WATER

Living in Northern Ghana has really brought into focus the significance of having a regular water supply. We are living in comparative luxury, in that we have a tap in our garden and water flows on most days between about 4.00 a.m. and 7.00a.m., although the timing is rather unpredictable. The early morning trek backwards and forwards with buckets of water is now a normal part of our daily routine. The reason for all Haydn’s clothing in the picture is to protect him from mosquitoes. The malarial mosquitoes bite between dusk and dawn and this, of course, coincides with the time when wer has to be collected. Now we are in the dry season, the number of insects has diminished significantly and the risk of mosquito bites is reduced. However, we are still being rigorous about anti-malarials, insect repellent, and covering up between dusk and dawn.

Some VSO volunteers have to rely on a well for their water or they have to go to the local bore hole. This is, of course, what local people have to do all the time. In many cases, the bore hole is a long way from the home. It is the women, and sometimes the children, who spend hours every day walking backwards and forwards, carrying heavy loads of water, usually in buckets or huge metal bowls. Everything is carried on the head, and we often wonder about the impact of this on the body, given the weight of water. However, it is really noticeable that Ghanaian women have wonderful posture. They must spend so much of their lives carrying things on their heads, together with babies on their backs, that there is no possibility of slouching around. Water is collected by the women and children in the early morning or evening. The picture shows local children at our nearest bore hole pumping water in the evening.

In addition to spending many hours doing physical labour, women have a very raw deal in many ways. As noted by UNICEF in a recent report (July 2009) called, Children in Ghana, “......much of the abuse and exploitation of girls and women is due to their upbringing in a society in which male dominance and control are widely accepted, and women and girls are trained and perceived to be dependent, passive and accepting of their status” . (Amazing, but just as we are typing this sentence, a womens’ protest march is going past our window, demanding an end to violence against women in this Upper West Region – Great!)

The point about the role of women is well illustrated by an experience of one of our VSO colleagues, Mike. He was queuing to get water from the well. Seeing that he was a white man, a local man approached him and insisted that Mike shouldn’t carry his own water. Mike protested at first, but then thought it might be impolite to refuse the Ghanaian man’s offer. At this point, the man called for his sister to carry Mike’s water. Men don’t carry water - or very much else, it seems!

Ghana’s main water supply comes from the Volta Lake, the largest human made lake in the world. Hopefully one day it will be piped as far as the Northern regions of Ghana. Near to us is a significant tributary of this lake, the Black Volta River. Last weekend, we visited a village near this river, inhabited by the Lobi tribe. The only other inhabitants of this area are the Hausa people who originate from Nigeria. They rely on fishing in the Volta for their livelihood.

The Lobi people moved to this area from Burkina Faso a few centuries ago, when they were escaping from conflict in their own country. The people have to get clean water supplies from the bore hole, which, again involves a great deal of walking. The women below are pictured at the bore hole in the early morning, and in the evening as they headed back to their village with their water supplies.

Our area of Ghana is renowned for slave raids in the 17th – 19th centuries. The islands on the river Volta provided a safe refuge for people escaping from the raiders. The Lobi villagers view the hippos in the river as sacred, as their traditional folklore says they helped people to escape to the islands, by acting as stepping stones. In the Lobi community, families live in compounds of about 50/60 people.

They are subsistence farmers. The pictures below show their goats, the sorting and pounding of bambara beans, the crops (bambara beans, pumpkin seeds and chilli peppers) drying on the roof , and the silos for storing grain.

They also keep chickens and guinea fowl, as these are often used as sacrifices to their ancestors and gods, as well as for eating. The people have produced nesting boxes made out of mud and straw.

The xylophone, rather than the drum, has great significance in the Lobi culture, and each village has at least one xylophone. These are used for all kinds of rituals and ceremonies. Any man that is born with clubbed hands is said to have “xylophonia” and he will be specially trained as a xylophone player. The man in the picture demonstrated the xylophone for us.

The village children were very wary of us and far too shy to come very close to us. White people are a rarity in their village.

As far as our work is concerned, we are very pleased with the way it is going at the moment. We have now established good working relationships with a number of headteachers, teachers and education officers. We are planning some workshops on leadership and management for headteachers, which we will hold during January and February.

During the past week, Haydn has been working with our housemate, Mel, on maths workshops with curriculum leaders. The second picture below shows one of the participants in the workshops (Pasky with her son, Vaness). Babies go everywhere with their mothers. Teachers in classrooms have their babies on their backs. Women have babies on their back while they are working. This seems to be a nation of very contented babies. We have not seen a single baby crying. We have spoken to some women about this and they can’t believe that in the UK, mothers don’t carry their babies on their backs, but put them into carriages with wheels!!

Politics and Hippos

Ghana is a unitary republic with a multi-party democratic system. Executive power is invested in a president, currently John Evans Atta Mills, who is elected by universal suffrage every 4 years. There is a single house of parliament of 230 members, elected in a first past the post system. John Mills is a member of the NDC party. This is a left of centre party, and the new (December 2008) NDC government has indicated that it is committed to pursuing social democratic policies. For example, it has been responsible for introducing the “feeding” scheme into the most disadvantaged schools. The country is divided into 10 regions, each of which has a regional capital, like Wa, and a regional minister.

This system operates alongside, and separate from, a traditional chieftaincy system. Chiefs are elected by the elders or “kingmakers”. The chief is expected to exhibit exemplary conduct in public. He is responsible for providing leadership to his people, maintaining cultural traditions, and enforcing law and order in his area. In past times, the chief was the military leader in times of war. Yes, chiefs are all men! However, there are also important women leaders, called “queen mothers”, as well as “mantazias.” who are the leaders of a wide range of women’s groups.

Within Wa, there are a number of chiefs for the different areas of the town and surrounding countryside. We have only just discovered that Khalid, the proprietor of the local school, is actually the chief for our area. He has become a real friend to us. He visits us regularly for a chat and has helped us sort out a number of problems that we have had, such as fixing our gas stove. He is an incredibly kind and generous man, who is clearly committed to doing the best for his own people and all the people of Wa.

Wa is supposed to have a “Big Chief”, called the Wa Na. The Wa Na is chosen from all the current chiefs in Wa. However, this position has been in dispute for a number of years, and the decision now rests with the courts. As a result of this ongoing dispute, the Wa Na’s palace has become rather dilapidated. We visited the palace recently, but unfortunately we can’t include a picture. Unbeknown to us, no one is allowed to take pictures of the palace. We had taken a couple of pictures, when members of the army took our camera from us. Linda engaged in a “persuasive discussion” with the soldiers, when one of the soldiers made the mistake of telling Haydn to “control your wife”. Needless to say, our camera was returned to us. However, we did have to delete the pictures first.

This weekend we were joined by 3 other VSO volunteers (Mel, Alison and Cameron) on an overnight visit to a local hippo reserve. Khalid lent us his school bus and driver, so travel to and from the reserve was made so much easier. This reserve of Wichiau is South West of Wa on the Black Volta River, right on the border with Burkina Faso. It is very underdeveloped as a tourist attraction, which partly contributes to its appeal. We arrived in the late afternoon on Saturday, together with our food for the evening and Sunday breakfast. We stayed in the mud-built lodge, while the others slept under a mosquito net on the roof.

We got up at 5.00 a.m. for the “river safari” in search of hippos. We walked for about half an hour to the river to find that our canoe had sunk. There was then an hilarious half hour where our guide and the oarsman tried to lift the canoe from the river bed. In the picture, the opposite side of the river is Burkino Fasso.

The canoe was clearly full of holes, so our enterprising guide took off his socks, borrowed a Swiss army knife from Cameron and proceeded to cut up his socks and plug the holes in the canoe. We were wearing life jackets, but the river looked rather wide and deep, so we asked if the canoe was safe. Our guide replied that he “trusted his socks” – so that was alright then.

Anyway, we set off, with Cameron sitting in the middle of the canoe, bailing out water with a calabash for the whole trip.

It wasn’t long before we found about 7 hippos wallowing around in the water. We landed the canoe on the Burkina Faso side of the river and spent a magical half hour just watching them.

Cameron had to bail out water all the way back as well, as the canoe got deeper and deeper in the water. However, we had a wonderful time and here are some of the hippos we saw:

Wichiau Hippo Reserve is a wonderful development in the area. It is totally run by the local people, who gain all the profits from the reserve. This has enabled a very poor community to build a primary school and to develop improved medical facilities.

Well, it is now officially the dry season. The temperature has dropped and the Hamattan (cool wind blowing sand from the Sahara), means that there is a general haze in the air. The local people say it is cold and they are wearing extra clothing. We are finding the temperature really comfortable, although we have to use a blanket at night.

Linda has spent much of the last week working with our housemate, Mel, running workshops on science teaching for curriculum leaders in primary schools. They used all kinds of household rubbish as teaching resources, to demonstrate that it is possible to engage students in active learning without having to spend money on books and resources. They had the teachers acting as the sun, moon and planets, using a charcoal cooking pot to demonstrate the water cycle and so on. The teachers loved it, and we will now be going into the schools to watch them implement some of the strategies. Next week Mel and Haydn will be running similar workshops in maths.

The picture below shows some of the children who live in our neighbouring houses. Many children have never seen themselves in a mirror and have definitely never had their picture taken. These children had seen our camera and they asked if we would take their picture. They insisted on going home to put their best clothes on first, and we promised to send it to the people in England – so here it is.

A week in Wa

Our first trip out of Wa was last Sunday when we travelled to Jarapa, a nearby town, to visit some VSO friends. It was a truly Ghanaian experience: 4 hours wait for the two hour bus ride to get there, and 30 minutes wait to return in 1hr 10 minutes in a tro tro (mini bus). Both journeys cost approximately 60 p and in the 12 seater tro tro we were one of 20 occupants, plus a baby and tons of luggage. We made sure that we were the first to get on board, so that we could get the front seats next to the driver. Otherwise, we really wouldn’t have coped!

It has been another exciting and challenging week. At the beginning of the week, we had our first visit to a village school, and this proved to be one of our most interesting and rewarding experiences to date. The school has three classes, a headteacher and one teacher. In local schools, children seem to remain in their classrooms at the allotted times to see if they get a teacher or not. The two staff at this school share their time between the three classes. The purpose of our visit was to support our Australian VSO colleague, Mel, in painting an educational frieze of the alphabet in the Kindergarten and Primary 1 classrooms. The kindergarten classroom is really an outdoor veranda.

The three of us travelled in a taxi over one of the roughest dirt roads we have yet experienced. To reach the village, we turned off the ‘main’ road and followed a track. The track became increasingly narrow. The tiny village of Dodiyiri was our destination, and the school was down a narrow footpath. We were all ready to walk the last 100 metres, but our taxi driver dutifully insisted on driving the whole way, each wheel running through the bush either side of the track.
On arrival at the school, we were surprised to see rows of chairs laid out beneath a tree. The Chief, elders and what seemed like the whole village, had turned out to ‘greet’ us.




After they had said a prayer for us, we were asked to tell them about ourselves and explain what we were going to do at the school. The Headteacher acted as an interpreter throughout.

Once formalities had been concluded, we got out the pencils, a big stick ruler and the paints. We then set about creating two white strips on the walls of two classrooms. Templates were used to draw the letters of the alphabet and pictures to represent each letter: a is for ant, b is for ball, c is for cup, d is for drum etc.

All the time we worked, the children helped and sorted templates, fetched water, watched intently and practised their English. Those who know Haydn well will not be surprised, but those with primary teaching experience will be appalled, that he had to repaint the g, j, p, q and y, because he failed to draw them dropping below the line. We are both learning a lot!! The children were brilliant and very excited when we got our camera out and took pictures of them.



The Headteacher, elders and students seemed delighted with the new learning resource they have. The chap in the white t-shirt in the picture above is our taxi driver, known as Ecowas. Having got us to the school, he thought it would be best to stay to take us home, rather than run back to Wa and have to drive the route a second time. He was soon drawing and painting alongside us and took us safely back to the town. He is a wonderful chap. We discussed the Koran and arranged marriages amongst many other things. You may be interested to know that the price of a wife in his tribe is two cows and six sheep. (As you will gather from several of our blog entries, there is much work to do in Ghana to improve the role of women.)

Later in the week, we talked to children at a town primary school about England. They wanted to know such things as the food we eat, what sort of Africans live in the UK, and does England have slaves. They also wanted to know about our families, and when Linda told them that her Mum is nearly 90, they burst into a spontaneous round of applause. The students were particularly surprised to know we could not grow bananas in the UK.

We have also spent this week running IT sessions with education officers, demonstrating how EXCEL can sort and graph data. We also worked at a local secondary school and gave each teacher half an hour’s practice on Word, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of electricity at the school. Some of them had never touched a computer before.

A really surreal experience was at Wa School for the Blind, where Haydn found himself with the kindergarten class. The teacher he was due to support was not there. The students sat in anticipation. They spoke a range of languages, but not English. In desperation, Haydn asked if they could sing a song. About 5 of them stood individually and sang a solo. At the end of each song, they all applauded their classmate with the unusual, but traditional, Ghanaian rhythmic clapping. (Much to Linda’s amusement, Haydn still can’t get this right - rhythm is definitely not his forte.) Fortunately, “10 Green Bottles” came to his rescue. Teaching a kindergarten class of non-English speaking, blind children was definitely an unexpected experience.

By contrast Linda, had just worked with a teacher who had given the class of blind secondary students a cookery lesson for the first time. She had bought all the ingredients out of her own pocket and put them into individual packets correctly weighed out for the recipe. Her husband had brought in the gas cylinder and their oven from home and set it up in the classroom. To explain such actions as “rubbing fat into flour” or “adding a pinch of salt”, the teacher and Lin had to demonstrate the action on the arm of each student, so that they could understand what they needed to do. The students loved it and asked so many really intelligent questions. They were soaking up new knowledge and showed great determination to learn new skills. Ghana is working hard to improve attitudes to disabled people generally, but there is still a long way to go.

Life in Wa

Each morning we wake to a cacophony of distant sounds. The crickets send us to sleep and we think they must chirp all through the night, as they are still going as we wake up. The call to prayer from the mosque is far enough away not to disturb our sleep when they begin at 4.00 a.m. There is competition from the cockerel to see who can penetrate our dreams first. Among the birds that sing at dawn, crows and laughing doves dominate, but as the sun rises there are more and more chirpy little things. (How’s that from an amateur ornithologist; we will get round to identification sometime!) Then, there is the sound of the sweeping of the yards. This is an activity that will grow as the dry season approaches and the dust levels rise. Gradually there is the sound of children singing and playing prior to going off to school for 6.30 a.m. By the time we head off to work on our bicycles, there is the slow thud, thud, thud of the big 6 ft pestle thumping into the barrel sized mortar, to pound the yams for the day’s fufu.

On a week day, we head to either a school or the education office. The morning greetings are a Ghanaian way of life, so we go through the traditional greetings with everyone we pass on route, and with everyone we see at work.

One of our key roles in the education service is to carry out an “organisation assessment”. This week we have been preparing a presentation to senior officers on carrying out self-evaluation and identifying priorities for improvement. The outcomes of this process will then be used to support any applications for NGO support and to determine priorities for future spending. We have set up an organisational development committee to carry out this process. The pictures below show “Madame Director” and other education officers who are members of this committee.

In preparation for our committee, we splashed out on a 25 sheet flip chart which cost us 8.50 Ghana cedis (less than £4.00). The whole education office budget for a year’s running costs - pens, paper, fuel, copier and printer inks and everything else is 400 cedis i.e. one flip chart is about 2% of the annual budget. A 2GB memory stick, which we need in order to help people share data (no networked computers here yet) is 30 cedis. As for internet access and virus protection, these costs are totally prohibitive. We have to ensure our laptops and sticks are kept away from local computers, because of the prevalence of viruses. If anyone knows the head of Vodaphone, please put us in touch. Vodaphone has recently taken over Ghana Telecom, a Ghanaian mobile phone company and one of the biggest players in the local market. Some deal with schools and the education service would be of great benefit!

When we are spending most of the day in the education offices, we sometimes get lunch from the local street sellers. Street food is called “chop”. Our nearest chop sellers are shown below. One woman sells hard boiled eggs, yam chips and a local dish called “red red”, which happens to be Linda’s favourite local food. It consists of a spicy bean stew that is served with fried plantain. This is really filling, and for the equivalent of 30 pence, we both have a meal. The other chop seller produces a very tasty, savoury food, called koosei, which is made mainly of bean flour batter.

In our work we are having to learn new meanings of English words:

Sensitise – Familiarise people/inform people/raise awareness
Sacrifice – use your own time and money to fund work activities; many do.
Motivation – giving a bonus/money/gift to an individual to participate in an activity such as a meeting, or to carry out a specific task.

So: “Next week we are going to sensitise the Education Office Staff about assessing the state of their organisation and their development priorities. We have made a sacrifice in bringing our digital projector, producing a PowerPoint presentation and adding photographs. We may even buy some biscuits and water to motivate the team.”

The other aspect of our daily work is to meet with people at schools and devise a programme that will help improve teaching and learning, organisational management, and develop leadership skills. Much of this last week was spent in visiting schools, observing lessons, and meeting with teachers and headteachers. We are working with Wa School for the Blind, and they are keen for us to support the newly qualified kindergarten teachers. Of course, this stage is way out of our comfort zone. Add to this, the fact that all the children are blind and the teaching takes place in Dagaare, not English, and you can see that we have a real challenge on our hands. The picture below shows Haydn planning his work with the kindergarten, not playing (he says!)

In our work we tend to want to put things in our diary and set a time for the start and end of appointments etc. We are having to adjust to the Ghanaian way of working. Very few people have watches. We must say that Ghanaians, have a good sense of time based purely on the sun’s position. With no watches and no diaries we are having to learn flexibility as a vital skill. We have a feeling that we may become too flexible and have trouble adapting back to a western way of working on our return. With some schools, we have waited for them to get back to us, but are quickly learning to pay a visit and say, “we are coming in at this time on that day, OK”? It usually works, although headteachers carry a lot of information in their heads and can say, “that’s no good because we have an activity on that day”. At least we do get an appointment and are able to work with the schools and staff. We will feature some of our visits and school based activities in future blog entries.

At the end of a working day it is home to our house, preparation of a meal in our kitchen – chef Lin is featured is the picture. It is then to bed under the mosquito net, with the incongruity of all the electricity being off and local people standing outside their homes talking on mobile phones – it is cheaper late at night. We are clearly adapting to the 5.00 a.m. water collecting by being sound asleep soon after 9.00 p.m.

Today is Saturday and we are having time at home to catch up with house and work things. It is market day in Wa, so there are several people and lorries passing our house, carrying produce to market. Just a few hour ago, the lorry below stopped outside our house, because the driver had to do some work on the engine. Lin got into conversation – mainly in broken Waali and sign language – with several of the women, who were really friendly. Some of them motioned that they wanted water, so Lin filled a bottle and threw it up to them. Next minute, they had collected together a load of tomatoes and passed them down to Lin. There was absolutely no expectation of payment. People are so incredibly kind and generous, even when they have so little.

We do hope people in the UK enjoyed bonfire night. It is hard for us to imagine the cold weather and dark nights, while we are applying layers of sun screen and seeking shade at every possible opportunity. However, we are clearly aclimatising, as we haven't needed to sleep with our fan on for the last 2 weeks.

Introdution to Schools and Neighbours

This has been our first week of significant visits to schools. We have visited 5 different schools and met some very impressive headteachers who are battling against the odds: trying to introduce ICT when the school is not connected to an electricity supply; housing books when the room allocated for the library has to be used by 60 pupils; class sizes of over 100 in some cases; the paucity of stimulus materials etc. One thing we could do is help teachers to produce learning resources, as so much of the teaching is made up of teacher talk and use of the blackboard. The problem is that teachers have nowhere to store any resources and classrooms are wide open to the elements and intruders overnight. Some teachers are therefore reluctant to put the effort into making resources that can’t be stored safely.

It is wonderful to see how eager many students are to learn, and less wonderful to see the deprived conditions in which teachers and students have to work. We pass students in the evenings and at weekends, sitting on concrete blocks or tree trunks absorbed in reading. Education is clearly seen as something to be cherished. As we cycle around the area, we now get additional calls from the children of “you came to our school”.

We have observed lessons, and students are so keen to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding. It is a delight that in every class we enter, there is always a bright eyed child who takes the lead in welcoming us and leading the class in a song or a greeting.

We will do a blog entry on a day in the life of a school, once we are well known enough to get out our cameras. In the meantime these three photographs are of the launch of a significant initiative designed to empower communities to support their local schools and to campaign for better resources. VSO has a wonderful volunteer, Ruby, who has been here for 2 years. She has been working with the Education Service and local activists to set up a district “coalition”, representing all schools. Its aim is to raise funds and champion projects for improvement. These projects will include getting electricity to schools, building classrooms, getting toilets provided, supplying school furniture and, in some cases, actually getting a school built. The most needy village schools have classes of 50 or more meeting under a mango tree, with no facilities whatsoever. The launch of this coalition has been featured on National TV, as it is seen as an initiative that could be replicated across the country, promoting action by communities to help themselves. The coalition will help local communities to prioritise and plan spending e.g. they will ensure electricity arrives before computers, as was not the case in one recent government sponsored venture!

On the home front, we now have 2 housemates, (Cathy and Mel), so we have to be much more careful with our collection and use of water. The rainy season is gradually coming to an end, and the dry season will be with us until next March. We are getting to know our neighbours much better, and they are becoming increasingly relaxed with us. The pictures below show a few of our nearest local residents!