Colin - 20 Nov 2006:

Five weeks into our stay here, and we are old hands at most things. However, we are just about tolerating the heat and humidity, but not yet adapting comfortably to it. It seems to have become even hotter in the last week, and Judi has now taken to carrying around her battery operated hand fan! The Hamattan has just arrived, and apparently stays around until early January; it is a wind, which is the equivalent of the “Pineapple express” in BC, or the Foehn in Europe, bringing in high air from a distance. In Ghana’s case the air comes from the Sahara, and brings sand with it, so the visibility is reduced, and the air becomes grittier apparently. It only started 3 days ago, and seems to have raised the temperature quite a bit, although everyone keeps telling us that by December the temperature and humidity both drop – we’ll see!

Having said that, I can’t be adapting too badly, because last week on one of the hotter days, when the power was off, and the office generator was broken, I was dutifully ploughing on with my work, with sweat streaming off me, thinking that this is the way life is here, so you just grit your teeth and ignore it. There was no-one else in my office, but after about an hour, I wandered into the other office to find that all the Ghanaian staff had stopped working long ago, and were sitting around fanning themselves, and complaining that it was far too hot to work! They also always carry large men’s handkerchiefs, and are constantly mopping their brows. I am very old-fashioned and have never accepted the transition from handkerchiefs to tissues in N. America, and am finding it harder and harder to replace handkerchiefs in Canada. Here they are sold dirt cheap all over the markets, so I have alreadyb decided to buy piles and use them as padding in our suitcases for the crafts we buy!

Life here of course requires a constant adjustment of attitudes. If you are not careful, you find yourself locked into the current attitudes in N. America as being the only reasonable ones, forgetting how recent some of those attitudes are. One good example is the amount of plastic packaging around – the first reaction is ‘What? They have no recycling’, forgetting that recycling is only a recent phenomenon in Canada, and hardly likely to be the priority in a country with so little spending on infra-structure. Another example is ‘child car seats’, which seem so obligatory in N. America (but only in the last generation), but could not even be conceived of here, given their cost relative to other priorities like food. I keep getting Maslow’s pyramid quoted at me all the time - priorities can never be absolute, they have to relate to the stage of development. Both our NGOs find this in the work they do. They do a lot of education, and this is critical to move people forward, whether in health, societal attitudes or school subjects, but it is pointless if the people haven’t eaten at all that day. Food, by necessity, has to come before or at least together with education.

Indirectly, some of my work here is trying to feed that food chain. I am dealing particularly with the Volta region, which is the greenest part of Ghana, but where there are many poor subsistence-farming communities. The area is potentially attractive to tourists, and a lot of work has gone into helping communities gain some entry into tourism and guiding income from the process. Many of these are communities with which Pro-Link or ICA are working, so we are looking for additional income-generating activities for them. One obvious gap for the foreign tourists is the limited supply and low quality of postcards in the country. The tourist industry is relatively recent, but is now the country’s third largest income-earner. No-one seems to have noticed the need for postcards or had the money to invest in the initial inventory, so I am becoming an instant expert on the postcard industry, at least for the Volta region! It is not a traditional NGO approach, but the income in these communities is so small, that postcard sales could make a substantial addition to both community and NGO income, to permit Pro-Link to extend its support to them. We’ll see.

It at least gave Judi and me a good reason to spend a couple of days in a very pretty part of the country, meeting the different communities, and checking out the possibilities. Both ICA and Pro-Link have been trying to train lead groups within the communities to work together to introduce new ideas, and helping them with income- generating activities. It is fascinating to see the different degrees to which individuals have been able to move forward. In one community, a big step was being made in adapting the male and female roles; traditionally, the women carried both the food and the firewood back from the fields at night, and the men carried nothing - this meant that on many nights a cold meal was served, because it was too difficult to carry both on the same trip, and too far to do 2 trips. It is hard to break a long-standing tradition of what is a woman’s job, and by no means as trivial as it sounds, but progress was being made.

Another group had progressed much further in sophistication. Among other things, they were trying to find ways of marketing their traditional and beautiful woven Kente cloth. Judi and I wanted to buy some, but they were sufficiently astute (and generous) to work out that we would probably feel far more obligation to help them, if they gave us some pieces, rather than selling them.

We will definitely be doing more trips to the region, although Judi may be slightly less eager than me. She didn’t seem to appreciate the male / female urinal facilities at the NGO offices. They consisted of an outdoor concrete slab, surrounded by a piece of waist-high fencing, and overlooked by the offices. And even the western women seem to have adapted to peeing standing up, so privacy obviously isn’t a priority when attending to bodily functions.

As in Uganda, we are finding that we brought far too many clothes. It is not that we don’t get through them rapidly in the hot weather, but we have the maid from our landlady’s house to do all our washing. This works out fine, but has been interesting for the ironing. The landlady’s house is all women, so I don’t think the maid is used to ironing creases into pants. Not that I am fussy (or maybe I am), but the first pair she did had diagonal creases, and not even parallel diagonals at that! After considerable instruction, we gave up and she clearly understands that her ironing is limited to shirts.

At least that wasn’t as bad as the experience of a friend of ours, who was here a few months ago. He found that a favourite shirt of his was missing after a few days, and he eventually found it stuffed behind the fridge, with a large hole burnt in the front. Apparently, the story was that the maid had been called away, so that she had asked the gardener, who had no idea what he was doing, to help out. Anyway, they said that they would take it away and get it mended for him. When he got it back, the hole was beautifully patched, using all the labels cut off the shirt! However, our maid is very sweet, and I am going to have to watch out, or I will drift into the typical topic of conversation among ex-patriate communities in the tropics, exchanging complaints about the behaviour of their servants.

That’s it for today. Best Wishes Colin