Politics and Waterfalls

Last week began with travelling to a more remote village with the DofE kids from the UK. They were there to build water filtration systems to provide clean water to the villagers. The system is clever and the technology has been gifted by a man from Germany I think. It works by passing water through layers of gravel and sand which remove any worms and bacteria from the water. We met the chief of the village and played with the kids. One baby was so shocked to see a white person he ran away screaming! There wasn’t much for Jonny and I to do as there were too many hands to all have a job really. It was interesting to see the systems though and I am glad I learned about it.

We decided not to go back to the village the next day and busy ourselves in Sogakope instead. I went to the market which happens every four days. It is bustling and fascinating with people selling fresh tomatoes, beans, blackened fish (which give off an almighty whiff!), soap and mobile phones. I was shopping for material though and found some bright fabric with ABC and 123 on it; perfect for a teacher I thought! I bought 6 yards for 18 cedis (about 7-8 pounds) and took it to a local seamstress. She has made me a fantastic African dress for only 10 cedis (3-4 pounds). So all in all I now have a traditional outfit for about a tenner!

When I visited the social welfare office last week I bumped into Joseph, who is the director of a local NGO called ‘Kids’ Foundation’. As usual here it’s hard to figure out what they do but he told me that as a second role, he is part of a good governance committee in Sogakope and was due to present a sanitation report to the District Assembly. I asked if I could come along and see his presentation to which he happily agreed. So at 7am on Friday morning I donned my African dress and made my way to meet Joseph at his office. He told me a little about what he was going to present. There is a real problem here with litter; there are no bins and of course no council run services like pick up or tips, so rubbish gets thrown into nearby grass and burned. There is a lot of plastic used for market goods and for purified water which comes in plastic sachets, which all gives off horrible fumes when burned. In addition, there are open sewers where the chickens, the locals then eat, feed and where mosquitoes breed. However, Joseph’s main concern was to sanitise the area to attract tourism. I know that tourism can bring money and create jobs in the local area but I get the feeling that the health and well-being of the local people gets overlooked.

Anyway, we proceeded to the District Assembly which from what I can gather is like the headquarters of the local councils and looks like a big concrete car park. Joseph took me round to meet the head of town planning, the budget director and the chief executive; who I am told is the top civil servant in the area. I told him I was a civil servant in England and felt like I was starring in the Last King of Scotland when he excitedly responded ‘Oh, then we will talk much and share ideas’. The meeting was a General Assembly to bring together all the local councillors from the South Tongu District and was meant to start at 8.30am. By 10.45am and after a very helpful Ewe lesson from the man sitting next to me, the meeting commenced! The room was vast, set up like a court room almost with the chairman and Chief Executive sat on a platform behind a table and everyone else sat in assembly format in front of them. First came prayers and a minute’s silence for a recently passed Police officer, followed by apologies and spell checking the agenda and report that would be the focus of the meeting, which took a good hour and a half. Then the chairman gave a speech about God given responsibility for half an hour and they opened the floor to hear the local councillors concerns for their area of responsibility. It was hard to understand everything as a lot was in Ewe but one issue seemed to be that the newly laid roads had many potholes- Ghana and the UK maybe are not that different after all! The senior panel’s response to this was that the engineer who planned the road had only visited in the dry seasons and so had not known where the rain would collect, which I thought was a great excuse but a sad waste of precious funds. It got to 3pm and Joseph had not yet been invited to present. Very hot, thirsty and regretting my decision to wear my African dress, I told Joseph I had to leave as Jonny and I had promised we would visit the local orphanage. So after all that, I never got to hear the presentation but will visit Joseph soon to read it myself!

The local orphanage was funded by a Canadian philanthropist who happens to be visiting at the moment with his daughter. He is a very interesting, kind and humble man who is doing a lot of good in multiple African nations and has provided a beautiful home for orphans to live in. Agnes, a Ghanaian lady, single handedly runs the orphanage which currently houses around 20-25 kids ranging from 4 to 19. People often don’t finish senior school here until they are in their mid-twenties, due to interrupted education in their childhoods. The older children help and look after the younger kids and so there is a lovely sense of community and caring between them. Jonny and I have been visiting every day, sometimes twice a day, to play with the kids and give them some attention. You cannot help but fall in love with these kids who have so little but offer so much unreserved affection. That is all I will say for now as I am already in tears but I will write more about the orphanage soon as we will be helping a lot more in the future too!

We took a trip this weekend to the district capital, Ho, to visit the highly acclaimed waterfalls there. It was 6 hours on bumpy dirt roads in vehicles that looked like just the skeletons of tro-tro’s but it was well worth it. After a 40 minute walk through the rain forests of a small village called Wli, we reached a massive water fall. Swimming up to it you felt a hugely powerful wind and spray from the falling water. It was an amazing feeling and I achieved one of my dreams to go under a waterfall (or get as close as possible due to the force of it!). A thousand plus fruit bats make their homes on the cliffs next to the falls and something must have disturbed them as they started circling the pool of water below- which was a little unnerving! The next day we visited a monkey sanctuary which was effectively a forest housing a small community of Mona monkeys. We got to feed them bananas which they expertly peeled in your hand and then scattered back into the trees to enjoy. That is really the first exotic wildlife I have seen, other than the geckos and lizards which I love, so it was a nice treat before the gruelling, dusty 6 hour trip back to Sogakope.

More Exploration

Last week’s summer school in Akatsi concluded with a celebration day on Friday, congratulating the children and handing out effort awards. There is always an order of doing things and a correct way in Ghana. For instance, when you enter a room you must greet everyone there and start from the right to the left and always shake hands with the right hand, never the left. There is also a special Ghanaian handshake where you click the other person’s third finger with yours. I am trying to master this! At the school, the correct order determined that we had to wait for the local education minister to arrive and make him chairman of the event before we could give any awards to the children. This meant the children were waiting for around 3 hours before we could even begin the day and as ever were impeccably behaved!

Some children sang and some did presentations and every child was given a gift, with special awards going to the highest achievers. It was a very loud, energetic day and by far the best poem entitled ‘Girls Beware’, was read by a young girl called Cinderellah. It went like this:

Girls beware,

When boys see you for the first time, they will say that ‘I love you’,

‘You are the apple of my eyes’,

‘You are the only cockroach in my cupboard’

When they get you pregnant, they will say ‘Abort it!’

So girls beware,

Boys are always boys!

Brilliant advice ladies, I absolutely loved it! The children gave Jonny and I gifts of bracelets each and we said goodbye for now. We should be doing more work with that school in the coming months.

Saturday saw my first trip to Accra, the capital city, since we arrived. It is around an hour and a half away from Sogakope but is our nearest ATM so we needed to travel to get some money. I took my first tro-tro which is a minibus that picks people up from the side of the road along a route. It was surprisingly comfortable on the way there; I am told that in some African countries they pack the tro-tro’s as full as possible but in Ghana the police stop them at checkpoints to make sure there are only enough people to the number of seats. As you can imagine, Accra is a little different to our little village. It is very busy, a lot of traffic, there is more wealth and people are not surprised to see white people there. We had to go to the shopping mall to get money which gave us the opportunity to have a treat of more familiar food. I had chicken nuggets and chips and devoured it like a hungry child!! We twinned the trip with a visit to the art market. There were hundreds of small shops selling African art. Everyone wants you to visit their shop but people are quite respectful and not too pushy. I did some pretty hard bargaining and got some carvings and bracelets.

After a busy and exhausting day, we headed back to Sogakope on a less than plush tro-tro this time. I was more than happy to reach our simpler village after the craziness of Accra.

We got up early on Sunday as we had arranged with a local guy we’d met, nicely named Cherubim, to go to church with him. Ghana is by far the most religious country I have ever been to. The majority of people, especially in this region, are devout Christians. There are some Muslims too and I am told that people of different religions live in a respectful peace of one another. Happily, from what I have experienced so far, the Christian Ghanaians genuinely live by Christian morals they believe in and preach.

We were in church by 8.30am and having been told the service was going to be 4 hours long, pre-arranged our exit with Cherubim! There are a lot of Pentecostal churches here (3 within spitting distance of our house alone) which meant that the service started with some extremely loud singing, drumming and dancing. The crowd got so worked up that two people had to be carried back to their chairs before they passed out! It was hard to follow what was being sung and I started to feel like a bit of an imposter observing people with so much passionate faith, not being a Christian myself, so we left after about an hour and a half. That was enough for me; Jonny however was getting quite into the dancing and clapping so I will report next time whether he keeps up his attendance!

We have had to move out of the guest house for three weeks as a Duke of Edinburgh group has arrived from the UK of eleven kids. We have moved into a small hotel up the road which is pretty nice. Since the kids have come, the Director of YCC has been focusing his efforts on sorting out their programme so we haven’t been doing too much. I decided to conduct my own research around town about the schools and the local NGO’s. Speaking to the director of the Social Welfare Office in Sogakope, I found out that the government only gave them 10% of the funding they need to carry out their functions. These include everything from mediation services to child maintenance issues, support to disabled community members, orphan support and tackling child trafficking. They are under staffed, under financed and rely on NGO’s to help them carry out their work. There are around 10 local NGO’s but their mission statements tend to be a bit wooly so it’s tough to figure out exactly what need they are addressing in the community. One thing that worries me is that there is no mechanism for accountability of the NGO’s, so their actual impact on the community goes un-vetted and unmeasured. This is to be my mission next week, to gather some more info!!

Welcome

Hello everyone from Ghana! ‘You are welcome’, as the Ghanaians would say. We arrived in Accra safe and sound after a smooth and luxurious British Airways flight with free drinks and good food. Jonny, myself and a girl we came over with who’s volunteering in a different area of Ghana, Hattie, excitedly rushed into the passport control and baggage reclaim where we had our first taste of the laid back life in Ghana. Hattie’s bag didn’t appear and we spent almost two hours trying to find out what had happened to it. No one seemed to know what was going on and one person sent you to another and another and so on. Hattie was getting pretty irate by the end of it, to say the least. We had to leave without the bag, conscious that we’d miss our lift. We met John, our host, in the arrivals lounge and apologised profusely for being late. We were soon to realise that a two hour wait is nothing unusual in Ghana....

We travelled for around 1 and ¾ hours to Sogakope and were pleased to find a very nice guest house awaiting our arrival. Our room is pretty luxurious with a nice double bed, a roof fan and real toilet (more on the varied toilet situation later!). We were zombies when we finally got here and just went straight to bed.

Friday morning allowed us to see where we were and what surrounded us. There are pretty ramshackle buildings and huts around us where a few families live. There is a church opposite us and a dusty track takes us up to a main road. Stoyan, a Bulgarian volunteer who also stays in the guest house, showed us around Sogakope. He has been here two months and has picked up an impressive amount of Ewe, the local tribal language. Jonny and I are trying hard to learn but Yonna has got it a lot quicker than me. I know that ‘How are you?’ is ‘Eh-fa’ to which you reply ‘Ehhh’, a bit like the Fonz!

Sogakope is pretty hectic with busy main roads and lots of hawkers selling their wares on the side of the road. The ladies and kids carry buckets, bowls and boxes of bread, dried fish, water sachets, tomatoes etc. piled high on their heads. I cannot understand how they manage this yet but I will try someday soon. As a white person, wherever you walk, people shout ‘Yevu’ at you. This means white person but is not a derogatory term. John tells us that when Portuguese settlers came to the Volta Region, where we are and which used to be in Togo, they always said yevu which was a word in Portuguese and so the locals used the term to refer to any white people. The fitting reply in Ewe is Ameyebou, black person, which the locals are always surprised that we know!

On Saturday we travelled to a nearby town called Ada where we had heard there was a tribal festival. The taxi driver contested our agreed price and we waited nearly an hour for him to sort a price out on the phone with the owner of the car. Some good Ghanaian style waiting there! We stayed at Dreamland hotel which was a collection of huts with a bamboo bunk beds and thankfully fitted with mosquito nets. Now for the toilets.....Mum you would not have been able to stomach the toilet situation there. They were long drops with a hole above basically. When you finished you had to throw a handful of sawdust down, ready for the next person. I just held my nose and closed my eyes each time! We ordered lunch at Dreamlands and waited the standard hour and a half for it to arrive, before we headed to the festival.

There were thousands of people and so many new sights I could barely take it all in when we arrived at the festival. From what I could gather it was a celebration of the traditional tribes of the local area. The event centred around a grass arena on the edge of which the tribal chiefs sat. They all carried staffs with a symbol of what their tribe is known for on top e.g. cocoa production. There were people firing what must have been blanks into the air from huge, old rifles. As Yevus we got ushered in to sit within the arena by the police and watched a parade of marching bands and a speech by the vice-president of Ghana. It was hard to follow everything as most of the commentating was in Ewe but the kids kept as amused as they were fascinated by us and our cameras.

The next day, we took a boat to Marinata beach which was a resort with a few more Yevus. It was nice to chill out there and watch a boat race take place. I ate fried plantain with ‘sauce’ which is like a spicy tomato sauce. I have figured out I really like plantain. The food has been interesting with some of it hard to get used to. Fou-Fou is a stodgy, dumpling consistency which I have had served with a spicy stew and Talipapa fish; it was so spicy my mouth hurt. Breakfast at the guest house tends to be omelette with pieces of onion and what looks like cabbage in it with fried bread or sometimes we have porridge. Banku is another dumpling made with corn and left to ferment which gives it a sour taste. I can’t really stomach it but it’s Ghana’s favourite dish apparently so I may need to train myself! We have had a lot of groundnut oil soup which usually comes with one chicken bone in it with a morsel of meat on. There are no puddings but the most amazing fresh mango, pineapple, coconuts and papayas! I will keep updating food experiences, especially for you Jane!

On Monday we went to Demonstration school in Akatsi, a nearby town. I assisted another volunteer to deliver his workshop on communication and public speaking to 80 or more children attending a one week summer school. The school itself, in term time, consists of 1000 students, 10 teachers and 3 or 4 large classroom huts, one of which has no roof. They are in pretty desperate need of help so that’s where our focus has been this week. On Tuesday, I took two reading classes with 40 kids in each ranging from 11-18 years and read the Hunchback of Notre Dame. We only had 10 books between them all and had to give out pencils and paper as they did not have any. The children were well behaved and eager to learn. They struggled a bit with my accent so I need to work on that a little bit but hopefully we can bring something new to their lessons and help them on a little. As seems to be the way here, John does not seem to be able to tell us too many days in advance exactly what we will be doing and with which children so it makes it quite hard to plan lessons but I keep trying to tie him down to some plans.....watch this space for progress!

All in all, it has been a good starting week. It will take some getting used to the laid back style and attitude of Ghana and the food, but I have never met immediately warmer people. Everyone has a ready smile and greets you when you walk past them. You really do feel very welcome here!