Having just got home from my most stressful, unproductive, longest day at work so far I feel the only way I can get my frustrations out of my system is to journal them on my blog. Now I know most people choose not to use their blog as a source to journal and vent, but as you all know, I am not most people so you are being treated to a highly charged, probably irrational and very emotional blog post...
Today was the second day in a row that I found myself in a public place in Ghana crying my eyes out, real gut-wrenching, body shaking sobs! I was stood in a shop with standing fans on one side of me, gas cookers on the other and I was weeping like my heart had been broken in two! My tears had several emotions and a lot of hormones behind them and as I type I'm starting to well up again...Yesterday was one of those days when I couldn't have felt further away from home! As two of my closest friends in this World said goodbye to someone very dear to them, I felt that sharp stabbing pain of just wanting to jump on a plane home to see all the people I miss and care about so very much. I felt the girls sadness all the way over here in Ghana, as I remembered loved ones that I too have lost, and I spent the rest of the day longing for Kenya to come sooner than it is!
But today was a new day so I woke up, gave myself a good talking to and decided to start afresh! Two hours later I was my five year old sobbing self again, just wanting someone to hold me, to take all my worries away and to fix all the wrongs in this World! Back to reality though where that will sadly never happen I was left with seven hours ahead of me to analyse the source of my bleeding heart...I am struggling. Struggling with why I am here. Struggling with the impact I am making. Struggling with corruption. Struggling with cultural misunderstandings. Struggling with power. Struggling with hierarchy. Struggling with the dirty money of Ghana!
In my six months working at the GES (Ghana Education Service) office in Talensi Nabdam I have witnessed and ignored numerous acts of corruption, all based around deep rooted systems of hierarchy and power. I have not questioned the fact that my Director's son is on our employment books and takes a monthly salary as one of the drivers, but he has not once set foot in the office, let alone a GES car. I have not taken action when a group of teachers trusted me enough to tell me about 'the envelope' form of passing money to GES office staff to do work that should actually be part of their daily job. I have turned a blind eye to hushed conversations in the office that turn from English to Fra Fra the second they turn corrupt. I have allowed the ridiculous notion of TNT, snacks, lunch, allowances, 'motivation' etc to carry on in the profit making way it has become. I could go on, the list is sadly endless...
For some of these issues the root cause is obvious, because my GES runs on a hierarchical, power hungry system of 'if you're a rung below me on the ladder, I will make sure you know that and this fact then allows me to make money out of you whether you're a colleague, teacher or pupil.' Now I am not saying that all the office staff are this way inclined, I would really like to think that some of them aren't, but the more time I spend there, the more murky the waters look! For other issues the cause is ironically NGO's themselves. The towns and cities of Ghana are NGO filled to the point where you would be hard pushed to find a stretch of road without an NGO sign board every two metres! The majority of the larger organisations are based in modern, state of the art (for Ghana) offices with air conditioning and a desk for each person. They have at least one air conditioned pick-up truck that cruises around all day among the other NGO pick-ups creating a landscape across the cities of high-rise cars rather than high-rise buildings. I'm not saying that this is all the NGO's are good for, not at all, but over time a culture has been created in which they are fuelling rather than reducing the dirty money of Ghana!
An unfortunate practise was started long before my time here in which NGO's began supplying TNT (time and travel) money for people attending workshops or training run by the NGO. Over time this craze has got ludicruously out of control with people expecting /demanding snacks, lunch, fuel money, allowances and 'motivation' (money) for them to grace a workshop with their presence! And the worst part is that staff at the GES office who should be working to squash out these things, instead encourage them to make a profit! There are groups of them working together to make serious amounts of money for as little work as possible! One of the worst incidents I encountered was the Deputy Director getting an allowance of twenty-four Cedis for four minutes of reading an opening speech that wasn't even written by him. I have no doubt in my mind that he and the officer in charge of the budget for that workshop got an even split and enjoyed laughing about it at our expense. But why not, their opinion of NGO's and the volunteers that come with them are that they are providers of bottomless pots of money, and when all NGO's flash the cash as they do then of course someone somewhere is going to try to make a quick buck! Would I be the same if I lived in such poverty and saw great bundles of wealth being spent in my country?!
As I consider now what my options are to rid this knot in my stomach of 'what impact am I really having, what change am I really creating' do I...
- Conduct a wife swap style switch where we go from playing it their way to playing it mine?
- Continue quietly not causing a stir on this path of self-destruction through sheer frustration?
- Detach myself from the people in the office who I am starting to rather dislike anyway and continue my work with individual schools and pupils?
Of course throughout all of this, as is always the case I am learning substantial new things and growing as a person day-by-day. Today I looked inwards and learnt that maybe more of my frustrations are to do with me than they are the surroundings I find myself in. I am looking in the mirror at the person I have become and the path I am on, do I like what I see?! I am assessing past mistakes, particularly becoming too emotionally involved with my work and I need to learn from those mistakes now. I am questioning how far running from this current situation, as I have always done before, will really get me! I am gauging how much value I put on my own life and my own happiness, some could say too much making my actions rather selfish! I am wondering whether I will ever work in development again, probably not, so do I leave it now and move on?! I am reflecting on my own morals and my past behaviours, things need to change! I am looking forward into the future and thinking about the type of role model I want to be to my own children, a good one! I am realising that I am still a vulnerable, emotional human being and that actually I may have done most of my growing up and this is the person that I will always be so I need to get to know myself here and now...!
So finally late into the afternoon my working day ended with fake invoices and VAT receipts, two arguments with GES office staff over the 8000 Cedis (£3333) I was in charge of spending, a reminder of how dirty the money of Ghana can be, a free sandwich toaster given to me by the nice man at 'Modern City' because he was upset by all my crying, a restored faith in human kind, a quickly shattered faith in human kind (or maybe myself) by a niggling in the back of my mind...'was he being so nice and giving me the toaster because he had seen the amount of money I had been spending all day and he was trying to ensure I come back to spend at his store again' and a feeling that this kind of questioning will never go away! By accepting his gift had I just played a small part in the cycle that is the dirty money of Ghana!?
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