I realise this isn’t the usual topic we blog about on the NM site, but I had a wonderful experience doing some overseas work earlier in the year in Africa and I wanted to share my story with the world and I thought a blog would be a great way to do this.
Back in February I had the opportunity to spend 2 weeks at an orphanage in rural Ghana, West Africa.
Rather than tell a deep story about my trip, I thought I would highlight the main observations I made during the trip, documenting a little of what I was able to experience. I hope it provides an enjoyable read..
Travelling there
It took a 7 hour flight to get to Ghana, then a days travelling to get from Accra (the capital) up to Sekyere. A long old trip! From Accra we caught a coach to Kumasi, and from Kumasi had to catch a ‘tro tro’ to get to
the village. A ‘tro tro’ is essentially a ragged out old vehicle with too many people squeezed in, often with no doors and little of a windscreen, quite often with an individual hanging off the side. Quite a hair raising experience on those roads I tell you.
Location
I was staying at an orphanage based in Sekyere, a medium size farming village in Rural Ghana, about an hour or so’s drive from Kumasi, which is Ghana’s second largest city. The village consists of one main road (or dirt track) that
stretches the length of the village, with shacks, huts and the early stages of brick structures strewn out to the left and right of the main road. Running water and electricity are present for some, but are limited and the reliability varies.
The orphanage
The name of the orphanage is Revelelation’s Children’s Home. It is a small orphanage, run by a man, Nana, and his wife, Margaret. There are 15 children, half of them disabled and the orphanage is run very much as an extended family as opposed to an institute. What this essentially means is that all children at the orphanage have their names registered as children of Nana and Margaret and all are treated equal, as family. The orphanage is essentially a largish, old building, with 5 rooms: 4 bedrooms and one main living area. Bedrooms are sparse, with an old bed and a sheet per child, and the living area consists of an old wooden couch/chair and a coffee table.
Outside the orphanage the grounds are used to grow food such as casava or coco-yam and chickens run free until a
time comes that they are to be used (for celebrations, or sale). The toilet is outside the orphanage and up a little track and is essentially a toilet sitting over a deep hole in the ground. You do need to watch out for the bugs hitting your bum cheeks.
The villagers
Upon first arrival I was very nervous. Everyone looks (well, stares) at you and are very, very intrigued. After all, my friend and I where the only white people for miles around, certainly only in the village. Indeed, we had one little girl run away crying and it’s only after we found out it was because she had never seen a white man before.
The locals call you ‘Bruni’ which means ‘white person’ – and the children in particular like to sing ‘oh bruni, oh boobuni’ – which means white man amongst black man. They are very sweet and call out Bruni and jump around as soon as they spot you, even from a distance..
We had to meet the local village chief on arrival, who, even though he speaks English, had to have a translator present – it’s tradition apparently that he speaks in his local tongue when greeting visitors.
We also met the local police chief, which left some to be desired I have to say. A glass eyed, scarred man, working out of a shack and spending the most of day sitting on a bench. Not sure how quick to the mark he would be if there was a crisis, but he was friendly all the same.
After a few days, word had quickly spread that there was 2 bruni’s in the village, and before we knew it people left right and centre were telling us ‘I like you’ and wanting to shake our hands. Very endearing, though also somewhat nerve-racking when most of the time they have a bush knife in the other hand.
Local cuisine
The food is probably the strangest I have eaten anywhere. It’s quite a stodgy diet, usually of rice or yam (which is a kind of peanut mush ball) accompanied with ground plantain leaves mixed with a fiery chilli and lots of oil to dip it in. Plantain, cassava, coco yam and rice are typical daily food, most of which are farmed from the surrounding lands.
The food doesn’t stop there though. One evening, on a foggy night driving back from the medical centre through the bush we felt a thud beneath the car. Nana ran out of the car and came back a moment later with a huge grin on his face and a large animal in his hands. He had run over a huge bush rat which he exclaimed is a delicacy and is worth more than a live chicken locally. I then spent the rest of the evening watching Junior and Sarfu (the two older boys) skin and prepare this rat. The following day I had it in a hot stew – it was delicious!
The children
The children are, quite simply, adorable. They are a real mix of ages, from different backgrounds with different reasons for being at the orphanage. Some simply have parents that have passed away, other have a more worrying background of being cast out due to beliefs in witchcraft and other tribal beliefs. A shame.
One thing that was clear and apparent was the generosity, willingness to learn, and sheer playfulness of the children. They all want to go to school, they all want to learn and they all work – very, very hard. Outside of school, the older children cook and wash the clothes for the household as well as farming and tilling the grounds. They support each other as a family unit. The other obvious thing is that children are children – wherever in the world you are. They love to play, tease and have fun. I was gobsmacked at how happy these children are given the fact they don’t have an ounce of what children have here in the western world – a leaf could be taken out of their books when it comes to acceptance, humility and happiness.
The local schools and children’s approach to schooling
I spent a couple of days at the local school (we had to walk the children each day) and met the teachers. It’s amazing! The response you get saying good morning to a class of 60 children is quite impressive. They leave early for school, usually before 7.30 and are back for 3pm. The day is similar to ours, lessons, lunch, lessons, home. The main difference is the infrastructure they are taught in and the subjects. I have to say when helping some children with maths homework I was struggling myself.
The culture/religion/social observations
In my eyes, the culture was one of a very old, developing country, though on the brink of change. Ghana is a model country by African terms, with peaceful, democratic elections taking place and (recently) free schooling for all primary age children (the problem is access to it).
Late one night we heard lots of chanting and drums – this went on for hours and hours. We found out later it was a religious (Christian) ceremony. It’s an interesting combination of Christian beliefs and traditional African rituals.
Another thing I noticed as I travelled around, was the occasional white marquee being set up for what looked like a wedding. As the time passed I realised these are for post funeral gatherings. They celebrate the life of an individual with a huge party when a person passes away and go to great lengths to advertise the celebration party of a passing person.
Hygiene
Hygiene varies depending on where you are, the plot of land you are given by the chief (that is how homes are allocated) and what your approach as an individual is to personal hygiene. We saw some areas, particularly near the cities that were awful, and others not so bad. One huge problem they have is plastic. All water and packaging comes in either plastic bags or similar – these are sold roadside, and dropped after use. They are everywhere. I spent three whole days clearing up just the plastic bits from around the orphanage grounds – but it comes back so quickly. There is no rubbish collection.
Malaria
Malaria is rife in the area – we spoke to one missionary that said he had caught malaria 3 times in the past 2 months. One evening we noticed that one of the smaller children, Adjunem, was very quiet. He went to sleep very early (whereas normally you can’t keep him quiet) and I was concerned. We checked him, and he was very hot, and we couldn’t wake him. Unfortunately, Margaret and Nana weren’t aware of the severity purely because they aren’t educated enough to spot these problems. We told them something was wrong and insisted on taking him to the next village to get to the medical centre. Upon arrival, a very strict women took two looks at him, confirmed his symptoms and said ‘Malaria’.
A cocktail of 4 types of medicine and a suppository later and the boy was back on his feat saying our names – all in 10 minutes! That must have been some drug cocktail.
The nearest city – Kumasi
Kumasi is the nearest city to Sekyere, it takes an hour or two by tro tro to get to and is a completely different experience. Away from the tranquillity and bush knives of the country side there is a massively overcrowded and busy city. This really was a completely different world.
Kumasi is home to the largest market in West Africa and indeed it is like a labyrinth. Turn after turn of markets stalls, cooking foods, fabrics, rice, bartering and homelessness. Thank goodness we had Nana to guide us else we would have surely got lost. Earlier, we had agreed to purchase the children new school clothes and some much needed covers for the old sofa they had and this was main reason for coming to the city. We walked in and out of dusty alleys, eyes everywhere, past a bush rat outdoor kitchen with literally hundreds of these things being cooked until we came to an opening in a wall where a little fabric workshop was busy bustling away. It was here we selected and placed an order for the school uniforms and for seat covers from a sweet old tailor with purple lips. Within the week the tailor came to the orphanage with everything as requested for the children. Happy days.
What I took from the experience
Sure, a visit to a small orphanage in Ghana isn’t going to change the world, but it gave me an opportunity to experience first hand a lift style that has always fascinated me and provided me with an opportunity to make a small difference to a wonderful set of individuals that I now have ongoing contact with.
There is much, much more I could talk about, perhaps in another blog post. If you’d like to hear more, let me know.
I hope very much Ghana continues to develop as an emerging nation in Africa and I very much look forward to my next visit early next year.
I’m keen to hear of similar experiences others may have had – have you done any overseas volunteer work? How did you find it? Would you go back?
Thanks for reading.
Matt wrote this on 15.09.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Democracy, Ethics, Interesting, NixonMcInnes, Off topic box
Last week I was lucky enough to get involved in ittriga09 – a conference that was part of a larger project that started last year run by Transitions Online in Prague. The project, Interactive Tools for Better Transparency, had this aim: (taken from the Transitions Online project spec as seen here on Dan Mcquillans blog post about it last year)
“This year-long initiative seeks to provide NGOs in the new member states of the EU (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria) with web tools and strategies that will better enable them to promote transparency and good governance norms in their respective countries. The Internet is a powerful tool for the dissemination of information to the public and policymakers; however, NGOs in this region have been slow to adopt Internet-based approaches and, as a result, a great deal of their socially-useful research remains unavailable or poorly organized, having limited influence on public policy.”
The project kicked off with a training seminar in Prague, which the excellent Dan Mcquillan from Make Your Mark (an NM client) spoke at, which kicked off some excellent pilot projects over the last year. This conference was about reviewing those projects and looking to the ‘what next’ for them all.
I volunteered to get involved to give the group some practical tips and techniques in testing their sites and getting them ready for users, and to also talk about how they can start reaching out to their audiences online now they have started building platforms, using buzz monitoring and network mapping.
It was fantastic and very inspiring, on so many levels:
Meeting some of the people working at the NGO’s and hearing about their missions, challenges and great work they do in their countries.
These NGO’s only starting to look at these new online technologies last year and how much learning they’ve done in the last year and the excellent pilot projects they’ve put together so quickly.
Seeing some of the other examples of online activism, campaigning and freedom of information sharing from some of the excellent speakers.
A couple that were particularly interesting and I’d recommend having a look at:
Tony Bowden from mySociety showed us some of this organisations fantastic UK-based campaigning sites, do check out mySociety and in particular FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow.
And Sami Ben Garbia from Global Voices talking about digital activism in highly internet censored Tunisia – one really interesting campaign was the practice of Geobombing – with this example of it being used by Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org to link tens of video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth, because YouTube is banned in Tunisia. Absolutely fascinating.
Following this conference a lot of the delegates went straight onto Barcamp Baltics that weekend (some of the techies involved but also the non-techies from the NGO’s who are finding themselves slipping into geekdom!) which sounded excellent and extremely international with 23 countries represented.
And the exciting thing for me now is to see the conversations following on from this event; that this is not the end of a project, but the start in a lot of ways; the news of more funding secured for another pilot project to get off the ground; and the ideas floating around of these NGO’s from different countries working collaboratively on projects to get ideas off the ground more quickly, cheaply and without being lost in the sea of the individual organisations work.
All in all, I am so glad to have been involved, if only to see the amazing work that is going on in organisations I didn’t know existed and how quickly and in a nimble way they are starting to adapt to the new online world and do their good work within spaces that their audiences are now residing. I look forward to seeing the projects progress and staying involved to help out where I can and keep learning & being inspired from these excellent digital projects happening in organisations all over Europe.
(image credit – Yaroslav Azhnyuk)
Anna wrote this on 14.02.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Democracy, Development, Ethics, Events & conferences, Interesting box
Congo-refugee-camp
As an iPhone user and lover of all things gadgety, I was concerned when I received an email from the ‘Raise Hope for Congo’ site alerting me that there’s a chance the gadgets I own may have played a piece in fuelling the awful war taking place out there.
Essentially the issue here is that product suppliers to the major electronic companies may be sourcing their parts from corrupt groups in the rebel held areas of the Congo region (a region rich in the ‘3 T’s – Tin, Tungsten and Tantalum). These three minerals are used in batteries, vibrator parts (for your phone….) and other elements.
Some stats:
- Tin – used as a solder on circuit boards inside cell phones and laptops. 70% of the world’s tin is used as solder, and 5-10% of tin ore comes from eastern Congo.
- Tantalum – used to store electricity in iPods, digital cameras, and cell phones. 70% of the world’s tantalum is used in electronic products, and 15% comes from Congo.
- Tungsten – used to make your cell phone or Blackberry vibrate. Tungsten is a growing source of income for armed groups in Congo.
So what’s the point you’re probably asking. The point is, it’s good to hold these electronic giants to account and ask them about this. Raise Hope for Congo suggests sending a polite mail to those companies, asking them to make sure and to provide details of the concrete steps being taken to guarantee such minerals are being sourced from legitimate suppliers.
Play your part to help – read more on how you can make a difference by sending a simple e- mail or letter here.
Thank you to Julien Harneis for use of the above photo.
Matt wrote this on 22.01.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Democracy, Ethics, Interesting, Social media box
