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Published: April 28th 2007
I have never had a month go by so fast as the one I just experienced in Ghana. It was a very unique experience and there were some pretty rough times but overall I found it to be amazingly enriching and rewarding. We arrived in Accra several hours late and were picked up by a couple we had never met before. The connection to them is distant but just try and follow. The woman, Jill, is the sister of the boyfriend of the former college roommate of Beth's dad's brother's daughter's husband. That is the most confusing way I could think to say it. More simply, we met Jill's brother Tyler while rafting in the Grand Canyon with a bunch of Bilodeaus. Jill and her boyfriend JJ have been living in Ghana for the last couple years doing resettlement work and embassy work respectively. They were super nice and waited at the airport till 1am to pick us up and then took us to JJ's nice house where we slept in good clean beds and got nice showers. In the morning, they made us pancakes, good American pancakes. You wouldn't know it but a normal pancake like you are used to is a hard thing to find in Africa. Best of all though, JJ had a stash of cold Dr. Pepper. It was heaven. We played Uno and Yahtzee until the afternoon when Beth and I were picked up and taken out to the refugee camp.
The Buduburam Refugee camp is about 45 minutes outside Accra and has about 40,000 people, mostly Liberians, living there. We were not living directly on camp but in a small village another five minutes down the main road called Awutu and populated by Ghanaians. The volunteer guest house in Awutu held, the eight volunteers each with their own room (Beth and I had our own), a Liberian guy named Issac to keep the place in order, and because he was on holiday from school, the 17 year old nephew of the owner of the house, Kofi. Once you can get past the no running water and the capricious supply of electricity it was a great place. It was much quieter than staying on camp like some of the other volunteers with different organizations have to do. The risk of catching malaria was also greatly reduced living off camp. We slept under mosquito nets on thin mattresses on the floor and tried our best to sleep through the barnyard noises outside. Anyone that tells you roosters only crow at morning is full of crap. I guarantee they start at about 1am and don't stop till the next evening. There was also a kid or baby goat whose constant bleating sounded eerily similar to what I and the rest of the volunteers imaged a baby being tortured would sound like. If you heard it you would understand.
The organization we were working with on camp was call Population Caring Organization or PCO for short. They had four main operations on camp and each volunteer worked in two of them. I worked at the Mother's Skills Training Center where I taught the Level 3 and 4 (advanced) literacy classes. My other work was with the Peace Cells. These were meetings that we would have every day in a different zone on camp with a certain topic. Camp is divided into twelve zones. The topic that I went to the most meetings for was human rights. The Liberian moderator would guide the community discussion with three questions. For example, what are human rights, do Liberians in general have good respect for human rights and what can you do to instill greater respect for human rights in your community. These discussions were pretty amazing. They were far more developed than I would have expected. It was inspiring to find out that the topics were discussed days after the meeting because the whole goal of the project was to foster communication and thereby reconciliation among the different tribes on camp.
While the Peace Cell meetings were sometimes inspiring they also became a bit repetitive being that it is the same topic with new people twelve times. The real enriching experience of each day was teaching the mothers how to read. My classes were typically tiny. The most students I ever had was five. These were women were at a level where they could struggle through a book like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I know because that was one of the readings I had them do. As I am completely new to teaching you can imagine that it was quite the learning experience for me as well. I had never considered some of the assumptions I have of what basic knowledge everyone has. For example, on one of my first days I copied a one page article out of a National Geographic about dinosaur bones. We didn't have much around the house to use for reading practice so I thought this was as good as anything. When I went to class however and I asked my one student that showed if she was interested in reading about dinosaurs she of course had no idea what I was talking about. How would she know what a dinosaur was? I tried to enlighten her by explaining fossils, museum displays, 65 million years ago, and eventually drew an awful picture of a trex on the board. When I drew myself to scale next to the enormous Godzilla lizard beast with sharp spiky teeth my student's mouth dropped. She clarified that the little stick figure was me and upon confirmation slapped both her hands on the table in amazement. I'm not sure if she believed anything I was saying or just thought I was a crazy white man but either way we were both having a great time.
The day to day schedule consisted of waking up around 7am and then having a leisurely morning. We would have breakfast which alternated daily between oats or boiled eggs. There was usually a side of pineapple. I have never eaten so much eggs and pineapple. The thought of it now makes me want to vomit. On occasion we had this older Liberian guy who would come by and try to sell us his crafts made of corn husks. Why he was allowed access to sell to us during breakfast I don't know but he was harmless. He went by the name Sweet Africa and, I kid you not, was quite insistent that he was in fact god. Some days it was more the Eastern philosophy everything is god idea but more often it was the I sent my son to die, I flooded the world, Bible God we all know and love. He gave me a key chain. So now I have a key chain made by god.
After breakfast, it would already be hot enough that I would undoubtedly be drenched in sweat. I would load my backpack with a few sacks of water and then head off to camp around 9 or 9:30. When I say sacks of water I literally mean half liter sealed bags that were square shaped. You just bite off a corner and chug it. It's actually a really good idea. I'm surprised we didn't see it until Ghana. We had to catch a tro tro, or 40 year old minivan packed with people, down to camp which cost 2000 cedis. Keep in mind that it is 10,000 cedis to the dollar. And interestingly enough their largest denomination bill is 20,000 cedis or $2. Don't worry though, in June they are dropping 4 zeros so they will be back on par with the dollar. Hard to believe in '89 it was 1 cedi to 1 dollar. The morning activity was mobilizing. This involved a couple volunteers going with a few Peace Cell leaders around whatever zone was having the meeting and just telling people about it. This was the hardest job solely because it involved walking around in the hot hot sun. Directly after mobilization I would go teach my class from 1 to 3. At 3:30 we would do an afternoon mobilization until the meeting started at 4:30. Actually it never started before 5 but that is due to the whole concept of Africa time which I may delve into later. Just know that everyone, if they come at all, will be late. Always. We'd get home around seven and it would be dark. Chow down on dinner which was rice and some other dish, sometimes spaghetti (good) or sometimes potato greens (bad). Potato greens is just what it sounds like. A potato grows underground and has leaves above the ground. How delicious would it be, do you think, to cut those greens off and then stew them to within an inch of existence?
That was how things were going for the first two and a half weeks. It was hard and exhausting but the fruits of your labor were readily apparent on a day to day basis so it was actually really amazing. It was on that third Wednesday night at about 1am or so that I heard one of the girls scream. Beth and I jumped out of bed and were trying to figure out if the noise had come from inside our volunteer house. We came out and one of the girls was really shaken and said that she had woken to a guy in her room telling her to be quiet. She screamed and the one other male volunteer busted through the door and scared the guy off. It all seemed scary but not that bad. I assumed everyone else had been left alone. I couldn't have been more wrong. A moment later one of the other female volunteer came out of her room with her arms tied fiercely behind her back and a gag in her mouth. The image is burned into my memory. Turns out the girl that screamed was the fifth room the two guys had gone in. Two men armed with a gun, a machete, a knife, and crowbars had broken in. They bound and gagged two girls and sexually assaulted others. They got away with thousands of dollars as well as the laptop which had all the volunteers work on it which was basically priceless. It set the program back months. It was a traumatic experience to say the least. Beth and I were extremely lucky in that they never came into our room. Presumably they could have looked in and seen two people and just thought to leave us alone or to come back later. Who knows? I do know however that Beth and I were the only one's with St. Christopher medals. They are still the same two that my grandpa gave us at our wedding. I'm not really a supersticious person but I'm just saying...
Needless to say once everyone was awake and we'd established the guys were gone we tried to get in touch with the police. That was not an easy task. We called all over and no one answered anywhere within an hours drive. Eventually we got a guy from Global Volunteer Network (the website we booked our program through) who was living on camp on the phone. He found the head of our program and he brought the cops and the whole circus that comes with it. They arrived around 3:30, so two hours later, and besides the one guy in some sort of a uniform, were indistinguishable from a mental image of guerrilla fighters. They were not comforting at all. They just wanted to know the accent of the guys so they could know if they were Liberian or Ghanaian. Eventually they left and basically we just sat around sipping whiskey and trying to take stock of what had just happened. When the sun came up we packed up and headed into Accra where we were put up in a hotel for a few days.
After the weekend a couple people left and just went home but a few of us went back to camp. We lived at the director's house on camp instead of at the other house for security and personal sanity reasons. We all tried to do our work but the positive optimistic vibe was just done. The last week for me at least was just going through the motions until we could get out. It was a sad way to end it. We had a really great group of volunteers who all seem like they are going to be doing amazing things both with PCO and when they return home. And of course the irony of the situation was not lost on me. We were attacked in our home, forced to feel, and were living in worse conditions on camp. Just like everyone else there.
Overall though it was an amazingly positive experience. When we came back to camp everyone was so sorry for what had happened and they really tried to make us feel at home again. The mothers did a big song and dancing production in class to welcome us back and thank god that we were all okay. This incident is apparently extremely uncommon in Ghana and particularly in Awutu. There is vigilante justice there and apparently if you steal a chicken they just kill you so there is a pretty large deterrent. I am still trying to process exactly how I am supposed to feel about the whole incident and all of that. There are a couple people still there who were there that night and hope things are going better for them. Some new volunteers have come now and I expect some newbies has helped to bring the energy back up and allowed PCO to get back on track. In no way do I regret going. Nothing compares with the feelings you get teaching the mothers there.
As always, more photos and movies are available at
PairedHearts.com
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amy jane
non-member comment
holy crap!
wow, that sounded crazy! i loved picturing you trying to explain dinosaurs! that must have been funny! ...buy shit, the end of the trip must have been so scary!! i'm glad you all are ok...