Chapter 20...The Zuarungu Festival!

Yesterday (Saturday 26^th February) a group of us volunteers attended a local festival in Zuarangu where there were chiefs, dancing, food and music! We arrived near the end of the day part where speeches are given and local dancing is performed in the centre of a huge arena. 

A very elegantly dressed Chief!

The idea of the dancing is to produce lots of dust!

The evening then turns into a drinking, eating and dancing frenzy with people dispersing to a social centre set up as a ‘club’ with music booming and bass being heard for miles throughout the night! 

We decided to head to a local 'spot' (pub/bar) near to the social centre to have a few quieter drinks and actually be able to talk to one another and hear people's responses! Volunteers being grown-up and sensible, surely not!  

Chapter 19...The serious side!

As you all know unlike my past travelling adventures this one is not all about fun, sightseeing and the odd spot of partying! Well there will obviously be all those things over the next year, but they will not be my main purpose for being in Ghana!

I haven’t ‘officially’ started work yet as we are given the first two weeks off to get settled and find-our-feet (or ‘bumming around’ as my sister calls it)! I did however spend two days in meetings at the office last week just so I could suss everything out...the first was a VSO review meeting on Tuesday, which was very interesting and helpful for me as it included some strategic planning for the future, which is exactly the type of Marketing I love to do! The second was a focus group meeting on Wednesday to try and find out more about school girls and their parents views on education. The aim was to delve deep into what they thought about the Ghana Education Services inclusion and treatment of girls in school and whether any improvements had been made...! 

So at the focus group meeting the parents and pupils were split, with the group of 10 parents being taken to sit under one tree for their group discussion and the group of 11 girls (aged around 11-13) taken to sit under another tree for theirs. I spent the morning observing the parents and the afternoon the girls and some of the issues being highlighted by both groups were just unbelievable and at times very disturbing! 

The young group of girls that I observed!

The parents mentioned issues to do with ICT and lack of resources; teachers being late for lessons or not turning up at all; infrastructure of schools being inadequate; teachers being drunk; teachers beating children (harshly) as punishment; overcrowded classrooms...the horrendous list of concerns just went on and on...!

My afternoon spent with the girls was even more of an eye-opener and much harder to listen to! They started off talking about girls being pregnant at school, often not through choice, but by meeting boys at jams (mainly funeral parties where it is traditional to play loud music and to party into the early hours)! One girl talked about being able to handle herself, which is why she hadn’t got pregnant at a jam! Others talked about some parents letting their daughters stay late at the jams and not really caring about what happened to them! This all got very intense for Damien (another volunteer) and I so we steered the conversation onto lighter things to do with girls and boys chores before school and whether the girls thought it fair that they have more chores than boys so are often late for school, therefore missing out on vital education! But before we knew it the Ghanaian male teacher leading the discussions (with a female Ghanaian teacher too) had steered the conversation back onto pregnancy and what the girls had learnt at school to do with puberty and before I knew it we were talking about abuse and sexual harassment in schools! The girls talked about some male teachers asking them to be their girlfriend and if they said no they would then face ridicule by that teacher in lessons! If girls became pregnant by teachers they would have to terminate the pregnancy or drop out of school! They also spoke about harsh beatings from teachers, so much so that some didn’t go back to school the next day if they had received a beating! One girl mentioned teachers being drunk and how she could smell the alcohol on their breath or ‘just tell by their face!’ The list of negatives just went on and on...!

I knew before I went to the meeting that these were HUGE issues in Ghanaian schools and that they are very often over-looked with male teachers who sexually assault their pupils simply being transferred to other schools instead of being removed from the education system altogether! But to actually sit with a group of girls where it was clear to see who had experienced such abuse at school was just astonishing and something I never expected to be experiencing so soon into my placement!

I gave myself Thursday and Friday off work, as I felt it was all very emotional and intense and something I need to get my head around properly before deciding what action to take! One thing is for sure though...I will definitely be asking to help run the ‘girls groups’ in schools, which are designed to educate girls on all the things they discussed in our focus group meeting and fingers crossed I can also do some mentoring and even just be a friend to some of these girls so they feel they’re not alone!

Chapter 18...The first day and night in my new home!

Following the bus journey from hell the four of us quickly showered and got changed then went for lunch with some of the other volunteers here in Bolgatanga! We sat outside in the garden of Comme Ci, Comme Ca (a local hotel) eating, drinking and getting to know one-another, which was really lovely!

Rachel then bought me home on her moto for my first night in my new home! I am living with Rachel who is Scottish; 27 and 18 months through a 2 year placement (she wants to extend) and Vic who is English; 32 and leaving for home in May after two and a half years here in sunny Ghana! Oh and of course I can't forget the fourth and most important housemate...Layla (Vic and Lewis' kitten, who is just SO cute)! 

I have been told on several occasions that I am extremely lucky to have been put in this house because the girls are both lovely, very sociable and very knowledgable on Ghana! Plus we have all the amenities a volunteer could ask for – electricity (most of the time), a night watchman - Godwin, mains water and a polytank for when there is no water, an oven, a toaster and a blender! Could a girl ask for more eh?! So I have  been treated to food delights such as toast and groundnut paste (basically peanut butter) for breakfast as well as amazing meals of pesto pasta, fish casserole and rice and tonight is a ratatouille style dish! As I have no means to buy food yet I have been treated to all these yummy meals, but come the end of the week the girls will have to be treated to my cooking (uh oh I hear you all cry)! Apparently we also sometimes bake flapjack, shortbread, banoffee pie, pizza and flatbread :-)

So anyway enough on the food (has anyone else noticed that I talk an awful lot about the food in Ghana?!) The house, let me tell you about the house...it has three bedrooms (one en-suite, which Vic snapped up a couple of years ago), a large living room area where we also keep the motos, a kitchen and larder, toilet with seperate bathroom and a random area that Rach uses for her schools resources! 

The front gates to our house (taken from the inside)

The front of the house (the wooden doors with the reindeer on are the front entrance)! My bedroom window is the first one on the left!

The view over our compound wall looking into the fields behind our house :-)

 And my bedroom itself looked a little bit like this when I arrived on Sunday...

And now, before even going shopping for pretty little things, it looks like this...

 

Right I think that is enough for now...my next blog post will hopefully tell you a bit about my first week at work and some more about Bolga itself! I can tell you’re all looking forward to it already!

Chapter 17...The Ghanaian Transport System!

What is the saying we have back home – ‘you wait 10 minutes for one bus to come along, then three come along at once!’ (We all know what I’m like with sayings, phrases etc, I’ve probably got it slightly wrong, but you get the gist)...well in Ghana that saying would be ‘you wait and wait and wait and wait some more for one bus to come along, then when it does it breaks down!’ 

So as you know from my last blog post, on Saturday morning I and three fellow volunteers had an early start to catch our bus to Bolgatanga in the Upper East region of Ghana (pretty much Burkina Faso)! We were all psychologically prepared for the 15 hour bus journey, we had packed a take-away breakfast and were good to go...! 

Now seeing as Ghana is around the same size as the UK, we all thought that 15 hours would be the max it would take to travel from one end to the other, unless we hit traffic or the usual road problems one occassionally comes across! But oh no, in Ghana things work very differently, especially their concept of time...!

Here in Ghana GMT no longer stands for Greenwich Mean Time, it stands for Ghanaian Maybe Time, because all sense of being on time does not exist as I found out when our 9am bus to Bolga eventually arrived to take us to the North at 3pm!!! So after 6 hours of waiting at the bus stop we were finally on our way with armed guard on board to deter any hi-jacks! We made it out of Accra in a couple of hours, which was pretty good considering it was like trying to leave central London during rush hour! As we were heading out of town we passed some fellow volunteers who were headed to the Upper West region, their bus had been broken down for around 5 hours (in the end they had to wait nearly 10 hours for another bus to take them the rest of their journey to Wa) so they were sat on the roadside waiting for assistance! We passed, gave them a wave and thought how lucky we were to have been kept waiting at the station instead of the roadside!

So to cut a long story short, we eventually made it to Bolga at 10am Sunday morning, only 10 hours late!!! We had an hour stop around midnight to fix a flat tyre and a slow journey between Tamale and Bolga, but 25 hours after we were due to leave Accra, the four of us had made it in one piece (just about), me vowing to wait a LONG time until I did that bus journey again!!!

Chapter 16...The ICT (yet another VSO acronym)

ICT is VSO's shortening of 'In-Country-Training' which is the introductory training all volunteers receive when they first get to their placement country. It usually consists of anything from a week (mine for example) to 6 weeks for those who have a language to learn (luckily for me most Ghanaians speak English, but then have their own regional and district dialects to keep themselves distinct and unique from other groups!) At the end of my ICT week I have decided to sum up some of my experiences, of what has been an extremely intensive, yet informative (although at times not relevant) and fun welcome to Ghana! So I have...

• made some lovely friends with whom I know I can call upon when it comes time to travel around Ghana...!

Top photo: Some of the Ghana ICT group of Feb 2011!
Bottom photo: About 18 of us in a 'tro tro' - Ghana's word for what is
basically a minibus used as a share taxi!

• met one of my future housemates - Rachel who is 27 YOA, with GSoH, Scottish, works as a TSO (Teacher Support Officer) and is 18 months into a 2 year placement!
• discovered more about my role and what is expected of me, which is apparently to work with communities and other NGO's to give local people a voice when it comes to their childrens education, so they can go to District Assemblies and advocate for change!
•  eaten enough food to last me the entire year of my placement - kelewele - deep fried plantain (delicious), jollof rice (yummy), banku - ball of maize (not so), okre soup/stew (eww)

A typical plate of Ghanain food (basically lots of carbs) - banku, jollof rice, beans, deep fried plantain, chicken fish and spicy spicy sauces! All very yummy, although the maize takes some getting used to, especially eating it with your hands!

This is okra soup/stew, which you eat with your hands along with a huge ball of maize! I did NOT like this, it was a fish based one with crabs in, which the Ghanaians eat whole, shell and all!

• sweat out half of this food in the scorching heat - on average 33 degrees by day, 28 by night!
• had a serious lack of sleep and fallen asleep in a workshop! I thought they were going to put me on the next flight home!
• experienced a night of live Ghanaian/Burkina Faso music and dancing! The hand and the moves are going to go down SO well here!!!

A brilliant Burkina Faso band called Koroleko! Their dancing was amazing!

• started to learn two local languages - Talen (for where I work - Talensi Nabdam) and Gurrene (for where I live - Bolgatanga)!
• received my first allowance, which looks and sounds a lot in Ghanaian Cedis, but works out at around £150 per month - eek!!!

My Ghanaian Cedis :-)

And so now with ICT done, next comes the hard part...actually starting the job I have been flown out here to do!!! Oh but before that is the 15+ hour bus journey tomorrow to actually get to Bolgatanga, wish me luck...!

Mam je'ebi me!

Chapter 15...The Departure and Arrival!

I have arrived...AND almost even done my first 24 hours in Ghana, Accra the capital to be precise! 

 SO much has happened since I left home at 10am yesterday to travel down to Heathrow airport, I feel like I don't really know where to start, but to save this from being the World's most boring blog post I will put my brain into gear and try piece it all together for you...

At 12am yesterday I found myself alone at Heathrow Terminal 5 with my backpack and daypack on a trolley and my helmet under my arm! As being dropped off at an airport alone to travel to somewhere unknown is nothing unusual for me now, it didn't really feel all that strange and there was not a tear in sight! That morning I had said goodbye to my best friend in the whole Universe (my little sister for those of you who couldn't guess), as well as my parents best friends who VERY kindly offered/got asked to do the airport run for me, so anyone would have thought the tears would be free-flowing! 

As there were no tears to occupy my time at the airport I decided to treat myself to some last food and drink treats and don't even ask why I chose these - an egg sandwich from Pret, a Starbucks strawberries and cream frappuccino and a bar of Cadburys fruit and nut! Me treating it as my last supper and really going all out (not)!

So to move this story on a bit quicker than it currently is...as it came time to head to the gate to board the plane I met the other volunteer I knew was going to Ghana with me (we had met at SKWID training, see chapter 12)! We were chatting away when suddenly someone interrupted us to take a photo (of them, not us) and as I turned around to see who this rude person was I noticed it was Kate Garraway of GMTV fame! She was also heading to Ghana, who knows what for, and was on our flight! Interesting I thought, maybe Ghana will be filled with loads of D list celebrities!

A VERY turbulent flight later where I had my sick bag ready for most of it, we landed at 21:30 in a 'cool' 28 degrees Ghana! Walking through arrivals with the other 4 volunteers I'd met en route, we were greeted by a young lady holding up a piece of paper with V.S.O typed up in big letters, a relief for us all to see someone there to meet us! But not only was there someone there to meet us, there were also 12+ other volunteers who had also been on our flight and were all heading to the Capital for a week of In-Country-Training...!

We were then transported by bus to Sun Lodge Hotel in Accra, which was described by one of the current volunteer reps (who I will be living with) as 'one of the best (mid-range) hotels in the Capital!' Brilliant I thought, I can definitely do this volunteering stuff, especially when we arrived and were checked into a huge room with a/c, TV, balcony overlooking the pool, fridge, water, kettle AND wi-fi...all luxuries in a developing country, as we all know, and all luxuries that I was told I should make-the-most of now, as there will be NOTHING like this where I'll be living! Great I thought, I knew it was all too good to be true :-)

So...today, Valentines Day, has consisted of a bus tour around the capital where a million photos were taken (surprise), AMAZING food which has been non-stop, good conversation and a spot of 'work' in the form of visa applications, emergency contact forms etc! 

My small backpack is at the end of the far bed! All the other bags in the room belong to my room mate! As you can probably expect everyone was VERY surprised by how few bags I had with me! I now think I maybe should have taken advantage of the 2x23kg baggage allowance and not just gone for my 20kg backpack!

Me outside the hotel we're staying in!

A Ghanaian street market!

Our yummy bus snack of a traditional African meat sandwich and waffles :-)

Independence Square!

The location of our lunch by the pool!

The pool!

Me on our balcony overlooking the pool :-

)

All-in-all a VERY good first day and start to my placement, I just hope the next year runs as smoothly as this, but we all know it won't...!

Chapter 14...The last minute (as always) packing!

It's currently 03:15 on Saturday 12th February in England and also in Ghana (same time zone for those who didn't know) and I have just about finished my packing! I'm not going to lie, it was a stressful process, but one I quite enjoyed by the end...

I realised earlier today that my first aid kit was rather limited for a whole year away so I popped into town to stock up on plasters, savlon etc etc, which has put my mind at rest about all those cuts and scrapes I will get over the next year (no doubt coming off my moped)!

I then came home and decided the time had come for over half the things I wanted to take away with me to get the cut! Most of the clothes I'd put aside needed to be eliminated, along with shoes, toiletries and pretty girly things that I am going to have to learn to live without in Ghana!

So what made it into the backpack, which must weigh no more than 23kg (argh!)...practical trousers, practical tops, practical shoes, my raincoat, DVD's, 4 books, gym stuff (what a waste of precious space I hear you cry, I will prove you all wrong), swimwear and a VERY limited number of toiletries and pretty girly things (photos, postcards etc)!

And that is it, my life packed away into a backpack for a year in Ghana, my room left tidy and ready for my return and my bed made ready for that first cosy night back at home :-)

Chapter 13...The Motorcycle Training!

So...SKWID done, next was Motorcycle Training, which again I had very cleverly booked in for Tuesday morning at 9am! No rest for the wicked! 

I arrived at Motorcycle Pitstop feeling really nervous, but mostly tired! I thought there would be a group of people all being trained together over the next 3 days and we would spend the first day learning about the bike and watching horrific DVD's about motorcycle accidents! Well there were no DVD's and only about 15 minutes spent checking BOLTS - Brakes, Oil, Lights, Tyres, Suspension! Next it was on the back of the bike for a ride to an open area where I would then be 'giving it a go'...sorry what?! Yes I would be riding the bike on my own on day one!

My biggest fear previously on bikes had been the kickstart or the jerk forward you get with too much throttle and brakes! But there was no time to think about that, I was off... and to my surprise I was actually quite good :-) Before I knew it I was doing figures of 8, U-turns and emergency stops, and all before lunch! My instructor kept telling me I was a natural and one of the best VSO people they'd trained, I thought 'yeah right you must say this to everyone!' Then they announced we would be going for a ride on the road, the real road with cars, lorries, pedestrians and DANGER!!! Panic kicked in, but me being me, I once again 'manned-up' and got on with it, and again really enjoyed myself! We mastered roundabouts, traffic lights, junctions...everything I needed to pass the course, so on day one I passed, on day two we went for a ride into one of the other towns for a cup of coffee and on day three I finally had a lie-in, watched 'This Morning', wrote my blog and chilled out at home!

This isn't the bike I learnt on, but a 500cc instead!

Chapter 12...The SKWID!

Me being me I decided to fly back from Cambodia on Wednesday last week and on the Friday morning drive up to Birmingham for 4 days of VSO training! What was I thinking?! The training was HSW - Health and Safety Workshop followed by SKWID - Skills for Working in Development. They were both highly interesting and for me very beneficial, although I think I was the only person to feel this way! I was able to use my past travel experiences as examples of where I did and didn't do things right in another culture and establish how I should be while in Ghana!

Our group of 18 volunteers all got on really well, although two clear groups were formed - 'the club' and 'the young ones!' On the Saturday night I got dragged kicking, screaming and moaning about the cold into Birmingham town centre for a night out! I was force-fed alcohol, without spending a single penny, but decided my bed was calling once the shots came out! Who said volunteers were sensible and boring?! On the Sunday we ended up in the bar at Harborne Hall and afterwards decided to raid the kitchen for flapjacks, because a few of us were hungry! I wonder if these are the skills VSO are hoping for us to share on our placements?! A lesson to be learnt!