Thursday, 30 September 2010

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!

Wednesday, 22 September 2010

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...