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!!