Accra to Wa

Well, we have made it to Wa. We enjoyed getting to know Accra a little bit, although it is a very busy, sprawling city, with traffic jams everywhere.

The 8, volunteers in the picture are all based in and around Wa. They come from Canada, Australia, Kenya, Liverpool and Derby. The other picture shows all the volunteers who have arrived in Ghana this September. Everyone is incredibly supportive.Settling into this new environment doesn’t come easy, even after having lived or travelled quite extensively in developing countries, as all of us have done.









The journey to Wa was by coach, which was packed to the ceiling with people and luggage. The whole journey took just over 15 hours and it was a real challenge. However, it was fascinating to travel the whole length of Ghana and watch life going on in every town and village that we passed through. We had about 5 brief stops on route and on each occasion, there were people try to sell us everything you could possible imagine, very reminiscent of the railway stations in India. As in India, everyone was polite, friendly and good humoured.


We are now in our house and settling in to doing priority tasks, like trying to work out how our water filters function, as well as putting up our mosquito net.


We are becoming friends with all the local ants, lizards, spiders and cockroaches that also enjoy living in this house. The house is connected to a mains water supply, but it only comes on for between 1 and 3 hours from 04.00 to 07.00 a.m. The water has to be collected in barrels. Water for drinking and cooking has to be filtered and then boiled. We have to use buckets for showering, and we are anticipating our first attempt at this with just a little trepidation.

The work they want us to do sounds very exciting. We will find out more detail over the next few days, but we will definitely be working with the Director and her staff in the education service, as well as with headteachers and their teams in a number of local schools. We walked to the education offices today, during the hottest part of the afternoon, just to check how best to mange it. It took 45 minutes each way, with lots of drinking on route. We hope to be able to buy bicycles soon, to help us get between the education offices and the schools.

We have practised our very basic Waali with all the people we have met so far. Our simple greetings cause great amusement and this helps to build positive relationships. We will clearly be totally fluent in Waali by the time we get home, so if you want to communicate with us you may want to start practising now:
Ansoma: good morning
Antere: good afternoon
Anoola: good evening
Barika: thank you

In-country training

We are now half way through our training. We’re learning a lot about the social, political and economic aspects of life in Ghana, as well as some useful tips about cultural expectations and behavioural norms. Most of us will be working in education in the upper 3 regions (Upper East, Upper West and Northern) and we recognise that there will be very real challenges in these areas:

• Formal education is much less developed than in the south. During colonial rule, Britain saw the north as the provider of labour, mainly for the cocoa plantations, so there was no advantage to the British in educating the northern population. For example, the first school in the north was built 200 years after school building started in the south of Ghana.

• 84% of the population in the north is undernourished. In addition, the “hunger gap” in the north can be as long as 5 or 6 months. This refers to the amount of time between food running out and the next harvest. The impact is that many northern people/families move south in search of work/food. Therefore regular school attendance is very low at these times.

• Only 50% of the teachers in the north have had any form of training and often resort to such things as corporal punishment. Teachers are also very poorly paid and sometimes the pay doesn’t arrive at all. Many therefore seek supplementary employment and teacher attendance at school is often very low as well.

• There is a big gender divide in terms of school attendance. The education of boys is more often seen as an investment for the family. Girls are more readily kept at home for various household and farm duties. The family gains from a dowry when the girl marries into another family, and therefore her education would not be of benefit to their own family. Once girls reach the age of about 8 or 9, their attendance at school declines rapidly.

Throughout our training in the UK and in Accra, there is a repeated emphasis on recognising the value of making very small steps, in terms of helping to develop education in the country. The government is working to improve school attendance by providing food at school, as well as free school uniforms. They have also introduced a scheme whereby everyone leaving university has to do a year’s “national service”, many as teachers or community mentors for people with disabilities. We understand that “Comic Relief” is also initiating a project in the north, focusing on education for the disabled.

We are going to be the first group of volunteers to pilot an assessment tool, which should enable the education service and individual schools to analyse their strengths and areas for development, and plan effectively for the future. This tool is being promoted by the government, in conjunction with VSO. One of our key roles in our 6 month placement will be to train education service staff and headteachers in the use of this tool, so that they can be more effective in planning future improvements. There is likely to be huge resistance to this sort of development in many quarters, so our skills will be stretched to the limit. We’ll let you know if we have any success at all.

Meanwhile, the facilities at this hotel are luxury, in comparison to our accommodation in Wa. There are several vegetarians among the volunteers and yesterday’s lunch was baked bean sandwiches. Lin is in heaven, as she thought she would have 6 months without baked beans!!

Accra

On Saturday, bruv & sis, Mac and Jane, took us to Heathrow Airport. This was really appreciated and made the departure that much easier. We left from terminal 5 for the first time. All went very smoothly. Any notion we had about driving back over the Sahara, as an adventure, has dissipated. We realise we are not that adventurous. We flew over it for hours and hours. It is a very big desert indeed, isn’t it!

Arrival at Accra was a little hair-raising, as it was gone 8.30 p.m. by the time we had cleared immigration and customs. We had no local currency and all currency outlets were closed. A considerable number of people wanted to help us! We realised we didn’t even know the current exchange rate! That was a mistake on our part. We asked a number of people in the airport for advice and eventually used an ATM to take out 200 cedis, the local currency. We negotiated with an organiser, two porters and a taxi driver and were eventually whisked off for a crazy ride through night-time Accra to our hotel. We were safely delivered at the agreed price and with all cases intact. Phew!

We had most of Sunday to ourselves. We were woken to the sound of Christian worship both inside the hotel and outside. Lovely gospel music seemed to be emanating from every corner of the city. We took a walk along the nearby local main road and were warmly greeted by everyone. Many people were dressed in traditional Ghanaian dress for church. Taxis were very keen to give us a lift to anywhere, but we were going nowhere in particular. We realise now how used to unleaded petrol and catalytic converters we have become. The traffic fumes were quite overpowering. Accra is a large sprawling city which we hope to get to know better over the next 6 months.


The hotel is on the outskirts of Accra which means we are surrounded by local homes and small businesses, one of which is pictured. These two little huts are immediately outside our hotel, and two enterprising women have converted them into two immaculate hair and beauty salons.

Our in-country training is now underway. We are with 20 others who will soon be working in the northern regions of Ghana. Today is a national day of celebration for Kwame Nkrumah's 100th birthday and the arrival of the "Unity Flag" in Accra. It is clear that Nkrumah is highly respected by people of all ages for his vision of a united free Africa.

These birthday celebrations also coincided with the Muslim festival of Eid at the end of Ramadan, so everyone in Accra is celebrating. We spent the evening with all the other volunteers in Independence Square, joining in with the crowds, listening and dancing to the rythms of a wide range of modern and traditional Ghanaian music.

Nearly there

The visas have arrived and we leave in 5 days time. Our practice packing, unpacking, and re-packing session was hilarious and led inevitably to the purchase of a larger suitcase.

We are now spending some of our time doing the things that we know we will miss: cycling in the countryside (like the annual Essex Churches Ride, last Saturday), and going to the theatre. We met up with a number of friends at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park and saw a great performance of Hello Dolly. The Regents Park Theatre on a sunny and dry evening is such a wonderful London experience. If you’ve never done it, book for next summer and let us know when you are going! We also saw “The Pitmen Painters” at the National Theatre. Anyone with an interest in both politics and art should find this both moving and entertaining. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing and learnt a little more of the life and times of coal miners in the 1930s.

We hear on the Ghana news that exciting things are happening in Wa. This year would be the 100th birthday of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of the republic of Ghana. The current president, John Mills, has organised celebrations throughout the country in honour of Dr. Nkrumah. These include carrying the “One Unity Ghana Flag” to each region. This week it is in Wa and there are numerous celebrations throughout the town. The flag is due to arrive in Accra on 21st September. This is 2 days after our arrival, so watch this space ………

Two weeks to go

As we continue to prepare for Ghana, a few challenges present themselves.

• We have just started taking Larium for malaria prevention. As one of the side effects, psychotic episodes are possible. Therefore, from now on, things we say may be totally unintelligible. We are hoping that family and friends will tell us if this is the case at any time.
  


• Packing is a challenge. The amount of clothing we can take is very restricted by the sheer scale of the medical kit we want to take. We couldn’t resist taking this picture of approximately two-thirds of the kit we have assembled so far, laid out on the bed. This also restricts the resources we want to take with us: reading books, cameras, laptops and other electronic equipment that we believe will support us in our work and comfort us in our more challenging moments. We have decided that a practice packing session is required to help us prune down what we take.
  


• Will Lin survive for 6 months without chocolate?! Current volunteers say that it is very hard to find chocolate anywhere. A fascinating fact, given that cocoa is Ghana’s most important agricultural export earner. When the slave trade was legally abolished in 1807, Britain aimed to establish “legitimate trade” with Ghana. This led to increasing trade in palm oil, cotton, rubber and cocoa over the ensuing years. It will be really interesting to see how much vestige of British colonial rule still exists today in all aspects of Ghanaian life.

We have had a really enjoyable meeting with a returned volunteer, Maddy Parker, who is a primary headteacher in West London. She provided us with a delightful meal, showed us great pictures of where we are going, and gave us an advice sheet from first hand experience.

We have learned that we will be sharing a house in Wa with an Australian VSO volunteer (Mel Treweek) and we are now in regular email contact with her. She has been in Wa for over a year and will be finishing her placement in December. She tells us that the house is excellent and is often nicknamed “the chateau”. Talk about raising expectations!

We are now engaging in some serious reading about Ghana and anxiously await the return of our passports with visas, so that we can enter the country.