Another week flies by

The temperature has risen rapidly this week. We have slept without the fan since November. Now we have to have it on all night. At the hottest part of the day, temperatures exceed 40 deg C. It does not seem to get much cooler at night! The smell of the baked earth in the middle of the day is not at all unpleasant - and very distinctive. This ia another memory that will seem so far away once we return to the UK.

We have completed our final headteacher workshop. We have had 65 attendees in total, and we are very pleased with the feedback received. There are certainly some very talented and committed headteachers in the area. Their pay is very low, and teachers pay is even lower. There is a real job to be done by the government in raising the status and self esteem of school staff, if Ghana's millennium goal of universal education for all 5-14 year olds is to be achieved.




Our families have raised significant sums of money for our work and this has been used to provide resources for our workshops. Paper is a really expensive and precious commodity here. It all has to be brought by road from Accra. We have provided headteachers with printed materials that will enable them to share learning with their staff, undertake key self evaluations, and work on developing more appropriate learning and teaching strategies. The workshops have given them much to consider in improving their leadership and management of their schools.

People at home have also collected and sent out computer components. With replacement hard drives we have been able to bring some ‘old’ computers back to life. Education Service staff are slowly plucking up courage to come to the resource centre to practice their typing and mouse control skills.

Using money sent from home, we have also assembled over 100 scissors, rulers, tape measures, marker pens, string, pegs and geometrical instruments. These are all bagged up ready for distribution to all primary and junior sedondary schools in the municipality. This equipment will enable schools to produce classroom displays and a wide range of teaching and learning materials. Here is Haydn bringing the pegs and balls of string from the local market.

School walls are concrete (where there are classrooms!), so display is an issue. With string and pegs, teachers are able to hang up visual displays and resources which make for much more interactive learning. Many thanks to our families for making all this possible and, of course, to our Education Service colleagues, who are seen below, bagging up all the equipment.

One of the local volunteers has been collecting all the cardboard he can get and is cutting it into rectangles, painting the pieces black and encouraging their use as mini chalkboards. This enables students to demonstrte their understanding and therefore helps the teacher to assess their progress. As paper is so expensive, the small chalk boards are an innovative and helpful resource that costs very little to provide.

Our new volunteer colleagues arrived last weekend and are settling in to their new environment. Joanne is now sharing our house with us; Maureen moves in when we go. The house will then be theirs.

Joanne is a teacher support officer - and the first VSO volunteer from Gibralter. She is the one who will eventually distribute all our resource packs to schools. Joanne is working with us, as a direct replacement for Melanie. She is focussed on helping the schools to develop more creative and effective teaching practice. She will be the catalyst to ensure that the packs we have provided will be put to good use. She will work with Education Service staff to give teachers ideas about learning resources that will help stimulate interest and thus aid learning for the students.

Maureen is working at the Regional Education Office on the development of the curriculum for pupils with special needs. To many in Ghana, "special needs" still equates to disability and the concept that some students are slower learners than others, is new. She will have some great challenges ahead.

Short term, there will be another resident at our house. He will actually move in next weekend. Greg is a US engineer from Seattle. Greg is working with the local office of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA). The government has bought agricultural equipment and his role is to help local people get the equipment working in the local environment. His key project concerns the combine harvester, mentioned last week. Now we have a photograph of the combine harvester working in a rice field.

.....and a couple of the Combine harvester at the local MoFA headquarters.

Greg has an instruction manual in Chinese, and one of his tasks is to investigate every last cog and screw in the combine harvester and to produce an instruction manual in English.

To get this complex piece of machinery into small rice fields is a real challenge. The government has encouraged farmers to assemble plots of land into blocks, so that the combine can harvest a big area and the farmers can then share the resulting grain. The cost of such machinery is way beyond the reach of farmers and some form of co-operative arrangement has to be worked out. A problem appears to be that the World Bank, and international support agencies for agriculture do not like the sound of co-operatives, generally. They want the machinery owned by private individuals and not by the government. Currently there is no Upper West Region business that can afford the capital involved. The combine is certainly beyond the reach of any individual farmer in the Upper West. Brand new tractors lie idle at the MoFA HQ, because no-one can afford to buy or run them. The way forward has to be farmers sharing equipment costs and any resulting profits.

We end this week with a few early quotes from Maureen and Joanne.
“Its hot ................and it's all goats and gutters”
“Aren’t people friendly!”
“How on earth do you find your way around without road names and maps?"

Traffic & Transport

We are now beginning to understand the meaning of “hot”. The dry, Harmattan season is gradually drawing to a close and humidity is gradually increasing, together with temperatures up to 40+ degrees centigrade. We just sweat all the time, and within 5 minutes of having a cold shower, we are sweating again. Even the Ghanaians are complaining about the heat. However, we are coping pretty well with it, and actually enjoying it. We just have to slow down and do everything at a much slower pace. It is great to ride our bikes, because this gives us a lovely breeze.

As the development of Ghana’s infrastructure, including improvements to transport, is essential for the future, we decided to say a bit about transport in this blog entry.

Our 17 hour bus journey from Accra to Wa and our 19 hour bus journey from Wa to Kumasi have featured in earlier blog entries. These are not typical, we have just drawn a short straw on our long-distance bus travel. There are no operating passenger rail services in Ghana, so the bus is the only affordable option for long-distance travel. There is an airport at Tamale some 7 hours south of us, from which you can fly to Accra for many, many, times the bus fare!

The government-owned Metro Mass bus services cover the whole country.

Private companies also operate on some local and inter-city routes.

Ticket prices are very low, even for quite long distances. It costs us the equivalent of about £10 to travel to Accra. There is a proposal to privatise the Metro Mass company. We wonder how long, under private ownership, the company would keep all routes open throughout Ghana. At present you can travel to anywhere in Ghana on this service along the major roads - provided you don’t mind being squashed into the bus with at least 100 other people. This always makes travel really interesting, because you really get to know your fellow passengers.



Once in a town, transfer to a trotro is very easy. These vehicles leave bus stations, known in Ghana as lorry parks, when they are full - and we mean full. We travelled on the one pictured below. It was licensed to carry 27 people; 6 rows of 4 behind the driver and a front seat for 2. With the passengers come babies and every sort of luggage.

On the roof of trotros you will see sacks of grain, charcoal, baskets of fruit, bicycles and goats. When we travelled to Accra from Koforidua over Christmas, we bought an extra seat for our luggage. People are happy with this. The driver gets the money for the seat and the trotro is full earlier, so leaves earlier. Below is a row of trotros at a lorry park in Wa waiting for passengers.

Most drivers and passengers appear to feel comforted by quotes from the Bible or Koran that are painted on their vehicles.

In the south of the country, there are more cars than in the north, and the traffic jams make the M6 hold-ups seem insignificant. One can take 4 hours to travel 10 km in Accra at some times. In our first week in Ghana we had first hand experience of this in moving by coach from our hotel to the VSO offices, a distance of 5km. It took over 2 hours.

Catalytic converters are not common and hence air pollution in the large cities is horrendous. We are pleased to be in the quiet north with our bicycles.

45% of road deaths in Ghana, are of pedestrians. The rule is that driving/riding is on the right hand side of the road, but generally people just drive wherever there is a space. Pavements, road signs and junction markings are all needed. A recent conference on road safety made the link between poverty and road accidents. Poor people walk everywhere and are vulnerable to being hit by vehicles. After pedestrians, the second highest proportion of deaths comes from tro-tro accidents. Again, it is poor people who use these services most. For young men, road injuries are the second leading cause of premature death after HIV/AIDS.

In our first week we bought bicycles. We were well advised to go for second hand bikes without gears. If a bike has been on Ghanaian roads for some time, then its components are robust and easily repaired. Modern, cheap imports from China have complex gearing and flashy additions which break down and fall off in a very short time. Wa is flat and we do not require gears. We need a bike that can carry our shopping. Our purchases are often heavy, as things to drink are very important (and we do not mean alcohol in this heat!). Our bikes have served us well; a few punctures and one collapsed and rebuilt wheel is all we have had to cope with so far.

Being in the North, there are many bike repair shops, so each time we have had a puncture, the equivalent of 20p has enabled a repair without even getting our hands dirty. One particularly heavy parcel of computer components caused three spokes to snap on Haydn’s back wheel. By the time the bike was taken in for repair, there were many loose spokes. In the UK, the wheel would have been deemed irreparable. The equivalent of £1.50 was the cost of a wheel rebuild, and it has held up well ever since!

Cycling is very popular in the north of the country. Most people can’t afford motorbikes, known locally as motos. Certainly cars are out of the question for 99% of the population. Mitsubishi, Toyota, Nissan, Ford and Land Rover, 4WD vehicles, SUVs and pick-ups do exist, but it is only the business owners and directors of NGOs who can afford to run these vehicles, let alone buy them. The pictures below show two contrasting vehicles!

Motos are popular and we love to see the families on the way to school in the morning, with 4 or 5 children being carried on one motobike - a picture we have yet to capture!!

Goods are brought to the Upper West mainly on heavy lorries. It never ceases to amaze us to watch the variety of goods that are unloaded from one truck: reams of paper, boxes of tomato sauce, sardines, Blue Band margarine, bicycle tyres, bags of grain, foam mattresses, and the list goes on.

We have recently had a new volunteer working in Wa. He is an engineer and is helping the government agency for agriculture to bring into use a combine harvester imported from China. During its first major outing, the drive belt snapped 8 times as the ground used to grow rice has never been properly cleared for mechanisation. The heavy soil and stones were too much for the belt to cope with and it kept snapping.

Replacing a combine harvester drive belt proved an interesting logistical exercise. The first time it broke, someone drove from Wa to Accra and back again (712 km each way) to buy one. He did have the foresight to buy 4, but they only lasted a week. The next consignment was ordered by telephone. The package of belts was put on a bus and the delivery was in Wa within 24 hours. Things do get done - in the Ghanaian way!

A footnote for all sports car enthusiasts - we have yet to see one in Ghana! I wonder why?

Planning for road improvements is going on, but the finances are unreliable. There are 32,000 kilometres of road in Ghana. Of these, 26,000 kilometres are dirt roads. The abandoned roadworks around the country are testament to broken promises. In 2007, a national conference on road building and road safety, argued for better strategic planning and used the following quote from Ghana’s first president:
“Thought without action is empty. Action without thought is blind”
Kwame Nkrumah

Our Neighbourhood

The headteacher workshops continue. We are delighted with the response we are getting from participants. Their eagerness to learn is so satisfying for us. They actively participate throughout and are full of questions.

We always seek feedback in order to improve what we are delivering. We ask at the end for participants to share key learning with the group and to indicate what actions they will take as a result of the workshop. Work on leadership styles has been an amazing eye opener to most, and headteachers have all sorts of creative ideas about how they will use their learning with their staff.

Sometimes the feedback we get leaves us speechless. One male head said that an action he would take following the workshop was, “to review his relationship with his wife...” We did not know what to say or expect as he continued, “....seeing you two working together, I realise the woman can take a lead and it makes me think that I should treat my wife differently”. What on earth could we say in response to that!! This could actually be our greatest success in Ghana, as he said this in front of 13 other, predominantly male, headteachers.

We have lived in Wa for nearly 5 months and it is about time we shared some pictures of our house and local neighbourhood:

This is the house in which we live.




Ayisha comes every weekend to help us with the cleaning and washing. She is the carer for three younger siblings, all in local colleges at the moment. She had to suspend her own education to see the others through theirs, after her mother died.



At the moment we share the house only with the wildlife. We have four or five of these friendly chaps who eat many irritating insects. Just occasionally a lizard will eat a spider ...etc. etc!



A lovely family lives behind our house. Farook (below) is the man in the family. One of the delights of living here is listening to the girls sitting behind our garden wall in front of Farook’s house singing each evening. Another regular sound is that of the children playing football. All the local children seem to play happily 90% of the time. Their laughter will be something we will miss when we return to the UK.



This delightful family lives to one side of us. Osman is Headteacher of the Dodyiiri village school, featured in a previous blog entry. Osman attended one of our headteacher workshops and is very pleased with the insights it gave him. His school is really challenging. He has one teacher working with him to teach 4 classes.



On the other side of us is Fatima, a local teacher. She is a real gem, always warm and friendly, and full of questions about the UK. She is feeding her granddaughter in the picture. She is going to teach us how to make tofu from soya beans before we leave.



We all live along the road pictured below. Fatima's house is on the left, behind the blue container, which houses a welder's business. If you need a gate or railing, this is the place to come.



Below is our “corner shop” under a mango tree, run by Memuna. Every time we pass we get a very warm hello and wave, and every time we buy something, a delightful smile. Like all the other local shopkeepers, hawkers and farmers, Memuna speaks Waali and no English.



Just a few metres further on is our local “supermarket”.


Once the shopping is done, a few more metres brings us to the Countryside Spot. This is our local “pub” at which we spend some lovely early evenings absorbing the sights and sounds of the local life: bulbul birds with their fabulously cheerful chirpy song, the laughing doves, the scurrying lizards and, of course, the local goats and chickens.



Most local people are Muslims and the mosque is only about 200 metres from our house. The call to prayer at 04.00 is very gentle indeed and another sound we shall take home in our memories.


Last but not least, we have the local bike repair shop. These lads have helped us out on a number of occasions. For the equivalent of 20p we can have a puncture repaired and not even get our hands dirty.



On the opposite side of the road to us is a beautiful forest in which we walk occasionally, taking binoculars to look at the birdlife. In the recent dry spell a fire tore through the undergrowth. The tree pictured below fell two weeks later. It had clearly been smouldering from the inside until the trunk was weakened and it fell.


The sunsets and starlit skys are fabulous. This scene is outside our house virtually every evening.



Next weekend we have a new VSO volunteer coming to join us in our house. We are looking forward to meeting Joanne and being the experts on Wa. It will feel good to explain how we cope with the water supply and get gas for the cooker and electricity for the meter. It all seems so straightforward now. Joanne will be a teacher support officer, and we will be working with her for 4 weeks before we leave.

A week in the life....

This last week has been interesting, exciting and challenging.

The Harmattan wind is still blowing and there is dust everywhere, inside and outside. We even have to dust the papers and booklets before using them at our workshops. It is impossible to keep shoes clean. We were daft enough to bring black shoes and white shoes. The only suitable colour is red/brown.

It is now gradually getting hotter, as the Harmattan season draws gradually to an end. March is likely to be the hottest month of the year before the rainy season begins in April. All this means that the nights are no longer cool, and a cold shower is bliss!

Water is clearly being rationed, and supplies to our tap in the garden are much reduced. Previous volunteers told us that last year in February/March, they had 9 consecutive days without water. It is now Monday evening and we have had no water since last Thursday morning. Fortunately, we still have some stored in our barrels, but we have to count every drop. All of this means that people in the villages are experiencing really hard times, walking greater distances to get water, and getting water from anywhere by any means.

On Sunday 31st January, we started the week by joining a group of Ghanaians in a local Spot (Bar) to watch the African Cup of Nations football final, Ghana v Egypt. Despite losing, we, and most of our local friends and colleagues, were delighted that Ghana reached the final. They are now looking forward to the World Cup in South Africa. Football fans will have noticed empty stadia in this competition. This is no reflection on the enthusiasm of local supporters, just a sign of the impossibility of African people being able to afford to travel to distant lands, let alone pay for accommodation and football tickets.

During this last week, we have had a volunteer colleague from Accra, Jude, staying in Wa. Jude is working on developing the school curriculum, so it is important that he sees the conditions in the schools in the north of the country, as they are so different from Accra. We have spent some time this week taking him round to various schools, so that he can talk with headteachers and observe some lessons.

Last weekend, we spent a great evening with Jude and our VSO friend, Cameron, sharing our experiences and generally having a good time. In the picture, Linda is serving bananas in bright green jelly. Our previous housemate, Mel, sent us a lovely box of goodies from Australia, including 4 packets of jelly. This led the four of us into a whole load of reminiscences about our childhood. We all used to think that jelly only came in the shape of a rabbit and, believe it or not, we all used to fight over getting the tail!!

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this last week, we ran the second of our 2-day workshops with a group of headteachers. Last term, we circulated headteachers with a questionnaire, so that they could identify their development needs relating to leadership and management. We received a huge response. Sixty -five headteachers expressed an interest in attending our workshops. This includes quite a number of headteachers from out in the villages, who have quite a journey on rough roads, in order to get into Wa.

Like the previous week, the first day of the workshop focused on particular aspects of leadership and management, such as leadership styles, team building, developing a vision for the school, time management etc. Day 2 was spent mainly on developing coaching skills, which is what these particular headteachers had requested. Institute of Education colleagues will recognise the activity in triads!

We had a great group of 13 headteachers who participated actively and enthusiastically and we thoroughly enjoyed working with them. (This time, we didn’t forget to start and end each session with either a Christian or a Muslim prayer!!)

We had a number of invitations to visit schools. Unfortunately we won’t have time between now and the end of March to follow up these invitations.

In conversation with one of these headteachers, she told us that the reason that she really enjoys being a head is that she is in charge and can make decisions, whereas at home, her husband is the “master of the house” and she has to do as she is told. She told us that she really liked the way “you white people have equality between the sexes”. She is a really dynamic person who is doing her bit for equality in Ghana.

The next workshop will have a specific focus on accountability and the following two workshops will focus on learning and teaching.

Another of the highlights of this week has been visiting some of the schools and some of the market stall holders to give them printed copies of photographs that we have taken of them. Local people are so delighted to see pictures of themselves and they get so much pleasure out of having a picture that they can keep.

Friday of each week is “dress up day”. This means that we are expected to go to work wearing traditional clothes or clothes made out of the Ghana Education Service material. Our colleagues were insistent that we follow suit, so here we are in our Friday gear!

In the education office, we share a base room with 3 colleagues: Yakubu, Mary and Gladys. In conversation with Mary during the week, she discovered that Linda’s Mum will be having her 90th birthday on 9th April. She immediately told Linda that she must have Ghanaian dress (a bright, colourful long skirt with matching top, called an “up and down”) to wear at her Mum’s celebration, in order to bring her Mum good luck from Ghana. There was no argument to be had. The next morning, she brought in a local tailor to measure Lin (so that didn’t take long!!) We’ve no idea what material she will choose or what design - so look out Mum, Lin will have to wear it!!