On Sunday (20th March) a group of us from Bolga decided to head to Waaki (very near to where I work in Tongo) for their festival! We arrived in the afternoon to find Vic and Lewis negotiating payment for us to be able to watch the festival and take photos! Now this was clearly a back-handed payment that one guy was demanding from us, but for the sake of 1 Cedi, 20 Pesewas each (48 pence) we were all prepared to pay and join in the fun!
After taking many a photo...
After taking many a photo...
Christina and I headed to the room she rents in Tongo where we had decided to stay that evening to get a real-life view of a Ghanaian village! So after an egg and bread dinner we found ourselves lying outside on mattresses, covered from head to toe in mosquito repellant, listening to Celine Dion (booming from speakers somewhere in town) and enjoying the moonlight and stars up above!
After tossing and turning all night long and constantly hearing mosquitoes flying around my head I woke around 6am to find two local children stood in front of us with a look of shock on their faces to find us there! We then sat and watched the World go by for the next few hours, which was absolutely fascinating as I saw for the first time just how hard children (mainly girls) work before they start their day at school! Girls as young as five/six were walking past us with buckets of water on their heads that they had collected from the bore hole then they would deliver that to their house and stroll past us again with another errand to run!
In that fifteen or so hours I spent 'living' in Tongo I witnessed first hand just how hard life can be here, especially for women and children who find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy and who work extremely hard to keep family life going! Our fruit lady at work - Akwea...
...has three young children - Maxwell, Williams and Rosemary who she works hard all day long to send to school! They came to greet us on Monday morning looking clean and smart for their day ahead, which made me smile to think that there are some children here in Ghana who have some hope for their future because their parents can see the value of a good education! However as Lewis pointed out to me the other day, family sizes are large here because parents fear they will lose at least one child before they reach the age of five so try to have larger families! This means funding education as children get older will become more and more difficult causing many children to drop out of schooling when they hit JHS (Junior High School) because their families simply cannot afford to keep them in the education system.
No comments:
Post a Comment