Ghana Immersion Project

An Outbreak of Peace

Sunyani, Tuesday 6th July.
Denis Murphy diary entry.

There’s an outbreak of peace here with the boys over in school for the morning and the boombox turned off in the front garden of the hotel. They completed their first day in St. James’ yesterday and were buzzing. After six years’ worth of visits, the school’s attitude is refreshingly blasé; put two or three visitors in each class and continue as normal. There’s some hilarity at our accents, especially when the Irish students are asked to read in class, where they’re being told by their new teachers to slow it down and speak clearly, please. It’s an unusual situation for a white European. How many of us are ever in a minority, where the teasing is tilted in favour of the black, rather than the white? The lads are enjoying it, and find it better than the exaggerated deference given to visitors in places here where we are not known.

Another feature of this week is that the boys are in more senior classes, covering material that they haven’t done yet in Mary’s. Normally we’d be put in younger classes because the older ones are preparing for their final exams, but this year the Ghanaian system is converting to a four-year senior cycle so there’s no Leaving Cert. Not being the brightest kid in the class in putting pressure on them to perform academically, which they’re enjoying more than being bored by the classwork.

We had a fantastic drumming class last night. Most have bought their own drums (sorry, folks) and a teacher called Mr Minta taught us the basics: three ways to hit it, and eight basic rhythms. He drove us hard, moving around the group and making each one of us perfect the rhythm, firstly in groups of three, then if necessary on our own. We were in a gazebo outside but hardly dared to glance at the lizards hunting across the ceiling as Minta put us through our paces. After two hours he brought it all together, starting us off on our rhythmic drumbeats, then accompanying Cian Delaney through a series of spectacular dance movements. It was hard work but ultimately mesmerising, finishing the day on a high of collective achievement.

I asked Mr Minta to text his address so that we could write and thank him properly; he very kindly rang at 5.30 a.m. to check I’d got it. Ghanaian time. I cut my losses and went over to St. James’ for morning prayer and Mass. On the road in the early-day light were lines of women and children come to fetch water from a tap in the hotel grounds, carrying it home on their heads in two gallon yellow plastic containers. Over in school the church was packed with sleepy Massgoers. Attendance is compulsory for all, Catholics and non-Catholics, and is followed by the day’s announcements. As always I was caught unawares by the hissing noise made to get silence; I used to think it was derogatory but finally worked out it’s simply their version of ‘shush’. Afterwards I watched with Fr Alex, the headmaster, as the 600 lads filed along to their first class at 7.15; he can be stern when he needs to be but he was smiling as he described the thirty minute Mass as ‘very Irish – get them in and get them out’. They have a break at 8.15 for breakfast, then 50 minute classes starting at 9, 10, 11, 12 and 1.

Fr Alex hopes to bring a group of St James’ students to visit Ireland next year, finally closing that circle. We chatted through the supports and organisation that will be necessary. The barely-spoken fear is that we will not be able to get all of them visas. We had two Ghanaian teachers over last year and one of them, because years ago she was refused an entry visa for the UK, was at first turned down for Ireland. Thankfully there was a successful appeal and she got the paperwork the day before she travelled. Fr Alex will get his group to organise their passports and we’ll start the process as soon as possible.

The weather today is the coolest it’s been. Over the past ten days it’s generally been humid, but thankfully it’s never been ‘sweat-as-you-sit-in-the-shade’ kind of heat. We’re still consuming a lot of liquid: I’m waiting here for a water delivery organised by Ruth and Elaine (myself and Nisbet chuckled at the women doing the water). Yesterday and today, the group have accounted for ten cases of twenty-four 750ml bottles. So far – touch wood – we’ve all been healthy. A few had rocky days last week after forgetting to take the lettuce from their burgers, ironically when we treated them to dinner in a relatively expensive European-style pizza & burgers joint. But nobody has yet missed an activity, whether teaching, school or project visits. There was one case of tonsillitis which Elaine treated with antibiotics; the inflammation is now gone. Pray God we get another five days of this.

We’d a meeting the other night to mark the half-way point. Two themes emerged most strongly from the first week: the teaching, and the visit to Trede village school. Many commented on the sense of achievement of moving from the mutual awkwardness of the first day with the Ghanaian primary school kids, to the easy chatting and fun at the end; several spoke openly and movingly at their delight at greeting and being greeted by name on the street by the kids they were teaching, and their sense of loss at the farewell ceremony.

In Trede, the classroom facilities were shocking. The twentysomething Spiritan parish priest told me it is a very poor place, with many desperate people attracted to Pentecostal churches which promise great things. Spiritians, he commented, work in difficult places, and Trede is difficult. In one class where we introduced ourselves and asked if anyone had questions, a youngster stood up. He pointed to the tin roof, full of holes, and told us with customary formality overlying his barely-suppressed passion that proper learning could not take place when it rains or when the sun is baking down. None of us knew where to look. It was somehow worse that he was in this final weeks at school; aged 15 he’s gone from school even if the improvements do take place.

Today, back in Sunyani, the boys will be home for lunch at 12.00, change quickly out of their school uniforms, and be on the road as soon as possible after 12.30 to visit the mushroom project and a village afterwards. They might miss the World Cup semi-final which starts at 6.30 local time this evening, but then, if they’re not prepared to let that go without comment, they’re missing a bigger picture, and I don’t think they are. There’s similar debates here to what happened when Ireland didn’t qualify: the ‘that’s football get on with it’ versus ‘the injustice must be rectified’ approach. After the quarter-final, an almost eerie stillness descended on Kumasi with thousands of men walking home having watched it around televison sets in the open air. Some spoke angrily, most were silent. They’d seen this World Cup as Africa’s chance to break a glass ceiling; the outcome was hard to stomach.

At the mid-point meeting, the lads looked at me for a comment on a moment that had stood out for me. I’d to think about it: so many strong experiences. There’s the profound satisfaction, for example, that since 2004 St. Anthony’s in Bantama has turned from a group of semi-collapsed sheds into a simple but magnificent school, with its blocks of busy classrooms. For the Irish boys, it’s the way it is; for us who’ve been fortunate enough to watch it grow, it’s a miracle. The moment I mentioned as a highlight of the past week was a smile and a wave from the new principal, Mr Peter, as we passed one day. When we met him the first day he didn’t know what to expect, and was warily seeking to work out what to do with this big group of Europeans invading his school. Two days of watching the programme in action turned him into a convert; as I told the lads, he joined a long line of people who’ve being won over by the niceness of St. Mary’s students at their best.

Tuesday evening
A very heavy project visit this afternoon which one of the boys is writing up. It began with a visit to Bernard Bempah in Techiman, who trains women in income generation schemes such as mushroom growing and rearing rabbits, giant snails and grasscutters (bushrats) for eating. We went on to a village in the Wenchi district to meet some of the women. There people here are Islamic, originally from the north of the country. It was stone-age poor: mud huts, people dressed in rags, children with swollen bellies. No electricity, no running water, no practical way to transport surplus produce a few dozen miles to Techiman, one of the best-known markets in western Africa. There are water pumps, but the villagers say one is contaminated and the other doesn’t always work because the water table is very low. At the end the kids showed us a version of hopscotch and ampee, a game like paper-scissors-stone done through dance steps. Then they performed a dance for us; their mothers smiled for the first time as they kept time with claps. No drums here. An older man sat and watched, a small child nestled against him. At the end he thanked us for coming. He told Bernard that he didn’t come to them often enough, and asked him to come more often (Bernard, to his credit, translated this). He asked us to remind Aidlink about the water pumps not providing enough. All this with a gentle, stately dignity that belied the desperation of the message.

Later we spoke on the phone with Anne about the village. I’d been there before but it hadn’t seemed so close to the edge; the people today looked worn out. Anne reminded me that Concern Universal, previously our hosts in this area, are closing down their operation here. Their funding reduced in the recession, they’re cutting programmes. Previously they’d have been advocates for that village, providing training, support in dealing with the state, and a general safety net.

Tuesday 6th July in Sunyani

Conor Sheridan 6-6-10

Today we went on our only project visit of this week. After attending our morning classes until 12, we hurried back to the hotel, as the teachers had given us the near impossible task of getting back to our rooms, changing and eating lunch in half an hour. Needless to say, it took longer than they had hoped for and we didn’t get on the road until quarter to one. The place we were visiting was the income generation project, or mushroom farm to us, which we were told a lot about before our visit. The journey out to the project took an hour and a half, and we when we reached our destination we were greeted by Bernard, the friendly manager of the farm. He took us around the farm in the stages the mushrooms grow. First he took us to the sawdust piles, which are used as the medium for the mushrooms to grow. A few of us took turns turning over a pile, which was tiring work in the heat. The next stage of the process is dividing the now decomposed into bags each weighing a kilo each. After this, the bags are filled with mustard seeds and then put in an incubation room. It was a very efficient operation and everyone was very impressed. The farm also keeps animals, including rabbits, goats, snails and a peculiar creature called a grasscutter. The goats were kept in an enclosure. The rabbits were housed in hutches which were in the open air. At a guess I would say there were 6 or 7 goats and at least 20 rabbits. We went on to the grasscutters next, which are essentially giant rats, the bigger ones reaching the size of a rugby ball. Bernard told us that they are nasty in the wild, but these ones had been domesticated somewhat, which made it very ironic when the one he was holding wriggled out his grip and ripped a hole in his shirt with its front teeth. It was onto the snails next, who also had an enclosure. The snails were all about the size of a fist, and apparently are quite delicious, but we all politely declined the offer to taste them. They also had a pet monkey on the farm, which Conor Flynn befriended. When we had seen everything there was to see, we all packed back onto the bus and continued another 40 minutes down the road to another town, which the project supports. When the bags of mushrooms are nearly ready for harvest, they are sold to women in various villages, who continue to cultivate them and then sell them on to people in the city. This was our first experience of the Africa that you see in the Trocaire ads. The community of 500 all lives in mud huts, while a vast majority of the children have the tell-tale sign of the swollen belly which means dirty water. A lot of us were taken aback by the poverty and destitution surrounding us, but as Bernard spoke in Twi to the local woman it came to light that recently one of their water sources had become spoiled, and the only remaining one is very unreliable. Nonetheless, they proudly showed us the room where they grow the oyster mushrooms, and after this a few of the children entertained us with a bit of local dance. After this a few words were spoken by the village’s chief and reciprocally by Mr. Nisbet, with Bernard acting as translator. After this, we hopped back on the bus and headed home, arriving just in time to watch the Netherlands beat Ghana’s conquerors Uruguay in the World Cup semi-final, which lightened the mood, but I doubt any of us will forget the sights we saw in the village in a hurry.

Monday 5th July – Sunyani

Conor Flynn

It was the official start of the second week, as we walked across the road for our first day of school. We arrived and we did not know where to go so we stopped beside the first class room block. A man came out and greeted us, he was very nice and asked us who we would like to be in the class with and what subject we would like to be in. I went into a science class with Adam Dunne. We walked in and they were not as excited as we expected because they had already had a pair of Mary’s students last week. They were doing physics when we walked in. They were doing leaving cert level work. I could keep up but it was hard without a text book and because the Ghanaians find it hard to understand our accents. The students told me that the teacher’s nickname was based on his snappy dress! When the classes changed and there was no teacher for a couple of minutes and the students asked Adam and I to go up to the top of the class and introduce ourselves. This would have been a lot harder if I had not of been talking to a class full of people when I was teaching in Bantama for a week.

The next class was English a new teacher came in. It was much easier then the other class and the teacher included us in the class. For the next class we had integrated science. This class was harder to understand. The teacher tried to get us involved but the work was very hard and went into a lot of detail.

On the second day there a free first class, unlike Ireland no supervisor came in but there was an elected writer for the class to write notes on the class. Nearly all of the class were taking the notes down, even though no teacher was in the room. Some were talking to me and Adam and we really got to know them better. They told us about last week and what the other two pupils, Colm and Eoghan were like. The pupils asked us questions about our way of life, one of the pupils in particular was asking me a huge amount of questions from movies to the Wicklow Mountains. I asked them a question about Ghana and one of them brought me over a geography book and they thought me the geography of Ghana for about twenty minutes. They kept on telling me to raise the impression of Ghana and that it was the richest and safest country in Africa. Then we said goodbye and left to go on a project visit.

Through the Market and into the Slums

F.Maguire…

Having packed and prepared ourselves for our journey today, there was little else for me to do in the afternoon. Some guys returned to the cultural centre and the jersey shops while others just relaxed. Mr.Murphy’s journey to buy spices seemed like a good compromise. We jumped into a taxi just outside of the compound led by our logistics manager Imma. Ghanaian driving is a bit chaotic, but it is also surprisingly safe. We were driven further into the centre of Kumasi until our journey was cut short by a bustling market street. We continued on foot up one of the hills around which Kumasi is built. We passed the prison which was directly beside the police station which was beside the city bank which was in turn then beside the courts (That’s decentralisation for you). Upon reaching the so-called White man’s market, for its continental fruits and spices, we then turned and headed back downhill. The road was filled with all kinds of vendors and electronics shops all bordered by the open sewers which unlike Bantama, were flowing.

It was after a few minutes of brisk walking that we reached the bottom. Suddenly Imma said that we’ll go through the market here. I didn’t realise that the entrance was simply a passageway the size of a doorframe to my left. I was so taken aback by the sudden change in scenery that I didn’t remember to take out my camera. We passed men eating lunch in crowded corners and women carrying what seemed like shops on their heads. Mr.Murphy, Luke Butler, Eoin Byrne and myself then stepped off of the cement ground, we were now walking on planks of wood suspended over little rivulets of ‘water’. There was a genuine kaleidoscope with each market stall bearing a different color of umbrella. We had landed in the meat section, there were slabs of what looked like liver and massive chunks of fish lying in stacks. The smell was somewhat strong but where else could we have seen this sight in Ghana. Having finished our brief journey through what we thought was the market Imma then asked Mr.Murphy whether we should go though the ‘real market’. Having already spent almost and hour walking through intense heat, colour and noise what was to come was genuinely unbelievable. We walked down a flight of steps and began another journey. This market was much larger and much more intense. The passageways were reminiscent of a crowded bus in the morning. There was little enough space not considering the bowls and boxes laden with merchandise perched on people’s heads and the trolleys that trundled through every so often. It seemed as if this market sold everything, there was fish, sweets, cloth, bags, shoes, food, utensils, and electronics. Imma knew every nook and cranny as he expertly guided us through a neverending maze of stalls. After 30 minutes we reached an abandoned train track and then shortly afterwards the top of the market. Looking back down, there was a sea of corrugated iron roofs and the more modern buildings on the other side, where we had begun. This kind of Africa that we were seeing didn’t stop here, we were standing on busy road full of ‘throw-throw’ busses and teeming with people. We bought lunch for 60 pesewas (around 40 cent) and continued back up one of the hills, headed back in the direction of Bantama.

But the market was not the end of our tour. Something which I’d been looking at over the past week was the slum (or township) beside our accommodation and had expressed some interest in visiting it. As a group I knew it was impossible but with the guys who had started off looking to buy some spices, a walk through was possible. It’s hard to describe what poverty is at times. In Ireland we have relative poverty, where those who are considered poor are only poor relative to those better off in society. Over the course of the week we’ve seen widespread poverty throughout certain parts of Ghana. What we saw in this slum was striking, only ‘absolute poverty’ could describe it. The houses were on the brink of falling apart. They were constructed out of wooden planks, plywood and (if you were one of the more lucky people) corrugated iron. The ground was stained black with oil in various places, an obvious health hazard. A herd of goats stood idle in our way along the dusty road which bisects the township. A dribble of a stream ran down this path and entered a river at the bottom. You didn’t need to have studied water quality to conclude that amongst other things, this was a breeding spot for mosquitoes, diseases, viruses and posed a serious danger to any adult or even curious young child. There was no running water to be seen in or around any of the dwellings, without which a healthy lifestyle is near impossible.

I’d never come so close to the energy and optimism of a market and to the disparity evident in the slum before. it’s hard to believe that unlike tear jerking advertisments, these two worlds live side by side. Witnessing that first hand is an experience that’ll stay with me for the rest of my life.