Chapter 24...The wild wild (Upper) West!

Last weekend seven of us Bolga volunteers embarked on the seven hour bus journey to Wa for a long break away over the Independence weekend! The weekend started on a sad note with the end of the VSO love story that I know you were all enjoying following (Daniel and I ended our long distance VSO romance very amicably so don’t go worrying about there being tears and sadness in Ghana), and ended with a visit to Bolga Regional Hospital (again don’t worry we were not there for me)!

With Monday 7^th being a public holiday in Ghana to celebrate the country gaining independence on 6^th March 1957 a group of us decided to make the most of the extra day off work and headed to Wa in the Upper West region with a view to spending two days at Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary! So on Friday 4^th at 4:20am Rachel, Hannah and I hopped into a taxi to the Metro Mass bus station in town where we had to wait for a couple of hours to purchase our bus tickets! There’s a strange rule here that bus tickets can’t be bought in advance so it’s a case of first-come-first served (on the day of travel) at the bus station, which as I found out causes complete chaos!! Everyone forms an orderly queue then they wait and wait and wait until the bus conductor arrives with a wad of tickets and a whole lot of power! In my typical optimistic (cloud 9) view I saw a scenario where he will start at the front of the queue and sell tickets accordingly! In reality it is a hectic bundle to try get a ticket with, I’m sure, some bribes being given where necessary! It also turns out that once all the seated tickets are sold, standing ones are then sold (for the same price as seated) and people then stand in the aisle of the bus for the seven hour journey or until they are lucky enough to grab a seat when someone leaves!

Luckily on the outgoing journey (this should give you a little hint as to the hellish return journey, but lets keep the suspense building for now...) all of us managed to get a seat and had a relatively comfortable, if not very bumpy, ride to Wa! We did encounter a 20 minute breakdown three-quarters of the way through, but then it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t, as I am starting to learn about the Ghanaian transport system!

The buses armed guard! 

We arrived in Wa at 2pm all feeling extremely hungry and thirsty so we decided our first stop should be a local spot ‘Prisons Canteen’ for a Star (the best-selling Ghanaian beer)! I’ve never been much of a beer drinker before, but in Ghana I actually crave beer on a regular basis, which does surprise me! After a well-earned drink we walked the 15 minutes to ‘Mammy’s Kitchen’ where we got served a huge plate of fried rice and chicken, which again was much needed!

After re-fuelling it was time to head to GES guesthouse where we stayed for the weekend! It was basic, but served our needs (until the last night, but again lets keep the suspense building...) very well! That evening Anna (a volunteer in Wa) invited around twenty volunteers to her house for dinner, a delight of local food including T-Z which is yet another maize based dish, apparently different somehow to all the others I have tried (I haven’t as yet been able to identify the difference in taste)! Anna asked a local lady to cook for us and she started the evening off with an explanation of what all the food was and how she prepared it all, which took an awful lot of hard work! I spent the evening meeting new volunteers and catching up with three of my ICT family – Adrienne, Bas and Jeannine, which was just lovely! It did shock me how attached I feel to those people I started this journey with and I was surprised by how emotional I felt to see them again!

 

 

So after a late night walk back to the guesthouse we managed a lie-in on Saturday waking up at 8am! The plan for Saturday and Sunday was the Hippo Sanctuary which is an hour tro-tro ride out of Wa. We started with a cooked breakfast of toast, omellette and beans at ‘Mammy’s Kitchen’ then stocked up on food and drink, which you can’t get at the Hippos! At midday our group of twelve plus some locals were squashed into an open-sided, over-crowded tro bumping our way to Wechiau! As we are currently in the dry hot season the dust was flying everywhere with some rather funny consequences at the end of our journey...(oh and there were no showers at Wechiau so this was us for the next 24 hours!)

These two looking like umpa-lumpas (or however you spell it)!

After another shorter tro ride, half an hour walk and 2 hour boat ride down the Black Volta river (which is still Ghana on one river bank and Burkina Faso on the other) we eventually reached our goal for the weekend...the hippos! Now before I get you all too excited we only saw them in the water so there are mainly photos of hippo ears, but nonetheless here they are...

Post hippos the sun was starting to set so it was a quick dash to our hippo hides where we spent the night lying in the open air under the stars! It was one of the best nights I’ve ever spent in all my travels because the sounds were just amazing, the stars were bright and the peace I felt was heavenly! The tree we were under was creaking, the bugs and creepy crawlies were buzzing, the hippos were snarling away in the water beneath us and us volunteers were chattering away under our mosquito nets! It was a hot night, but one that I will remember for a long long time!

Our eight person hippo hide!

We woke at 4:45 on Sunday morning (Independence Day) in total darkness with the stars still shining and the hippos still munching away on the land! We dressed by torchlight and went to the toilet and brushed our teeth au natural! We then headed back to the boats to start our return journey back to the lodge! In the pitch black and silence of the early morning we heard the hippos charging back into the water from the Burkina Faso river bank, which was just astonishing to hear, especially because we couldn’t see a thing! So that was our last experience of the hippos at Wechiau and it was now time to return to Wa...!

Following a long shower to scrub off all the dirt and an afternoon nap back at the guesthouse we all trekked (45 minutes) to Alem’s restaurant for dinner, which was yam chips (delicious) and chicken! Rachel, Hannah and I shared two meals between the three of us as we’d had a cheeky lunch on our return to Wa of rice and chicken at ‘Prisons Canteen’ An early night was needed by all after the adventures of the last few days so we got a taxi back to the guesthouse with the idea of lying under the fan and drifting off to sleep, however as always things very rarely go to plan...!

Having packed and got myself ready for the 3:30am start we had on Monday morning I clambered into bed all hot and flustered, but ready to drift off into dreamland for a couple of hours! Just as I was dozing off and my roommate was reading the power went off completely meaning no lights and more importantly no fan, which in 30 degree heat is not fun at all!!! After half an hour of trying to lie still in bed so as to not use up too much energy and create more heat I ventured out to speak to the guesthouse owner who told me it wouldn’t be long until the power came back on! On my return to the room my roommate informed me that in Ghana that means it won’t be on again until the morning! ‘NOOOOOO’ was all I could say!

So at 3:30am after five hours of running back and forth to the kitchen to raid things from the freezer to keep us cool we headed to the bus station to start the long process of ticket buying all over again for our return journey to Bolga! Our well thought out plans to ensure we got seven seats on the bus completely fell apart when Alice and Jackie who had nominated themselves as ticket buyers for the group came over to where the rest of us were sitting with seven standing tickets!! Once again all I could say was ‘NOOOOOO’

By the time we left at 6am we had manged to get one seat at the start of the journey which for some reason hadn’t been filled so the seven of us agreed to rotate that seat at half hour intervals! Then half way in Tumu we managed to get two more seats so Hannah, Rachel and I shared those! By Tumu we’d had to stop the bus once already for Rose who gets travel sick, then just 20 minutes short of Navrongo (45 minutes North of Bolga) we had to stop the bus again for Hannah who had been sick and fainted, which was very scary indeed! After about 15 minutes we got back onto the bus having arranged to get to Navrongo and get Ishmal (favourite taxi driver of some vols as he has the nicest car in Bolga with a/c) to pick us up from there and take us to the hospital! He rushed to meet us, but with two passengers already in the car, which meant it was a tight squeeze in the back! Luckily though the lady who was already in the taxi is a nurse at Bolga Regional Hospital so we dashed there and got Hannah checked out in super speed! After blood tests and doctors it emerged a few hours later that she had a bacterial bug so we left with anti-biotics and headed for home!

I was finally back home (somewhere I missed all weekend), in my room under my fan and surrounded by my things! My first long weekend away taught me a lot of things about what’s important in life...the main things being the people around you who, especially when so far away from home, become your main support network, your friends and your family! Also though, the importance of all you lovely people all over the World who are my friends and my family, who are supporting me on this crazy but extremely exciting journey and who I know will be my support network no matter what!

Chapter 23...The too hot, too spicy season!

I feel that the harmattan needs a short mention in my blog as it is quickly becoming my biggest demon so far in Bolga! The harmattan refers to a dry and dusty West African wind where temperatures have been soaring as high as 40+ degrees!!

Last night I slept for 14 hours (almost straight) and probably sweated for that whole 14 hours, which means I lost a lot of fluids and salt, which is never a good thing! I think it made me realise that I am nowhere near being fully acclimatised yet, especially as I have arrived at the hottest time of year, which even volunteers who have been here for years struggle with! 

As most of the volunteers here have had malaria at least once during their placement, I am trying to be cautious with mosquitoes, but seeing as they love me, that is proving quite difficult! As always on my travels I’m not sleeping under a mosquito net as it is just too claustrophobic and hot but soon I may have to surrender if I continue to get bitten like this! Luckily the magic tiger balm/golden cup (depending on what you fancy) is working it’s charm and taking away the itch from my bites, which is a HUGE relief!

So the moral of the story during harmattan is to replace fluids and salt asap in order to continue enjoying ‘bumming around’ and to follow VSO’s advice and sleep under a mosquito net! Today I have done one of those two things...!

Chapter 22...The GES (Ghana Education Service) Office!

My office...well firstly what a location! I am based in Tongo, which is in the Talensi Nabdam district and famous for it’s hills (no not LC, Whitney, Audrina etc), but it’s beautiful rock formations and hillsides that stretch for miles and miles!

The building in this photo is the home of the male AND female urinals at work! I am yet to experience this!

 

The office is around a 40 minute bike ride from Kumbosgo where I live on the outskirts of Bolga! Until I get my bike, which should be sometime in April when I am acclimatised and used to the roads, I will be getting driven to and from work by Dominic who is the GES 4x4 driver! The roads vary a lot from tarmacced and speed-bumped to dust tracks full of potholes so the 4x4 is most welcome!

The office itself is currently located in part of the local primary school, St Martins/Waaki so the few days I have been in I have been highly enteratined by the children outside and their huge interest in another volunteer working in the office!!Currently there are four other volunteers at the GES– Alice who is an MSO (Management Support Officer), Christina who is a TSO (Teacher Support Officer), Damien who is working on gender in education and Barry who is a STV (Short-Term-Volunteer) working with head teachers!

The Office!

As I attended the VSO review meeting last Tuesday I got to meet and greet most people there, except for the big man himself...the Director who apparently boycotted the meeting due to the short notice he was given about it! This already told me a little something about him making me a little anxious about my first meeting with him, but it went well! He was very friendly and stopped what he was doing with another colleague to sit down with me and ask what role I was here to do (slightly concerning he didn’t know already) and to give me his support in everything I needed to do! We shall see how this relationship pans out in the future, but on first impressions I should be able to wrap-him-around-my-little-finger! 

So all-in-all I am very much looking forward to working with everyone at the GES and seeing what plans I can come up for the next 11 months...!

Chapter 21...The life and times of Bolga(tanga)!

Where do I start with describing Bolga...I always refer to it as a medium size town so not your Saffron Walden and not your Cambridge, but somewhere inbetween! 

So what does Bolga have to offer a Western 25 year-old female who is planning on making this crazy town her home for a year:

• One large market held every three days in the centre of town, one small market held every day in the centre of town! This is the place to buy – cloth, vegetables, rice, pasta, famous Bolga baskets meat etc! 
• Many many spots (bars), chops (eateries) and pito bars (pito - a local warm beer), as well as hotels (Ex tee Crystal hotel being the nicest in town with a/c and free wi-fi), restaurants and guesthouses! 

The pito bar!

Rachel and Hannah getting settled in to enjoy a warm, bitter pito!



Me struggling to enjoy my first ever pito!

•  Three supermarkets (the equivalent of a corner shop back home), a post office, chemists, electrical goods shop (you name it they’ve got it)!
• Three nightclubs of which I am yet to venture, but I will no doubt tell all when I do...! 
• A police station, a water company, an electricity company, Total garages (where you can buy Western treats) and a regional hospital! 
• New traffic lights and speed bumps in the roads to drive down road traffic accidents!

The people of Bolga have a lot to offer too, mainly their:

• Passion, which is often portrayed in an aggressive manner, but is majority of the time meant in good nature!  
• Beliefs – everyone has strong religious beliefs (mainly Christian and Islam)! They also believe very strongly in ju ju which (from what I’ve been told by Lewis (Vic’s Ghanaian boyfriend) involves witchcraft and curses that can be put on someone without them knowing through a simple handshake or through a photo etc!   
• Greetings – it is extremely important here in Ghana to greet everyone no matter what you are doing! On my first introductory morning in the office I was walked around by one member of staff to meet all 45 or so people working in the GES (Ghana Education Service) office! Not so bad for a first meeting I thought, but I then found out that you should do this every time you go into the office, as it is considered very rude to not greet, even if you are in the middle of a conversation or a meeting! 
• Nicknames - since my arrival I have been referred to as ‘sister’ (by other volunteers) or ‘madame’ in a teachers workshop! These are the two main ways of referring to women, those who are younger are ‘sisters’, those who are older or well respected are ‘madames.’ Men are either ‘brother’ or ‘Mr.’ Sudamia is another nickname the Ghanaians have for us volunteers, which we think means ‘foreigner’ and is always meant in a positive way (when shouted at us across the street) in order to get our attention so we can say ‘hello!’ 

Hopefully this starts to answer a lot of questions to do with where I'm living, what it's like, what the people are like etc! I shall try in my next posts to give you even more details so you can start to build a picture of what my life is like here...!

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!