Road Tripping

December has been deemed 'vacation month' by boss Shannen so together with her and her sister Chelsea I'm heading on a little road trip that will take us north to the capital of Burkina Faso - Ouagadougo and then down through Togo (we're staying out of Ghana due to the elections) to the Gold Coast of Ghana where we'll rest up from helping school kids for a little while!

Stage 1 : Tamale - Ouaga

Our first border crossing from Ghana to Burkina involved purchasing a visa from a lads who looked just like Claude Makalele...Chelsea is useful in border crossing situations as her name always provokes conversations about football rather than conversations about how much extra we're going to have to pay to get through this office.

It looks like most of our travels will be in small hiace vans (called tro-tros) which are packed to the hilt with people, goods and chickens as well as the odd goat up top. I usually end up with the shittest seat imaginable and spend most of my time in the rather compromising position which I call 'knees scratching ears'. Anyway 7 hours or so later we roll into Ouaga where the first taxi driver (who isnt a taxi at all) scams us for 2.50 and leaves us nowhere near our hotel and the second guy after slamming his fingers in the boot while packing our bags proceeds to hotwire his own vehicle before taking us to a pretty cheap hotel where we set up camp on night one.

Ouaga

is a big city, capital of Burkina Faso and supposedly home to a vibrant night life scene! As it happened we ended up watching a pretty good show put on by a blind guitarist in an amphitheater at the French Cultural Centre...the dancers made me happy at least with their African hip jangling moves!


Stage 2 : Ouaga - Kara (Togo)

Our second border crossing in less than a week proved slightly more stressfull than the first with the girls both getting charged heftily for their entry visa due to being from Canada leaving them $50 lighter of pocket. Having a good 'ol Oirish passport meant I only had to fork over $25 for the pleasure of entering Togo. After a quick visit to the local money changer we found ourselves on what would prove to be the worst tro-tro ride of the entire trip. The 7 hour ordeal from Cinkasse to Kara is one Ill be happy not to repeat! We shared the ride with an angry rooster, a bleating sheep up top and the biggest waste of space of a tro-tro driver that ever steered a hiace though Togo. The man was useless!...stopping almost at every town to have a cigarette / drop off a box / do a deal / eat some fish / talk to his woman / fix the sheep on the top of the van / pour petrol from a wine bottle into our fuel tank after the van had cut out / chat with various customs officials / have a piss / have another cigarette. Im sure our beds in the seedy Kara hotel that night had seen a good few back before ours (not doubt some for less than the usual allotted sleeping time) but Id imagine not many of the previous inhabitants slept as well as we did!

Stage 3 : Kara - Kpalime - Keta!

Theres a leg in every long trip where one has to get from A (in our case Kara in Northern Togo) to B (Keta on the coast of Ghana) as quickly as possible without really stopping except to sleep. Usually these sections are pretty harrowing and this was no exception. Travelling using a variety of transport (tro-tro, bus, taxi, motorcycle-taxi and on foot) we made it in a little under two days, which given the condition of some of the vehicles and roads here wasnt so bad!
One of the fun incidents along the way occurred 40km or so outside Kpalime where we had to get down from our tro-tro as a bridge crossing over a small river had a big hole in it and was unpassable. Enterprising locals were attempting to fix the hole and were also running a small toll bridge racket on the side. They had placed a few planks of wood across the river beside the broken bridge and were charging people as much as they thought they could get to cross to the other side where a phlanx of tro-tros were waiting to bring us the rest of the way to Kplaime. Obrunis are justifiably seen as walking cash machines and so I wasnt really surprised when they tried to charge us $3 a head to get across 6 yards of plank. We'd been through a tough few days and were in no mood for getting ripped off and I think the surprise came when I told them (in rudimentary french) that I wasnt going to use their crappy plank for $3 and would wade through the shallow river for free. This caused some consternation amongst them and faced with getting some small money or nothing at all they quickly accepted my next offer of $1 for all three of us to cross.

I have no problem paying a little over the odds to people in such situations here because the reality is that I do have more money than they do and the fact that I show up on any given day means that they get to have some extra food for their family or can spare some money for their kids schooling etc. It can become frustrating when it happens repeatedly as you can easily begin to feel like a victim but I found the best way to deal with it is to level with person involved...let them know you dont mind paying a little extra but still that you dont want to be taken for an obruni idiot thats gonna shell out money at any request.

We crossed the border from Togo to Ghana in what was effectively the middle of the Volta region jungle and a few tro-tros later arrived to our destination, the quiet rundown coastal town of Keta, a bit travel weary but delighted to finally be on the Gold Coast.

BaoBao

The BaoBao tree is a big massive ol tree that sometimes falls down ... like this one did. They are considered sacred here in Ghana and nobody would dare to chop one down. They aren't much good for firewood because the wood is all kinda rotten inside. This post was mainly written cos I had a picture of a BaoBao tree on my camera.

BaoBao ar an talamh

Football Crazy

Ghana is a pretty intense footballing nation. They hosted the African Nations Cup earlier this year and have produced some world class footballers in Essien, Muntari and Asamoah. And its easy to see why...every little village or town that I've been to has some form of soccer pitch nearby. They're usually dusty rocky affairs but that doesn't deter huge groups of barefooted kids playing for hours on end at kicking the ball from one end to the other.

On a recent visit to pay a kids school fees I came across what was a much more organised affair, an inter-school blitz between teams form all the local primary schools. Hundreds of frenzied children lined the pitch and cheered on every kick of the ball. Some of the kids playing showed off some pretty neat skills and the game finally ended in a 1-1 draw. Penalties ensued and the atmosphere really intensified. Teachers paroled the group of children crowding the goals belting their shins with canes to keep them off the field. After a few missed penalties and one save a goal was scored and the victorious team rushed the pitch and carried their goal-scoring hero at head height around the pitch 2 or 3 times!

Create Change - what's it all about?

So I guess I should write a little about the project that I’m working on here in Ghana…'Create Change’. ‘Create Change’ is a small NGO which was founded in Canada/Ghana in '07 (there are 3 of us here in Ghana at the moment..Shannen (boss), Kay (videographer and me (role as of yet undefined ;)) which aims to improve the quality of life of people in Northern Ghana by providing better access to basic needs of water and education. I guess the idea is that if you provide people with the most basic of their needs they are better equipped to escape the poverty cycle in which they find themselves. The novel idea behind the charity is that we will create a number of short video documentaries of each project which we carry out which will then be posted on our website and will be used to appeal for donations from the public. The videos will be broken down into ‘proposal’ -where we describe the idea behind the project we wish to carry out and appeal for donations to help create this change, ‘implementation’ – where we show the money raised being spent in order to implement the project idea and the change that has been created and finally ‘impact’ –where we show how the project has changed the life of the people concerned. In essence people that donate can actually see firsthand the change which they by virtue of their donation have helped create.

Interview setup

The primary focus of our efforts here over the last few months has been on our ‘Ghana Girls Education’ initiative , a project which is enabling almost 130 female students to attend secondary school by virtue of paying their school fees, providing necessary school supplies such as text books, uniforms, bicycles, mattresses and feeding supplies (for the boarders), calculators etc. Northern Ghana is considerable poorer than the south of the country and girls are often overlooked when it comes to education with preference going to the male children in the family.

This mans son had malaria when we visited his village

This gender imbalance results in many problems including the issue of ‘kayeyo’ where girls from the north that can’t get an education travel to the major cities of Kumasi and Accra in the south to work as porters of heavy goods. They often have to live on the street and become victims of various types of abuse. By helping to keep these girls in school here in Tamale we are not only helping the girls become a more productive member of their communities but are providing an alternative to destructive options like kayeyo.

Interview in the 'field'

A typical ‘distribution day’ begins at about 7am and over breakfast we set out the plan for the day ahead. After biking to our storage location (the back of an internet café of friends of Shannens) we load up the bikes and the pickup with supplies –books, bikes, mattresses, food supplies, calculators, school bags etc. and head to either a community or a school. If we’re going to a community we always bring a translator as none of us have command of the Dagbani language beyond the basics. There is usually great excitement when we arrive in the villages and after introducing ourselves we are normally taken to greet the village chief. The chief is pretty much always wearing a funny hat and chilling out under a tree. It’s not cool to look him straight in the eyes when talking to him so we generally squat for a few moments and look at the ground by his feet and mutter “Dasaiba, Naa, Naa,” which roughly translates as “Good morning, cool beans, cool beans”. We then head back to the village clearing and give out the supplies to the girls who have assembled. Shannen measures them for uniforms and Kay films the entire deal.

Me n Fatuw (one of the boys we helped attend SS) and my Haojiin

I spend lots of time sorting bundles of books and lifting bicycles off the pickup. The look on the girls faces when you hand them what are probably their first ever textbooks or a bicycle which means they won’t have to walk 2 hours to and from school every day is really special and is where the reward is in this for me. Most of the adults we meet in the rural villages are very poor subsistence farmers. They have big families (polygamy is widely practiced here) and generally have not received any formal education. Despite this they are very insistent on the importance of education and are grateful that their kids are being afforded an opportunity that was not an option for them.

Woman delivering water

Over the next few months we will be gathering enough footage to make over 20 short films which will be focused on the topics of 'water', 'education' and 'health' here in the north of Ghana. Ill write a bit more about each of these in due course!

Motorbiking Milo

So I had my first motorbike lesson today...and within about 20 minutes of starting I found myself driving along the dirt roads of Tamale for the first time. The motorbike is pretty much the primary mode of transport here in Tamale. Its a common sight to see entire families (mum, dad and up to three kids) piled onto a bike chugging along the city streets, not to mention people transporting live sheep and cows on the back! The bikes are of varying quality, everything from good quality Japanese off-road bikes to rickety contraptions that aren’t much more than a bicycle with a lawnmower engine strapped on the back.

My bike is a red Haojin 125 cc which cost about 500 euro and shes a divvler on the dirt roads!

Anyway my first lesson came free of charge via Mr. ‘ I can fix anything which has moving parts’ Ebbe , and took place in a local school yard. Nothing too unusual there until you consider that it wa s about 1pm in the afternoon on a Wednesday. We pull up to the school yard, Mr. Ebbe dismounts and points at the clutch and says ‘Here is the clutch…only use it small small’, then the accelerator and advises ‘This is the gas…only use it small small, now you try’. So after a couple of stalls I figure out the meaning of ‘small small’ and manage to get the bike moving, at which point fifty or so school kids stream out of their classrooms into the yard. By the looks on their faces Im pretty sure none of them had imagined the treat that was store for them that day..a big hairy ‘salaminga’ learning to ride a motorbike on their soccer pitch at lunchtime! And so with a bunch of them running after me trying to touch my elbows and the rest shouting and jumping back and forth on my track I repeated figure of 8s until Mr. Ebbe managed to clear them all to get out of my way. He shouted at me that we should go elsewhere and it was at this point I realised that I wasn’t all that sure about the slowing down and stopping process. I mean I knew that I had a foot brake and a hand brake but wasn’t aware that the clutch was also needed! So after a juddering halt we decided that it would be much safer for everyone else if I learned to ride on the road itself.

One and half months and over 2000km later Im feeling pretty confident riding my Haojin pretty much anywhere. I’ve had a few minor falls but only when going really slowly over rough terrain when lack of balance and the desire to keep my feet dry have resulted in some comical tip-overs. In terms of terrain there are three types of surface here…regular tarmac which is pockmarked with nasty potholes, dirt road which is pretty bumpy but a lot of fun to ride on and then of course off road trails which is where the good times are had. Many of the rural villages which we have been visiting are accessible only via these dirt roads and the extended rainy season which we are having has resulted in the deterioration of these roads to comical levels. We have some classic footage of us riding through long stretches of knee deep water. Usually I have Shannen on the back which makes the bike a little more difficult to control and sometimes a little more stressful…now I know why backseat drivers are such a nuisance! My record for carrying stuff on the back was on Tuesday last week when we rode from Tamale centre to our house carrying four 10 foot long drain pipes. Initially we were riding with them supported atop our shoulders which elicited shouts of advice and caution from the locals but soon realised that this wasn’t going to work on the bumpy roads near our house and transferred to the much more sensible underarm method!

Pictures to follow (I brought the wrong cable to the web cafe so real ones of me on me bike will have to wait!)

Buying and Selling

So I was walking in town today (I wrote this in my journal at the start of September a few days after we had arrived) searching for some bedsheets. A trader outside Melcom (the main dept store in town) sees me browsing through his produce and the conversation went a little something like this:

Me (white beardy Irish guy) : 'I'm looking for some bedsheets'
Him (twenty-something black Ghanaian trader) : 'Welcome...yes yes, we have bedsheet, do you need curtains aswell?...maybe table cloths?'
Me: 'No thats ok, i just need some bedsheets, do you have double size?'
Him: 'Yes, yes, let me go and get some more for you...we have the best quality!'
Me: 'ok then...i just want some plain ones...' -he scuttles off into a small side alley and returns with armloads of bedsheets-
Him: 'ok ok ... here is the double size...with pillow case, you take it 25 cedis'
Me: -laughing and walking away- '25 cedis!!... no thank you I will buy them somewhere in the market for 12!'
Him: 'No no, ok ok ... but look, this is the best quality!...22 cedis!'
Me: 'But there are bedsheets on sale in Melcom...right there, for 14 cedis! I would like to buy from you...melcom only have blue sheets and I dont like blue...but I only have small money...15 cedis ' -its getting a bit heated now...hes not happy at the thought of my going to Melcoms and its pretty loud on the street side.-
Him: 'Melcom quality is very bad...and blue is a bad colour for sheet...look at this ... best quality!! and white...white is better!!! I give you for 18 cedis' -he's pretty much shouting at this stage-
Me: -also shouting now to be heard above the din of the traffic..and getting into the swing of bargaining- 'Yes defintely!...white is better! white is better...I like the white ones!...ok 17 cedis...last offer...otherwise I go to Melcom'
Him: 'ok ok ...17 cedis for the white ones....you want curtains now??'
Me: 'no i will come back another day for curtains...thank you for the sheets!'

Puzzled in Ghana

I had never been to a country outside of Europe or North America before I came to Ghana...so my experience of place in which a very different culture existed was quite limited. Because of this my first month in Ghana has been a hugely eye-opening experience which has lead me to realise how little I knew about so much. On one of my first days in Ghana after reaching Tamale (our base city in the northern region) I was waiting for Shannen outside a tile shop when a little toddler...maybe 2 or 3 years old wandered past me, tottering about a little as infants do. I didn't pay too much attention at first but then I noticed that the child was sucking on a small light bulb. I was a bit shocked at first and thought to myself 'Woah, someone should really get that lightbulb from the kid!' There were plenty of people around and nobody took any notice of the child, and I, feeling it wasnt my place to do so didn't intervene. The moment passed pretty quickly and she soon disappeared around a corner leaving me with a guilty conscience for not having done something.
A few days later as we left our house and walked though the little village at the top of our road I spotted a razor blade lying on the ground right where the village children run and play barefooted every day of the week. Again I was pretty shocked at this and pointed it out only to be told that it was probably a toy that they played with or used to make toys out of other materials like cans or pieces of cardboard.
So what does one do in such a situation...take a childs toy for its own protection (according to my way of thinking) or let things be (according to the way things are here)?? There are so many examples of things here that the mindset which I have used for most of my life screams 'No!' or 'Wrong!' at. They challenge me on a daily basis to reconsider my preconceptions regarding what is 'correct' or 'safe' or 'acceptable'. Added to this is the consideration that I am a foreigner here and dont yet know the correct 'order' or 'way'. I find myself almost over conscious of not stepping on anyones toes by making assumptions about certain situations that I may not understand because I am not from here.

However given the chance again I like to think I would have taken the lightbulb from the child and picked up the razor blade from the ground.

One of the other games played by the kids involves a tyre and a stick. Belt the tyre with the stick and run after it...much safer!

Ghana first post

So finally I've managed to find myself stranded in the local internet cafe during a heavy thunderstorm (and surprisingly the power hasnt cut out) which means that I finally have time to start this blog!

Ive been in Ghana for just over a month now and its been a whirlwind of an experience since I left Canada on September 1st. Im living with my girlfriend and now boss Shannen and her friend Kay in a small city in the north of the country called Tamale. We are here to work for Shannens NGO called Create Change...more about that later.

Im going to divide the blog up into a number of different sections which will cover most of what I am going through here in Ghana... I aim to write little pieces on things like 'the Creating Change project', 'funny stories', 'motorbiking', etc so that you can dip in and out for little extracts from my current situation.

So here goes...

le premier post!

there is much back-story...suffice to say for the moment that a few weeks ago I decided to change my horizon.

i aim to record the views I encounter here

-t