Raleigh International Expedition 01C. Ghana, West Africa. Feb - April 2001.

---

This entry was written as a letter to sponsors when I first came back from Ghana in 2001. I found it at the weekend so thought I would publish it as a memory.

Raleigh International
February – April 2001
GHANA

At 6am on Thursday the 8th February, I said my final goodbye to my family and went to board the KLM plane heading for Ghana. A long, uncomfortable day lay ahead. Making friends with the rest of the plane (over 100 of the seats were taken up by Raleigh people) and the fear of not knowing what was ahead of us. There was also the realisation that it will be three months before we are back on the plane, seeing are families again.
We landed just before 10.00pm, and the outside temperature was 21C. We were amazed, and spend the next few hours in the most uncomfortable heat, squashed in to an old bus (there were no luxuries on this trip) heading for our camp.
The next week was an induction. We were placed in our first groups, with those we would be spending the next 4 weeks with, and spent the time learning basic skills; First aid, safety, carpentry and cultural awareness. We had a 3 day trek to get us acclimatised quicker, and learnt how to manage on 2 litres of water, how to wash with only a mess tin of water and how to walk through the pain of a very heavy rucksack! We also learnt to dig slop pits and long drops, build a fire and sleep in hammocks.

Community project; working with World Vision.

On the 15th of February at 5.30am, we left our camp and spent the next two days traveling up to Bongo, a small village in the north. Our first project was to build a bakery.
In Sub Sahara landscape, in heat on average of 45C, we started. We spend the days digging the foundations and mixing concrete. After about a week we started having problems with water, and because the village water pump was half an hour walk away, it had to be delivered. In such a laid back country, this took days and we found that we were running out of jobs we could do. World Vision decided it would be more beneficial to finish another of their projects, a school in the next village, Bongo-Soe.
It was fantastic having the opportunity to get to know another village, and we spent the next few weeks plastering the walls, and concreting the floors.
We manage to go to a funeral, which was amazing. Surrounded by tribal costumes, people dancing and singing, the sacrificing of a goat and cow, the throwing around of the body wrapped in straw, the spears and arrows which terrified me, was a very surreal special experience. Not only did I have the experience of living in dry hot conditions, with no water I also got to experience and work with tribes that didn’t speak even the main Ghanaian language, and who were so poor the children would take our empty tins to play with.

Adventure Project

.
In a new group, and in new area of Ghana, I spent two weeks trekking through dense rainforest on the southern escarpment of the Mampongtin Range. This is an area just south of Lake Volta. We spent the first few days trekking to a cave in the jungle, with a guide who cut down the path as we trekked. Our first aim was to get to ‘the Bushman’. He is an 86 year old who lives in a cave, and spends all day hunting rats to eat. After staying over night in his cave, watching him cook and eat his rats, he then spent three days trekking with us so we could find our way out of the dense forest. We carried on trekking, with the aim to get to a town called Begoro.
After 2 weeks trekking on average 12KM a day carrying all our food, tents and water, and only being able to wash in the frequent down pours of rain, it was the most amazing feeling arriving at the town a day early. It meant we could have time to rest and let our major blisters recover before we spent a week canoeing along Lake Volta, staying in small fishing villages along the way. A fantastic experience, as most of the children had never seen a white person before, and whilst the smaller ones cried and ran away, the older ones stared at us from the moment we arrived until the moment we left.

Environmental Project.

Ankassa Resource Reserve is in the southern part of the western region. It is a jungle rainforest, and is part of a 5 year programme to prove to the government that tourism is the money making scheme and not felling of the trees. Our group had the challenge of completing the project, which had taken Raleigh five expeditions. The project is a visitor’s center and included a large reception area, with rangers sleeping area behind, then a walkway down to the restaurant area, by the river. Our group manage to complete it, finishing the ceiling, constructing the information boards, making the counters, making the doors, digging out trenches for water to run in to the river during the wet season and placing pipes down and connecting the water pumps and filter with the buildings. We held the opening on one of our last days, which I felt was such a privilege, to be seeing the completed building after so many ventures had worked on it.
Living and working in the rainforest was the most amazing experience. We had to walk for 15 minutes just to get to the project site, as our campsite was even further in to the forest. We had to live with a red cobra in the long drop, ‘mummy spider’, who also had babies during our three weeks, living in the girls cabin, giant ants that would bite toy at every opportunity and black flies that, no matter how much deet and insect repellent you had on, would spend all day biting you, leaving blood scabs that itched for the next week. We also had a few visitors to our campsite; the electric blue scorpion that was the size of a lobster and the 6ft black cobra. Both were quickly removed and never seen again.
It was so amazing learning about the rainforest and knowing that we were helping to solve a problem which is so common all over the world. It was good to see that on the day after the opening, we had a group of 6 visitors come and the rangers had the first of hopefully many, busy days talking about the rainforest and taking them on tours.

As well as the experience of meeting a new culture, I was also able to hear about other ventures experiences, about YDPs, some of who had been heroin addicts since the age of 12. They told us of their struggle to give up and how it had ruined their lives. They had been chucked out of their homes, lived on the streets and ended up dealing to children as young as 8. I also met a couple of YDPs who had been in prison on numerous occasions, and who had friends who were there for life. They were all fantastic people who wanted to forget about the past and by the end of the expedition most had decided they would go back to school and finish their education. They became determine and positive people who all benefited from the money raised for Raleigh.
It was such an amazing experience traveling so far away to actually learn so much about my own country. The friends made in Ghana are people I will keep in contact with for a long time. The emotions we all went through together, the upset stomachs, the insects, the dirt, as well as the Ghanaians, the landscape, the animals. The ups and downs have really allowed me to open my eyes and develop me as a person and I thank you all for sponsoring me.

---