Tropical birthday

Falling so close to the festive season, my birthday is always intertwined with an unescapable Christmas theme. Not so in Ghana, where Christmas lights are few and far between and the sight of the odd lifesize Father Christmas effigy in swathes of red and white fur makes me break out in a double sweat.

Far far away from the bitter northern hemisphere, I spent the day in glorious equatorial sunshine, playing frisbee on the beach, riding a horse, paddling in water warmed beautifully by the hot sun. Quite spectacular and it succeeded in taking the edge off a significant birthday.

Later, I donned another outfit made by the legendary Mr Teiks and stepped out for some amazing pad thai, red curry and jazz music. I had a joint party with one of the other volunteers, and the highlight was an amazing birthday cake with both our names written on it and some great and completely unexpected presents.

Waking up

There is no such thing as a lie-in in Ghana. The nights draw in early – by 6pm it is dark - so many people are in bed early and hence awake early. It is completely normal to get a call at 5.30am from a Ghanaian for a general chat.

Every morning, each of my senses experiences its own awakening. First, the rays of strong sun penetrating my windows, my eyelids and falling in warm patches on the bed. Then the scent of freshly lit coals wafts through the windows as a lady begins cooking breakfast outside at a chop bar behind the house. Its acrid smell makes me wrinkle my nose, and irritates the remnants of the stubborn cough, which is now all but gone. At the same time, a loud sweeping sound reaches my ears, accompanying the charcoal scent, as a girl sweeps the entire compound with the noisiest brush. The culmination of the rude awakening is most certainly a cold shower, and as we enter the dry season, our mains water supply is increasingly erratic, so we have the additional exertion of drawing water from a communal tap in the compound and being on top of storage.

Ir de compras

Shopping for anything at home is full of choices, and shopping of any kind is mostly an enjoyable pastime for me. At home, small independent businesses are being forced out of the market by big competitors. In Accra, the shopping experience is more variable. The micro business model thrives. Choice exists, but at a cost, and by a strange twist, you can buy almost anything you could want for on the street, except when you are looking for it.

For groceries, I choose between small market stalls by the roadside and supermarkets. I am slowly building up a relationship with some of the stall owners and they now throw in or ‘dash’ me something extra – a mango, say, or an extra cucumber. Supermarkets mostly target the ex-pat community. It means I can buy things like marmite, cereal, shower gel, but all with a heavy mark up. Unless it’s on promotion, a box of Special K can cost the equivalent of £10. In my first few weeks I was scandalised at how imported goods, some with ‘99p special offer’ clearly written on the packaging, were being sold for at least six times the price. The whole experience is reminiscent of shopping at H&M: there is no certainty that if you find something one week, the same product will ever be in stock again. Most shocking were the prices of tin openers – a basic pound shop tin opener can set you back about 16 ghana cedi – around £8.

For clothes, there is the joy of the Accra mall, which is hideously overpriced, and not really on trend. There are shops with ex-catalogue, end of range UK stock from new look, next etc but from circa 1991. A pair of Aldo shoes would cost 250 Ghana Cedi (£125). The popular volunteer choice for clothes, shoes and bags is what is famously knows as ‘dead obruni clothes’ in the circle market. The name comes from discarded clothes of foreigners. Here second hand and almost new, on trend, items can be picked up at bargain prices. Well within the volunteer allowance!

There is also a huge demand for handmade, bespoke clothing. Yards of brightly coloured fabrics are available by the roadside and in more upmarket stores, and tailors are hard at work in small booth-like shops, just set back from the street. But there are strict protocols governing what is appropriate to wear, and when. One volunteer had a couple of shirts made and was mortifyingly told that the fabric he had picked was actually to be worn by new mothers! My tailor, Mr Teiks (which sounds like a cat’s name) is very skilled and able to re-fashion anything – a Gap dress, Mexx trousers to a perfect fit.  

Festivities

London must be looking and feeling very festive at the moment. You can spot a few Christmas trees in Accra, but it feels a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack!

I’ve enjoyed a few interesting celebrations over the last week. Starting with a Japanese festival in a park in Accra. You can’t imagine my joy at discovering a park! The festival was showcasing JICA, the Japanese volunteering service, and the work they do in Ghana. There were hoards of Ghanaian kids demonstrating Japanese dance, men and women walking round in some amazing kimonos and great food being freshly prepared. Sitting there, enjoying a Japanese pancake, watching the dancing, visiting a few stalls, I could have been in a park at home.

This was closely followed by my first Eid outside of the UK, part of which I was lucky to spend with a Ghanaian family. Ironically the way they spent their day reminded me of Eid morning in Brum. I went to a mosque in Burma camp first thing, which is in the military barracks, so everything was very organised and efficient! The mosque accounts were even written out on the wall. The atmosphere was incredibly lively, with drummers, people in brightly coloured traditional wear, and I sported a dress in semi-African print fabric. Did a lot of people watching and befriended a few people. A cow was sacrificed afterwards; it’s the first time I’ve seen it done and I oscillated between curiosity and feeling extremely queasy. Cakes, pastries and drinks (minerals) were given out afterwards, and there was a scramble for the best ones. I offered my juice to a few young girls and they snatched upon it before the offer had barely left my mouth, but then shared it equally amongst themselves.

 

The week ended with a film premiere at the National Theatre. The building was designed by the person who designed the National Theatre in London and there are similarities. The film was a little budget and amateur, set in the 1950s and toying with everything from tribal clashes, the innocence of young, first love, peppered with humour but not really scratching the surface. The cast all came up on stage at the end, and we took advantage of free food, drinks, and enjoyed the atmosphere and (more) drumming.

And finally, I cooked a vat of biriyani for Accra VSOs this weekend, which made it seem like it was properly Eid. With the accompaniment of some classic soundtracks from one of the Indian volunteers!

Speechwriters use the same rhetoric the world over

Attended my first ministerial event last week, and was surprised, delighted, and thoroughly amused, to find the structure, format and some of the rhetoric so familiar. Clearly speechwriters adopt the same clichés everywhere. Not good speechwriters, ofcourse!

A visit to the doctor

I have been plagued by a cough that won’t shift for the last 10 days. It is exhausting and is forcing me to take it easy, not travel, socialise less, stay in and rest, which is all v. frustrating. Menpao cough [I hate the cough]! I also braved a trip to the doctor, where I learned two things – I have lost about 6 kilos since being here, and medication is prescribed in abundance. I left the clinic with a goody bag containing cough syrup, antibiotics, anti-histamines, vitamin c tablets, multivitamins along with doctor’s orders to avoid at all costs cold showers, fans, air conditioning and other draughty conditions. In which case I’ll be going in for heat stroke and invariably another tonne of meds. Vicious circle. Antibiotics are kicking in and I hope the evil lurgie will be gone by the weekend.

Bridges and crocodiles

They are iconic and exist the world over, some more renowned than others. Sydney Harbour, Brooklyn, Tower, Charles, the views from Waterloo and Hungerford being firm favourites of mine, Humber, the Severn, and the amazing Adome in Akosombo in the Volta region. Akosombo is so green and lush, on a massive scale so you get a breathtaking 360  degree view of natural beauty and the bridge spanning the river is incredibly iconic. Too much to capture, even with a wide angle lens. Again, it’s hard to reconcile this wonderful feat of engineering with the surrounding natural beauty and discovering this in the middle of Africa.

A boy of 10 will row you up stream and back, probably to fund his schoolbooks, as you take in the wonderfully pure water, trailing your fingers through it, resisting the urge to jump in. In a hotel close by, you can take it in more, eat tilapia if the service were better and appreciate the mini zoo. Crocodiles lounging in inch deep water, their backs so dried out by the sun that they look like carcasses, grinning less, sleeping soundly, their mouths agape like an old man’s, minus the drool. Monkeys scampering, looking like they would murder a cigarette. So incredible and random.

You know you’ve been in Ghana six weeks when you...

• don’t wince when your taxi driver swerves suddenly into the path of oncoming traffic
• become impatient when he doesn’t
• stop taking photographs
• start saying words in a variation of the local accent for maximum comprehension
• forget frequently that you are in Africa
• have a rolling list of things that people could bring, package, send to you from home
• invest in a handkerchief to dab perspiration from your face, elegantly
• bump into people you know in random places
• wake up at 6.30am and feel you've slept in
• buy pure water sachets through your car window... and plantain chips, coat hangers, phone top up and anything else you just might need
• eat street food without a second thought
• think in cedis
• know people other than those who were on your flight
• start feeling chilly when it’s overcast
• have moved house three times
• ferry an assortment of washing basins, gas cylinder, pots and pans when moving house
• recognise tro tros and their mates
• have marmite, oyster sauce and kellogs special k in your kitchen cupboard
• start building a collection of locally tailored items
• run out of mr kipling’s cherry bakewells.

An ode to a tree

A tree has suddenly been chopped down in the garden at work. We’re puzzled to the point of hysteria by exactly how such a snap, comedy action has happened and what the motive was. Each time we speak to someone, the plot thickens. It is a fine cactus tree, probably worth a lot, now lying crestfallen. Overnight someone has hacked it into smaller pieces that scatter the driveway. Sometimes the eccentricity of the people you meet can befuddle. And the lack of logic to purely follow orders without stopping to think if it’s in jest, or makes sense. Who’s to blame and who will be held accountabIe, we don’t know. Maybe it’s a case of the juju. Here’s the fallen tree. Victim of an impulsive outburst. Or throwaway comment. We’ll never know...

Weekend at the beach

Beaches in Accra are a bit dirty, but if you head out 45 minutes or so to Kokrobite, you get gentle idyllic ocean, where I was referred to as 'roman sister'!

View from Big Milly's

Just outside our beach house

Fishing action

More fishing related activity

Playing in the sea

Smashing snails for the bbq

Obruni observations

Non-Ghanaians are called obrunis here, which is meant as a non-offensive term for foreigner. I’ve had a few occasions where everyone protests a little at needing to shift over to let the ‘obruni’ out of the tro tro. After a month here, I feel like a lot of what I thought was different has just become accepted, but here’s an attempt to capture what I experience when I leave the house on most days – a random sign for a dog restaurant on my way to work, women selling doughnuts, opening the doors to little wooden boxes balanced on their heads to extract them for customers in passing cars and tros, the just bearable heat walking in direct sunlight. Women frying fish by the roadside, fanning coals to roast plantain, frying plantain chips, scraping oranges, slicing watermelons, the incredible sweet taste of the pineapples, vibrantly coloured butterflies, batik fabric, an abundance of beauty salons, the hissing to get one another’s attention, the dust, the absence of pavements, people asleep in shops and on the roadside, the gust of wind that is so welcome but blows grit into your mouth, everything you own turning the colour of the road,  open gutters, the beeping of the taxi drivers ever ready for business, the calling of the tro tro boys, the amusing signs on the backs of tro tros and taxis from ‘cause and effect’, ‘good friend’, ‘inshallah’ to ‘clap nicely for jesus’, the equally amusing shop names. 4am church services, roads that turn to lakes when it rains, patient babies strapped to their mother’s backs, crazy driving, relentless traffic, spectacular rain, coupled with repeated flashes of silent lightning that lights up the night sky, the hawkers and market sellers, all tiny micro businesses selling the same stuff, repeated again and again. And again. Only seasonal fruit and veg, the sweetest, juiciest sugar cane, second hand clothes markets, the universal availability of phone top up in the smallest denominations, ditto washing powder and milo. The red signs from the AMA warning you that a house isn’t for sale, the section in the newspaper warning against financial dealings with an individual who no longer works for their organisation, people living in shacks from which they do business in the day, girls wrapped in sheets waiting to use communal showers, rows of laundry hanging out to dry, goats running about, geckos scurrying, the calls of ‘oi Obruni’ and ‘one one cedi’ through the market, the incredible generosity of people who offer to pay my travel fare or buy my shopping.

And amongst this array of chaotic, jumbled, micro level bustle, where everything is so different to home, enough can be found – a diet coke, a sprite, some New Look sandals, Chinese food, colgate, an apple, to normalise it so it feels completely easy!

The epic journey to work

My journey to work deserves an entry of its own. There is a hint of irony in its contrast with my route to work at home! Leaving the house, I have to trudge through a road of red earth, or red mud if it has rained, hugging the edge of the road so my toes don’t get crushed by the heaving taxis and tro tros that are negotiating the irregularities of the path. In a couple of minutes I reach the top of the street, my face already coated in a film of dust and perspiration. From there I’m confronted with a quarry of a road with standstill traffic, tros completely full as I have to shout my desired destination in the hope that they’re going there and have a spare seat, which others on the roadside are also clamouring for. The odds are against me as there is only so much risk and aggression that I’ll employ. This part of the journey can take either 2 minutes or 45 minutes. It’s all about luck, speed and dexterity as I race between lanes of moving traffic to climb aboard.

The first tro takes me down the road to the bus station, where I wait for a second tro. Here there are orderly queues of people. Sometimes the line moves quickly, other days it extends indefinitely and I have to weigh up the advantages of waiting in the heat or opting for a cab. Either way, we twist and wind around the suburbs of Accra. The tro deposits me at a place called Atomic Junction, from where I walk a short distance to take a shared car that drops me outside work. The whole thing takes about 2 hours. On public transport, it costs the equivalent of around 60 pence. In a cab, it’s closer to a day’s allowance which rules it out as an option for anyone on a local salary...

8-5

Started work last Monday and really enjoyed my first week. There are under 10 members of permanent staff at the education NGO where I’m working, and also 3 Canadian volunteers through a different programme, and we all get on really well.

I spent my week immersed in reading on education in Ghana, understanding the context, issues and policy priorities. I found it all fascinating and am feeling really engaged  by the work I’ll be doing here. Current issues at the moment are around capacity in schools to accommodate the new cohort of senior high school students as the senior high school curriculum has been switched from 3 years to 4 years and then reverted back to 3 years. Schools are struggling with the transition as this year they have students completing the 4 year programme and new students starting three year programmes, but a shortage of classroom facilities. There is also lots of effort to improve school buildings especially where there are schools under trees and separate toilets for boys and girls and a huge move to improve participation, especially for girls where the regional variations are most stark. There’s also a significant focus on inclusion, and building capacity for better provision for children with disabilities. I will be doing some policy analysis, leading on an inclusive education forum and helping to set up a Civil Society Education Fund that is all about devolution of power and getting more local ownership for education issues. We’re all in this together....!

School

There is a school near our new house and their assemblies are an energetic affair, with lots of singing and clapping. For those interested in Ghana's education system, education is highly valued here as a means to succeed. There is a big divide between the north and south both in quality of teaching and poverty being a huge barrier to children remaining in education. There is a compulsory age for staying in school but no way or effort made to enforce it. I’m still learning about the system but two things really struck me – firstly that 91% of children age 11 cannot read with understanding, and that 95% of the total national education budget is spent on teachers’ salaries, leaving 5% for everything else. That means district education offices (of which there are about 175) have a menial annual budget equivalent to about £1000 a year The main reason cited by inspectors for not visiting schools is that they can’t afford the fuel so steps are being taken to build the capacity of heads to self-evaluate.

The teacher training programmes are interesting here too. A degree is only needed to become a secondary high school teacher, but not for primary. There is a national volunteer service, through which people are encouraged to dedicate 1-2 years to teaching before beginning their career. But it seems like there is a lot of transition from the teaching profession as people use it as a stepping stone to other highly skilled jobs. Progression is only through University, with no clear vocational route. There also isn’t any formal training for head teachers. Progression is based on the number of years of experience you have, and more surprisingly there are no incentives to progress as heads are paid exactly the same as teachers!

Went into work to meet my colleagues this week. They seem nice and want me to start full time on Monday, which is good as so much has needed doing to the house.

A permanent home... with challenges

Said my goodbyes to Adabraka, packed up my things once again and headed to Achimota, which is my permanent home and on the outskirts of Accra. I’m sharing with Vanessa, who’s also a new volunteer from the UK.  The house is huge – five bedrooms with a garden, so there is lots of space and I have an en suite bathroom. But we soon discovered that all that glitters is not gold as we were confronted with this massive house, completely empty, with only 4 Ghana cedi of electricity on the meter, a range of leaks, no gas, a front gate that took at least two people to close it, locks that didn’t work and heavy traffic - far into the night we can hear the car suspensions creaking as they struggle through the potholed dirt roads.

The leaks were temporarily resolved when our running water supply stopped, and we have spent our evenings playing ‘hunt the cockroach’, trying to scare off the less welcome of our fellow tenants! We’ve done lots to the house this week, so it feels more like home but we’re still getting through a can of cockroach spray every night and having to be inventive with our meals – ranging between bread, dairylea and steamed fish and rice in the rice cooker while we wait for our gas canister to be filled.  Just when we thought we were getting there we woke this morning up to find the water was back on and caused a leak and small flood in the bathroom!

Our house

Garden - spot the banana trees at the back

Kitchen after much cleaning and cockroach spray

Three tomatoes

I went in search of some fresh fruit one morning and got directions to a local market. Even in the centre of Accra, you can turn a corner and the street transforms from urban to rural. From cars, tarmac and kiosks there are suddenly dirt tracks, women cooking outside, pounding barrels of fufu and cows and chickens appear. In the distance is the Ghana Commercial Bank tower and Kwame Nkrumah circle (known as the circle, or circle, circle, circle!) and in a short walk it all changes back again. The market was full of women selling mountains of vegetables – chillies, okra, yams, tomatoes and tilapia, which is the main fish eaten here. I managed to get on the wrong side of one of the sellers by trying to buy only three tomatoes, which was clearly a poxy number to be buying and the woman on the stall glared and berated me in Twi and refused to serve me. Her tomatoes were only sold in bucketfuls!

Rain and a rooster

We are at the end of the rainy season at the moment so there have been several tropical showers since I arrived. The weather is sometimes as unpredictable as at home and I have to carry an umbrella around.

Rain in Makola market

The star of last week, and the epitome of my week in Adabraka was a nocturnal rooster who would wake me every morning at 2.30am and then continue to crow at 20 second intervals for the rest of the day. It felt like prison camp torture so I was sleeping with my ipod on to drown out the rooster and the other noises on the street, which included all night church services, a mechanic that started work at 5.30am and about 30 different calls to prayer. The rooster clearly has an infamous reputation amongst volunteers here and the funniest story I’ve heard is how one night it punctuated someone’s night of passion!

An impromptu trip to Cape Coast

Tuesday was a public holiday so went on a very spontaneous trip to Kakum National Park, Cape Coast and Elmina. Kakum is a rainforest with a suspended bridge above the trees with amazing views of the forest. It was very tropical and I was most impressed with the giant bamboo plants!

Bamboo!

Cape Coast and Elmina are along the Atlantic coast and both have slave castles so quite a lot of sombre history, which is really hard to process when it’s set against these picture perfect white sand, palm beaches that look like something out of the Caribbean. I have some amazing pictures for when I find an internet connection that uploads!

Canopy walk

Elmina castle

Boys playing on the beach by Elmina

Caribbean-esque!

Kids playing in the fishing village

Side of Elmina castle

Settling into Adabraka

It feels good to be settled into a house but it also means I have to start fending for myself! That means food, cold showers, washing my clothes by hand. The other Accra volunteers came to visit me and we tried out our first tro tro (shared minibus like a dolmus) ride back to Osu, which is the area with restaurants, hotels and a big ex-pat supermarket which sells everything I could possibly want for, but at 5 times the price.

Did my first load of handwashing! Boiled water in the kettle as felt weird to be washing clothes in cold water. They smelt surprisingly nice when they were dry. I dried them indoors as if you hang clothes out, you have to iron them really well to kill the small bugs that lay eggs in the seams  and prevent them from burrowing into your skin. Nice! Hot water and a washing machine are definitely the things I miss most at the moment!

Bought my first piece of traditional Ghanaian printed fabric on Monday. A few of the current volunteers know a good tailor and have had some really nice dresses, skirts and tops made. I am making up for bringing hardly any clothes with me  thanks to certain people culling my luggage...

Moving into Adabraka

There’s a good group of us in Accra and I’m going into some temporary accommodation in the Adabraka (Abracadabra!) district, while the others are going into a hotel.  I’ll probably be moving into a house further out of town when it’s ready with a couple of the other new volunteers, which I’m looking forward to.

The VSO driver picked me up on Saturday morning and I met my new flatmates Weng and Rosario, who are both from the Phillipines. I feel really at home and they shared their lunch with me - great fish soup and a chocolate rice porridge. I have promised to cook them a curry! The house is really clean. I also don’t need to use a mosquito net as all the windows have netting, though a few sly ones exist in the bathroom. The mosquitos are v. stealthy - I hardly notice them, the bites don’t always cause a reaction,  and malaria seems to be an accepted inevitability amongst the other volunteers...

The Adabraka house



Living room




My room


 

Life post-training

On Saturday we said our goodbyes to the new volunteers heading to their placementsin the Northern, upper East and Upper West regions. I won’t be starting work until the following week as I need to be formally taken in by the VSO programme manager and she is busy all week. So I have a week to settle in and find my way round Accra!

The first week - in-country training

Spent the first week in a hotel on the outskirts of Accra on our in-country training with the other 25 or so new volunteers from the UK, India, the Phillipines and Uganda. It has been great for getting to know new and existing volunteers and generally acclimatising, but with three buffet meals a day, hot water and a pool, it felt a bit like a cocoon and a far cry from proper Accra. The food is traditional Ghanaian mostly, and I have developed a love, slightly verging on addiction, for kellewelle, which is like potato wedges but made from plaintain and way nicer. Also tried banko, which is sour and quite heavy and starchy as it’s a mixture of pounded yam and something else.

We had language lessons in Twi, which is the local dialect in the Greater Accra region and I can now hold a very basic conversation. Very basic!

We went out on a bus tour of Accra. It’s a bustling city with loads of traffic as the only way to get around is by road, hundreds of street hawkers selling everything from cleaning products to plantain , chips. There is also lots to do – with a sushi bar, gelataria, running club, yoga centre and lots of live music, and believe it or not, a polo club!

Boy weaving kente cloth by the hotel

Akwaaba!

So I have been in Ghana for 10 days and so far have loved every minute!

Access to the internet is limited and I’m currently sitting in the reception area of one of the hotels where other volunteers are staying, using the wifi.  The connection is pretty poor and it takes over an hour to upload a picture, so the odds are against a photo blog! I have been blogging in word, and I hope that what follows helps to paint a picture, while I persevere with the photos...

3 days to go...