuss the punishment of the children who had kicked over the wall. What followed was the most adult and orderly meeting I have ever witnessed in Ghana; no shouting, no pointing, no mobile phones going off, no interruptions. It was agreed that instead of dishing out a caning, the parents would pay for the wall materials and take the funds from the pocket money they usually give their kids and that the students would have a hand in re-building the wall. I was very, very happy to see that my ideas had in fact been taken on board, in their own way. This was furthered by the fact that, a few days later, we held a follow up meeting with the teachers and came up with some alternative punishments. It was a hard slog but we did come to some compromises and the headmaster announced that for the next 2 weeks the school is a cane-free zone for the teachers to test the new methods and report back. A brilliant breakthrough!

The next morning I arrived at school and was about to start my lesson when I heard screaming in the playground. I rushed out to find one of the older girls having what looked like a fit and her friends trying to calm her. She was taken into the headmaster’s office and laid on the floor. I asked someone to call a doctor but was told that this was a ‘spiritual problem’ rather than anything medical. The girl was screaming that her head and her heart were hurting and was writhing around the floor. I became more and more distressed and sure she needed medical help but the headmaster and one of the older teachers proceeded to hit the girl’s head and scream ‘the blood of Jesus’ into her ears! After their spiritual healing did not seem to take effect, they conceded that perhaps she did need to see a doctor and she was taken to the local health centre. I later learned she was admitted to hospital and is now out and fine after a 5 day stay.

My day didn’t get any better when my Junior High School 1 class handed in their first homework for me. From 34 kids I got 3 versions of homework copied by everyone else. I was pretty cross but had to laugh when, as the copying had gone on and on, the kids’ handwriting had got worse and worse so by the end the last copier was making some pretty humorous mistakes. The children in my classes are nice kids and I do think the majority of them want to learn, they just have no discipline. The teachers are the worst disciplined of all, as they wander in and out of my classroom as I am teaching, play with their mobile phones during lessons and are perpetually late- I have a gargantuan task on my hands!

Every week now, I hold a girl empowerment club with the older girls in the school. For our first topic, I asked if women were equal to men. This sparked pretty interesting debate, uncovering their view that when a woman is married she is the property of the man, it is a woman’s duty to cook clean and rear children and most worryingly, that it is right for a husband to beat his wife if she has done something wrong. Most of the girls told me that they had witnessed their mothers being beaten by their fathers and all but one are happily resigned, if not looking forward to, this being their fate as well. More than anything I want to provide somewhere young girls, ranging from 14-18 years, can talk about things that bother them and questions they have and can’t necessarily ask anyone else. It’s a lot of fun and I will keep updating my blog with subjects covered.

Last Thursday Jonny and I also held a film club for the kids at the orphanage. We arranged to use the donated projector of a nearby community radio station and played The Lion King to the 25 kids. I still can’t help but get a bit emotional when Mufasa dies. There were only a few fights over sharing the popcorn we’d brought and around 100 trips to the toilet (by that I mean to pee on the ground outside) but most of the children were enthralled by the film and excited to be leaving the house, so we’ll be doing this again next week too!

Mission Accomplished: Elephants Spotted

I started teaching a couple of weeks ago at Sanity School. After becoming more familiar with the syllabus, I decided to cut my classes down to teach just Junior High School 1 and 2; which means I am teaching around 65 children- more than enough! The children range from 12 to 17 years in a single class, as they are graded by ability rather than age. To me it seems counter-productive as the older children are embarrassed to be with the younger ones and so contribute less, making the situation worse for them. Like always in Ghana, the staff and students struggle to stick to a timetable so start times, break times and lesson lengths are all a little haphazard. But I am enjoying teaching them and they seem to have fun but I am dreading the day when me being a white woman loses its novelty!

After class on Friday I rushed back to Sogakope to put the finishing touches to a surprise birthday party for Yonna at the orphanage. I bought a huge cake- big enough for all the children to have some- and some candles. With Yonna totally oblivious, we went round at 7pm and were welcomed by an elongated version of happy birthday sung by the children and lots of Christian songs too. I had also arranged for the kids to make birthday cards so we gave them all to Jonny and he had a great time. The kids were pretty happy with the cake too! Some of the kids stood up to give Jonny special birthday wishes and Agnes, who runs the orphanage, gave a long speech about how I must not leave Jonny and when he’s bad I have to forgive him and when he’s good I have to praise him. There were no such rules for Yonna but we were made to promise if we got married we would hold the ceremony in Ghana!

After another dramatic football match on Saturday for Jonny’s team, we packed and prepared for our exciting birthday trip up to the North. We left very early on Sunday and took a tro-tro through Accra and to Kumasi. Kumasi is the capital for the Ashanti people, the ruling tribe, and so is quite a big city but much, much nicer than Accra. We got there after an 8 hour journey and set off from our hotel in search of some nice food after repetitive yam and vegetable sauce for what felt like weeks at home. We hit the jackpot when we found out there is a large Chinese population in Kumasi and went to a Chinese restaurant. It was the best won-ton soup I have ever had in my life and I can’t explain how good it was to have some tasty food! We ate until we felt sick (as is customary with Chinese food isn’t it!?) and then went back to the hotel to sleep before some sight-seeing and the next leg of our journey.

The next day we went to the fort in Kumasi which doubles as an armed forces museum. It was fascinating and housed weapons seized by Ghanaian forces in the Abyssinian conflict with Italy, fighting the Japanese in Burma, the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars and the war in Rwanda. They really have amazing artefacts there, including flags won from opposing armies, photos of the British colonial rulers and photos from the First World War. It was very upsetting to see the crude weapons used in the Rwandan genocide and brought all the stories I have heard first hand, horribly to life. It had never occurred to me that, under British rule and after independence, the Ghanaian armed forces fought beside the British in the above conflicts and the world wars. It was therefore especially difficult to hear that when Ghana wanted independence, we resisted and from that same fort, fired upon protestors and Ashanti leaders trying to gain what was rightfully theirs.

We then walked to a sacred Ashanti site in the centre of town. A famous and powerful Ashanti fetish priest is said to have laid a sword in the stone in the centre of Kumasi 300 years ago. The legend states that when the one comes who can remove the sword, the power of the Ashanti will be destroyed and they will no longer rule. The guide told us that they allowed Mohammed Ali to try and pull out the sword but was less impressed by our requests and suggestions that we thought we could do it. He said that if we tried, we would surely be killed. So we left that one alone....

We took our next bus the same day and after a relatively short drive, arrived in Kintampo. The hotel we planned to stay in had a power cut in the stormy weather that circled above us, so we were given two candles and shown to our room. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant and watched an awesome lightning storm in the distant night sky. Without electricity and therefore no fan, the night was hot and restless. This was added to by a kitten crying constantly by our window, talking through the night and finally the Muslim call to prayer in the early hours. After much fighting we agreed with the hotelier that we would not be paying the full rate and left for Kintampo waterfalls. We saw the falls early so were the only people there and the spray from the falls was a nice early morning shower to wake us up.

We then started our great journey to Mole national park. We took a tro-tro to Tamale, which took around 3 hours including a breakdown. The bus in Tamale was packed full of people and luggage with an extra ten or so fold down seats in the middle row so they could pack on yet more people. We waited in the bus for around 2 hours before everyone had come to board the bus and the driver decided to come and drive it- we were pretty tired and frustrated at this point. Little did we know what we had ahead of us...Many roads in Ghana are very bad- pot holes, dust, water logged, but the road to Mole national park was the worst I have seen and is infamous for breakdowns and lorries and buses tipping over. I was pretty apprehensive to say the least- we had 5 and a half hours and pretty much non-stop bumps. There were a few times that my heart stopped when we were close to tipping over or getting stuck in a massive puddle in the middle of nowhere. Plus having got up at 6am that morning, it was like sleep deprivation torture to not be able to get any rest on the bumpy journey. But we made it alive to the village just outside the park and commissioned a taxi driver to take us into the park. If I thought the previous journey was bad, this was insane. The taxi driver clearly thought he was a rally driver and took the potholes and mounds at a cool 60mph in a normal saloon car. It was quite fun until we hit a mound of rocks so hard the car came to a stop and he got out to check his bonnet was still in one piece. He decided it was fine and carried in the same manner until reaching an owl in the road. Jonny and I were thrilled to see an amazing night bird and then the driver sped up towards and clipped its wings, narrowly missing a kill! We were pretty shocked and later understood that the owl is a cursed bird according to Voodoo beliefs so the locals kill them when they get the chance. We finally arrived at Mole Motel at around 8pm (a 14 hour-ish journey all in all), having had to pay an entrance fee each to the park and a fee for the taxi and its driver. Ghana has not quite embraced the idea of tourism yet- to say Mole is probably the number one potential tourist attraction in Ghana, the road is almost impassable and the fees they charge are a racquet.

The light of the next morning, however, made us forget all our niggles and the discomfort of the previous day. We opened the door to our balcony and saw that we were situated on a cliff front looking over thousands of acres of forested park land and a watering hole just below the cliff. It was a breathtaking view and also Jonny’s birthday! We woke up early enough to do presents and cards before we went on our walking safari. I had successfully carried and kept hidden gifts and cards from Jonny’s family, which he was really happy to receive. We set off on our early morning safari with an armed park ranger and me in very fetching wellies. The ranger told us time and time again that a safari was ‘a game of chance’ in order to ease our disappointment if we didn’t see anything. But luck was on our side when we saw a group of baboons and monkeys and then turned round to see a family of elephants leading the way to the watering hole. We climbed down the cliff and past the watering hole to the grasslands where we saw a heard of elephants, with two babies, munching away on trees and vegetation. It was incredible and added to by spotting three types of antelopes too. We were happy with that alone but got an extra treat when we returned to the hotel and watched two elephants bathing in the watering hole just below our balcony. I never knew that elephants are actually quite a dark black and that it is only the mud they roll in that makes them grey! We did some swimming ourselves in the clean pool and had a nice birthday dinner and drinks.

We had to catch the bus at 4am the next morning and I will not go into the return journey again. Suffice to say it was just as bad and sleep deprived on the way back. We finally reached Kumasi 14 hours later and rewarded ourselves with another Chinese at the same place (it was that good!). All we had left to do the next day was an 11 hour bus journey back to Sogakope, but we did do a lot of it in an air conditioned bus as I think we had both reached our breaking point with rattling old buses!

Today I happily started my teaching again but having witnessed some of the pupils getting severely caned, I have requested a meeting with the headmaster and the staff to think of alternatives to corporal punishment in the school. I understand it is a cultural difference but I can’t help thinking there are better ways to discipline- violence breeds violence and all that. It is something that has been upsetting me for some time in Ghana as I have seen it a few times now, so I have my arguments pretty much ready and am having to learn parts of the Bible to support my argument and be able to counter theirs that they base on the Bible! Wish me luck!