Volunteering in Africa...something different

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Volunteering in Africa...something different

Africa » Ghana » Buduburam refugee camp By Jebeth
April 15th 2007 I don't have much time to write, and there's so much to say. The work we did on Budaburam Refugee Camp was amazingly fulfilling. I spent most mornings teaching an art and crafts class to excitable youngsters who'd had almost no exposure to using crayons, and who loved it. My afternoons were with a wonderful group of mothers who are part of the Mothers Skills Training Center, I taught the Level 1 mothers reading and writing and actually gave them their final exam. Although they only learned words like 'first, can, him, ect.' knowing that they were advancing their reading and writing everyday was amazing, as well as their appreciation and love. They were the ones that kept me going, through everything, and the memory of them is what always makes me smile. I know their example will inspire their families and communities, and every step, no matter how small, is a gift.

There are so many funny stories, and great things we saw, but for now you'll have to wait. Hopefully I'll write more in the next few days.

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For the real story I'm going to give it all to you. Ghana came with so many ups and downs, but all the people we met made it wonderful and unforgettable.

Arriving in Ghana was a perfect example of the ups and downs we were constantly having. We got in at least an hour late with no phone numbers or even the name of the NGO we were volunteering for, but we'd arranged to have some "friends" (to be described here in) pick us up. We would have been completely screwed if they weren't there to get us. When we got off the plane we waited and waited for my backpack but it never came out, I almost cried. Aaron's backpack came, and we didn't have a stopover anywhere where it would get lost, it just never made the plane in Johannesburg. I filled out all the paperwork doing my best to believe it would actually come in a few days like the lady said. So the good part about arriving was that our friends, Jill and JJ were there to meet us. Jill is my cousin Angella's husband's old roommate's boyfriend's sister and JJ is her boyfriend. But in all honesty we are friends with Jill's brother, Tyler too. We were incredibly relieved to see them waiting for us outside and it was even better to stay the night at JJ's house in Accra. Jull worked in Ghana for an NGO that does resettlement work for refugees all over Ghana and JJ is in the US air force serving a diplomatic post there. His house was great, air conditioning, a power generator, hot showers, washing machine (not that I had any clothes with me to wash, damn it) and best of all cold Dr. Pepper and good beer from America!

We were quite bummed to have to leave the next day for volunteering out in the refugee camp, at least they were two hours late picking us up to take us out there. We started our first day in Ghana at JJ's house with pancakes and Aunt Jemima syrup! And spent the afternoon drinking beer and playing an evil and very fun version of Uno, which I lost, and an exciting game of Yahtzee which I won by impossibly getting 2 Yahtzee. Then we were picked up and taken out to our new home in the village of Awutu, 5 minutes ride from camp. Now this was Africa as you imagine it. To get out to the house we went through several dirt rodes and the house was settled among a couple other houses and some mango trees and big fields of tall grass. The front was a bit marred by an exploded poly tank (water tank), trash, and several chickens and roosters. We were immediately greeted by two of the sweetest, perkiest Australians on the planet, Kirsten and Leah, who showed us around the place, ya know, these are the buckets for the shower, and you put toilet paper here, and flush with these buckets. It was the weekend there so no work right away and we were able to settle in and get to know everyone. Another volunteer arrived the same day as us but they just didn't pick her up at the airport for some unannounced reason. She was amazingly able to find her way all the way out to the volunteer house all by herself, and once we got to know the tenacity of Rachel, we understood how she did it.

The first couple of days I was sick, surprise surprise, I even puked on the road in the village as we walked out to have our orientation on the first day. It was oppressively hot, even if it was cloudy, you never stopped sweating, humidity of 100000%, like nothing you can imagine because there was no escaping it! (not like in Texas where you still have to bring a sweater with you everywhere because of the cold air conditioning) We did buy a fan, but it barely blew even when the electricity was on, which was only about 50% of the time anyways. Stats on the camp: 40,000 refugees, 20,000 of which are children! and about a million chickens wandering everywhere. At the orientation we were given out assignments of the projects we'd be working on. We both were assigned to teaching at the mothers center, mostly because they needed it, but also because all the other volunteers said it was the most rewarding. I was given the PCO school as well, despite the fact that the kids would be on holiday for the whole month. Aaron also got Peace Cells, which is basically a project where PCO facilitates discussions on "peace" type topics within each of the 12 sections of camp, one zone per day. This was the most grueling of all the projects because it required the volunteers to "mobilize" twice a day! That means walking around the prospective zone for around 45 minutes around 10:30am and again in the afternoon just before the meeting. I'm sweating again just thinking about it. At the orientation we were given times for meetings the following day which we were completely stood up on. Luckily all the volunteers had prepped us for that (punctuality, meetings...not real big in Liberian culture I guess), but we still waited for an hour at the mothers center, and after 2 more times of being stood up on, we gave up and never had the specific "orientation". Leah had told us everything we needed to know anyways and we were basically already teaching. For my project at the school I decided to do a kids arts and crafts program while they were oh holiday. My first experience with the kids was amazing and I really love remembering it. I walked up to the school with Kirsten and Leah a big group of kids came running towards and jumped into our arms for hugs. these kids had never seen me before, but never the less wanted to show me love. Thats really what I miss most about being there, just the random kids that run up to you yelling "Obruni, Obruni!" with a bear hug around your thighs and a huge smile. Everyday where ever you were there were these kids, so happy and excited to see you, no matter how hot and tired and annoyed you were they made you smile. I knew my art class would be great, even if 75 kids signed up and it was pandemonium, but only 15 or 20 ever came anyhow. We did drawing and crafts and it was really amazing how hard it was to get most of them to be creative. I couldn't even get them to scribble! As the days went on though, they all got more and more comfortable and free. We made pipe-cleaner and fuzzy ball men, paper bag puppets, and all sorts of drawings, it was so fun and rewarding, and did I mention hot.

Teaching the mothers was amazing as well. I took over Leah's level 1 class. She was a great person to learn under, being that she was a teacher for 3rd grade back in Australia. Level 1 literacy was tough at times too, but teaching words like 'his, first, water...etc' actually is cool because you can see their progress so quickly. My class was mostly amazing, happy women who really tried so hard. They laughed and complained during tests, and yet were joyous everyday. Remembering them will always bring me inspiration. At our farewell, they sang, danced, told jokes, and thanked us, thanked out parents for having us, it was so beautiful. I love remembering their strength, hope, and smiles.

So after the first week or so, the following things had become regular to us. We were on a Liberian refugee camp and they supposedly speak English, but its unlike anything you've ever heard. A lot of them are 'low talkers', speaking so softly that even if you could understand the words they were saying, you'd never be able to hear. Their English is marked by the fact that they don't say the ends of most words. Funny example of this was when the level 2 literacy instructor tried to teach his class the famous, the class had no idea what he meant until after explaining the definition for several minutes, someone in the class said "Ohhh, you mean 'famo'!" Pretty good eh? They'd also changed the meaning of some words, like embarrassed actually means angry or annoyed, hard to have that one figured out, and the word confusion actually means conflict. You'd inevitably say "oh, thats okay, it was just a bit of confusion." and they'd respond "No, no, there is no confusion here!" They've also created words like consciencesize. So a great deal of the time I had no idea what anyone was actually talking about. Who knows if they understood me.

Some of the less endearing and more annoying things include the already mentioned lack of punctuality. To be really honest I don't think they've ever heard of the concept of punctuality. Everyone just shows up when its convenient for them, even when its an "important" meeting, scheduled far in advance, sometimes people just don't show. I thought 'only if they had day planners and watches, or better yet, Microsoft Outlook with those nifty meeting reminders... oh yeah, they don't even have electricity' But it did get frustrating to deal with the overall flakiness of everyone, except of course the other amazing volunteers.

Another new experience included drinking all our water from 1/2 L bags. Yeah, thats right, water from bags. They were small completely sealed bags, that you'd have to bite off the corner and drink via a combo of sucking and squeezing the bag at the same time. There were many times though when you bit off the corner you'd inevitably squeeze the bag all over yourself, but heck it was a good way to cool off. On camp the bags came cold and you could buy them for a cheap 300 cidis, equivalent to about 3 cents. The water situation for washing however was much more annoying. Since the poly tank had exploded (coincidentally right when one volunteer was standing in front of it and was quite injured) there was no reliable source for us to get water for bathing and washing clothes. Some days we'd go to the "well" which was just a concrete hole in the ground filled by a water truck, but it was really tough to carry water in buckets enough for 10 people everyday. And then of course one day the well was dry, we called the volunteer coordinator and she insisted that she'd bought the new poly tank and the water for it, but she failed to see how the fact that it wasn't actually at the house didn't do us any good. She'd say "But we have the water" and we'd say "we have no water!" back and forth, funny now, but not so much after a long day in the heat. That night we all showered with the drinking water, 3 bags each. You really had to wash your body every day, it was the only way you could sleep through the sweaty night. After a couple more days of fetching well water they delivered the new poly tank and filled it with water, and there was much rejoicing.

The food was also a rough point. Every morning we had either hard boiled eggs or oatmeal with all the pineapple you can stomach, not so bad but I honestly never want to see another hard boiled egg in my life. Dinner was always interesting...they put fish, chicken and sometimes meat all into one dish, like stew or curry over rice. On the bad days you'd get a really fishy tasting bite along with a bone stuck in your throat after chipping your tooth. I switched to the vegetarian dish when there was enough to go around. The absolute worst was a Liberian favorite though, potato greens. It was terrible, the green parts of yams in a spicy, stewish, curryish dish, made with just the leafy part of the potato, no actual potato, and its bad, real bad, especially when served with fish, chicken, and even liver like we were served for a special lunch with a guy Aaron had been tutoring for his SAT math (who actually couldn't find the area of a square when Aaron started with him). He was super nice and cooked the potato greens especially for us with the special liver, I could barely choke it down, we felt bad.

Our food treats included sorta cold Fanta and spaghetti or fried egg sandwiches at lunch. And for volunteers last night we'd always go to a place hilariously called XXX, but didn't have ladies dancing or anything, only "expensive" beer and good fries and always different prices for everything. Every time we'd have to fight the bill because they'd overcharge us. Back at the volunteer house, after a bad day or night, some would indulge in a spoonful of Milo, which is like Nestle's Quick. On camp, if you're lucky you might see the ice cream man, and get a "Fan Ice" which is like a creamy Popsicle in a bag. The best treats however were on the weekend trips. The first weekend it was Easter and the Ghanaian people are quite religious, with most of their shops called something like Good Shepard beauty salon, or Blood of Christ hardware, and so on, so Easter is a big deal there. We decided to join Jill and JJ for a trip out to a beach resort in Axim, where we met up with a bunch of their interesting ex-pat friends who are also doing work in Ghana. One working for USAid and another working on a book about the witches in Ghana and how they get banished to special camps. All with interesting ex-pat insights of Ghana. Axim was also the only place I've surfed on the whole trip, the resort actually had a long board to rent. I was a beautiful place and a great weekend, ending with a big Easter buffet where they roasted pigs (which they'd actually brought alive to the beach that afternoon, much to my dismay) The next weekend Aaron and I made a stop in Accra and ate our first of many plates of Nachos at the great ex-pat sports bar Champs. From there we met up with the other volunteers in a another closer beach spot called Krokobite, decidedly less expensive than Axim, but still really fun with a band playing late into the night.

The week after that really changed everything. On Wednesday night while we were asleep in our room in the volunteer house there was an armed robbery involving everyone else in the house except me and Aaron. The robbery was the most terrible thing you can imagine. Some of the girls were tied up and gaged, one was raped, the two men had a gun, crow bars, and a knife, and got thousands of dollars worth of stuff. Including cameras, phones, cash, and even the laptop computer with several irreplaceable documents the volunteers had spent hours working on. The men only left after getting all that and one girl screamed and screamed and the guy in the room behind hers came bursting out and the men finally ran off. We woke up to her calls and came out realizing all that had happened. The image of seeing one of the girls tied up and gagged still haunts me nearly nightly. Getting a hold of the police was all but impossible, and just about made the situation worse when they arrived. We all sat up the whole night together and left for Accra in the morning. We spent several days in Accra doing our best to recover over nachos and mudslides and relaxing at the pool. (We actually found out a few months later that there was another armed break in at the other volunteer house, on the refugee camp, afiliated with another NGO called CBW, where a similar thing happened, but this time suspects were caught)

After a few days in Accra, some of the girls went home, and some of us decided to go out and visit a couple big forts on the coast. We went out to Cape Coast Castle, and Elimina Castle, remnants of the British and Dutch colonial power and were each the center of the slave trade for the entire west Africa at one time. The bright white forts jut out into the sea and are incredible sights that look so foreign and strange flanked by grungy villages all around. The horrors we heard about there were awful and the prison rooms said to be filled with 300 to 500 slaves were a bad sight. I did learn something interesting though, that from these forts only 1/3 of the slaves went to the United States, the other 1/3 went to Brazil, and 1/3 to the Caribbean. Strange to realize but it makes sense.

After that little vacation we returned to camp for our last week of volunteering. Our reception and return was met with so much love and concern it was amazing. The mothers at the center had cried for all of us and were just so happy to see us again, if felt wonderful. Their hearts are just so big. They literally sang for us.

Our group of volunteers was really amazing too, remembering what they all did for PCO makes me feel positive about the world. One American girl noticed how PCO only received funding from volunteers so she put together a grant writing workshop for the staff. Another girl saw how poorly the teachers were trained and gave a 3 day workshop on teaching for the entire school staff. Another gave a workshop on project facilitation, ie: how to get things done. All of their leadership, initiative, and basic intelligence gave so much to the program and really inspired me. Not to mention the strength it took just to be there and go through everyday.

There were so many funny stories too. Aaron tried to have his level 4 mothers read a national geographic article about dinosaurs and they'd never heard of one. So he drew a crude T-rex on the board and a person for scale and they exclaimed "its that big!!?" In my class, for some strange reason whenever I spelled a word with an 'i' they all thought I said 'r' and occasionally vice versa. So if I dictated "I went to church" They would write 'Are went to church' and I'd say "No, no...I not are" I really can't understand how one would hear that, but they did. And since they never said the end of words I could never get them to read properly words in the past tense, called or cooked never had the 'ed. But in the end they took and exam I wrote and I passed several of them onto level 2 with pride. Another funny moment was when we got the bus from Accra out to Krokobite, we trekked all around the bus "station", actually several parking lots spread out over a mile, and finally got a young kid to show us to the right bus, and we were the last people let onto the bus, there really were no more seats, but they pointed to a tiny inch of a spot between two huge women, saying that's where I could sit. It was like a joke, but I squeezed in for the trip. Also funny is the rocks that are on sale on the camp, they're actually clay for eating! Thats right, they eat clay! They say its good for morning sickness!

We ended our stay in Ghana with a few nights luxury in Accra. Many plates of nachos and relaxation. We also enjoyed an ex-pat party at JJ's house for his farewell, he left Ghana the same day we did, albeit after being there for two years. I also did some souvenir shopping and my package cost twice as much as my souvenirs. It was funny I'd wanted a mask and a bowl but we didn't have enough money to buy both at the time, the guy offered to trade for Aaron's watch, we declined the trade, but then as fate would have it, Aaron's watch broke the very next day as we landed in Europe!

Something I'll never forget, which really shows how wonderful most people there are, was a time in Accra when we were riding a Tro-tro. (an insanely packed mini-bus that takes you everywhere in the country). The price for a ride was always really cheap, but we never really knew how much it was supposed to cost, on one trip we were apparently overcharged and the money collector guy didn't give us enough change. We had no idea, it was only 1000 cedis, equal to 10 cents, but the guy sitting next to me, who I hadn't even said hello to despite the fact that we were certainly sharing sweat, called out to the money collector guy and demanded that he give us the proper change. He stuck up for us, just like that! It was amazing.

All in all Ghana was an incredible experience filled with highs and lows that I'm sure to be comprehending and reflecting on for the rest of my life. It was an unforgettable, invaluable, meaningful, life changing, experience. The trip would be incomplete without it.

One last thought, did I mention that there were roosters that would wake you up every morning at 3am? I slept with heavy duty earplugs. There was also a kid goat that sounded like a baby being killed that lived nearby.

P.S. I wrote this in my journal while we were in Ladakh India bored "volunteering" more about that later. And I typed it from our new house in Austin, TX. I have no life.

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Photos

The Camp sign
This is how all the towns were labeled, notice the lady carrying something huge on her head.

Where we slept
Check out our fan.

The look of Camp
This is basically how the camp looked, minus the white people.

The front of the house
Check out our broken poly tank, aka water tank

Simple pleasures
Deviled eggs for easter

My literacy class
My moms came so far!

Art class
These kids were great

Our African Mothers
I´m the one in the full on African dress

A beach trip
Krokobite

View from a slave fort
Cape Coast Castle

The Death Room
30 enter, none come out alive.