Ghana 4. Work

Okay, so this entry is somewhat overdue. I’ve actually started writing it on several occasions over the past few weeks, but it seems to have been interrupted by the time consuming banalities of Ghanaian daily life. Take clothes washing for example: in a tropical climate the most you can hope for out of a pair of boxer shorts is two days. Like most people here we don’t have a washing machine, so at least once a week I find myself head down, scrubbing gussets and t-shirts in a bucket of water that was already vaguely brown when it came out of the tap.

That said, last week a bit of domestic exertion proved a welcome distraction, as I spent the majority of each day glued to a computer screen. We seem to have now filmed pretty much all the footage we need for the promotional films that we’re making for The Organisation. As such, I’ve been staying in the house, editing these in earnest, while Louisa goes out around Accra with different volunteers to capture the last shots that we still need. Having never picked up a TV camera five months ago, Louisa is now shooting footage of a quality that will soon see me demoted to tea boy.

Our efforts however are beginning to look somewhat wasted. In the last few weeks we have run into several former volunteers now living elsewhere in Accra. Their individual accounts of problems at the hands of The Organisation have confirmed our growing impression of a very badly run business masquerading as an NGO. It would appear that several other filmmakers have been here before us, though their footage is nowhere to be found. It seems increasingly likely that The Organisation has either lost it (very possible), or that it was never given to them by our morally-torn predecessors. Suffice to say that we currently feel like the PR officers aboard the Titanic.

With only a matter of weeks left volunteering with The Organisation anyway, we have accordingly redoubled our efforts to find work elsewhere. Carving out our niche in Ghana’s media is proving tricky: it’s highly developed with new digital TV stations popping up all the time, yet the majority of people working in it are on jealously guarded contracts. We have been hanging out with several Ghanaian television producers who have been very friendly towards us, although I suspect we are in a queue of people lining up to curry favour with them. Getting a job in Ghana is very much about who, rather than what, you know.

For me, networking is akin to attempting a DIY vasectomy, but it seems we have no option. To this end, last week we gate-crashed a reception at the British Council being held to recognise people with degrees from British universities. We had invitations as we technically qualified, but I suspect that few of the eighty or so Ghanaians in attendance had spent three years vomiting alcopops into their shoes to get where they are today. After several speeches and the cutting of a cake, we found ourselves mingling with none other than the British High Commissioner. As I mentally recited “Ferrero Rocher…Ambassador’s reception…” mantra-like in my head, I thrust our business card into his hand and laughed recklessly at his anecdote about Swindon.

Thus far the only person who has called since the event is an I.T. specialist who had insisted that I dance with him when the band started playing. Undaunted of course, our Unique Selling Point may yet be that we can at least get the job done. One of the big three mobile phone networks in Ghana trades under the slogan “the network that really works” setting a new benchmark for aspirational advertising slogans. In its working life, Ghana suffers from a mass culture of presenteeism. Turning up at the office (on time optional) is effort enough; anything actually achieved between the hours of 9am and 5pm is an unexpected bonus.

Before I get lynched for veiled racism by a mob of angry Guardian readers, these are not my words but those of a panel of Ghanaian business leaders, speaking at a conference we were filming the other week. BarCamp is an international network of informal conferences for young entrepreneurs, and we had gone along to the 2010 event in Accra to dip a toe in the waters of commerce. In the face of loan restrictions and interminable red tape the mood amongst delegates was defiant. The representative for the department of trade and industry was nearly flayed alive on announcing blithely that it currently takes five to seven years to get a trademark registered here.

In fact, despite problems such as this, we keep on meeting Ghanaians who have chosen to move back to Ghana from lives abroad for the opportunities the country currently has to offer – Daniel, the PR exec who lived in Balham for eleven years; Parlos the Boot’s chemist who returned here to successfully become a TV presenter – to name but two. If you have the mind to be an entrepreneur, then urban Ghana currently seems to be the American frontier, both in terms of opportunities and challenges.

We managed to leave all this business talk behind this weekend, getting on a dilapidated tro-tro and heading North-East to the Volta region to visit the world’s biggest artificial lake. Dammed in the early 1960s, the Lake Volta hydroelectric plant feeds power not only to Ghana but neighbouring countries such as Togo and Benin as well. In an unusual use of local resources, a German company has recently begun work with an underwater saw, logging trees for timber that are still standing on the lake bed from when the area was first flooded.

At nearby Wli we climbed several hundred metres up through dense, steaming forest to the upper reaches of one of the highest waterfalls in West Africa. Our guide was a cheerful hunchback called Ousman who described changing jobs from tailor to farmer to tour guide as we wheezed our way up the precariously narrow path. At the upper reaches, as with the lower falls, our efforts were rewarded with a massive plunge pool into which we waded in our stinking clothes.

The falling water is so fierce that it blows thick spray hundreds of feet into the surrounding undergrowth, which is far more lush as a result. The spray is blinding and you must wade backwards, shielding your eyes, if you want to attempt to get under the main cascade. Here it feels more like someone is tipping bags of gravel on to you from a great height, such is the force of the water. I staggered back to the edge of the pool jubilant with the knowledge that after that kind of cleaning my boxer shorts would be good for at least another couple of days. 

Ghana 3. Water

The water supply has been back on this week, although it’s been coming out of the pipes accompanied by a large quantity of brown silt. This makes ‘washing’ and ‘cleaning’ possibly two different things, but so long as my developing layer of topsoil keeps on replacing the sweat, I’m happy.

On Sunday evening last week we returned to the house from a weekend away to find the water still off – day five without. According to Joe, one of the local shopkeepers, it was because of engineering works just around the corner where they are building a new water treatment plant. Other neighbourhoods further away still had water, and locals armed with buckets could be seen heading to the nearest working tap to fetch in water for cooking and cleaning.

By the end of last weekend our house’s meagre reserves had run very low – the huge plastic bin in the bathroom was now empty – and the volunteer coordinator said that we had to all stop washing until further notice. This, in a country where you can be sweating by the time you step out of the shower. Unsurprisingly there was a lot of grumbling at this and many people headed round to Joe’s to buy the last of his drinking water just so they could have a wash.

Thankfully I was pretty clean at that point. We had spent the weekend at Ada-Foah, part of a delta of around twelve islands at the mouth of the Volta River, where it meets the Atlantic. The coast of Ghana sports some impressive beaches, but most are plagued by rip tides that make anything more than paddling a life-threatening undertaking. In contrast, the gently lapping lagoon beaches along the river are perfect for swimming. I spent a lot of time in the water, mostly rescuing toy boats that local kids were racing from a tiny inlet out into the lagoon.

Back in Accra, sod’s law had it that on Monday, only hours after The Organisation paid for a tanker to come and replenish our supplies, the water came back on. This was just one of several recent episodes that have made us very grateful to have a running shower at all.

The week before we had travelled four hours east of Accra to get some footage of a rural orphanage where one of the volunteers has been working. To describe the place as a one-horse town would be overdoing it. It’s just not that developed. Accordingly, the washing facilities were the ubiquitous ‘bucket shower’: an outdoor cubicle into which you take a bucket of cold water, a bar of soap and a strong constitution.

The orphanage is home to around thirty young people, mainly boys, ranging in age from eight to twenty. The situation is complicated by the fact that at least seven of them appear to be the children of Pastor David, the guy who runs the place. Fran, the eighteen year old volunteer who has been working there, was understandably a bit taken aback to discover on arrival that many of her new charges were the same age as her if not older. Yet after ten weeks there she had become both councillor and friend to them all, and was genuinely sad to be leaving.

I hate to say it, but 48 hours there was enough for me. In the rural evening (it’s dark at 6pm) no one can hear you scream. There’s little electricity and even less to do, so most people go to bed around 8-9pm, as did we. Which was a good thing, because at 4.30am we were woken by a knock on our door. I struggled out from under my blanket of mosquitoes to find Pastor David standing outside; he announced with a beaming smile that he was ready for his interview. Having not been there when we arrived, he had travelled four hours by tro tro back from business in Accra to be filmed by us, but had to return there early the following morning. Accordingly he’d caught a few hours’ sleep then got up “a bit earlier than usual” (!) in order to speak to us. Under the light of a 12W bulb and through the fog of sleep it was all going at bit Heart of Darkness, although our Mr. Kurtz was impressively lucid. In contrast I am not, nor will I ever be, a mornings person.

Rustic quirks aside, it was great to be out of the city, and the orphanage did have some plus points over our usual metropolitan wasteland. For one thing, the drinking water tasted better. In Accra, as with everywhere else, you have two options: bottled or bagged. At around 1 Ghana cedi (about 50p) for 500ml, bottled is ten times more expensive, so most people drink the plastic-tasting Bell’s water bags that can be bought from cool-boxes on nearly every street corner. The same volume, these are tough, clear plastic bags that you bite the corner off then suck. It’s rather like drinking from a breast implant.

Alongside eating spare ribs or flossing, drinking from a plastic bag ranks as one of those activities at which it’s impossible to look sophisticated. It’s a gamble trying to put a bag down mid drink, and if you do, it’s easy to forget which corner you’ve opened. I often find myself sucking fruitlessly at an unopened corner while water trickles down my leg.

Speaking of legs, today was both the Accra international marathon and half marathon. Quarshie, one of the Organisation staff, was running the full distance and several Canadians that we’ve met were doing the half, so we went along to watch. In a bid to avoid the heat of the day, both races were due to begin at dawn. However, this being Ghana, both started late. Consequently the full marathon runners were only beginning to cross the finish line at around 10.30am by which time it was beginning to bake. Several Ghanaians ran barefoot or in flip-flops; one of the runners was an eight-year-old Ghanaian girl who did it in a swimsuit. Although there were several dramatic collapses across the finish line, it was astonishing how many runners seemed largely recovered within an hour of finishing. As we left the eight-year-old girl was running around, playing happily with a friend.

After a strenuous morning spectating we deserved a rest. The race finished down by one of Accra’s few bits of tamed beach, so we paid the entry fee to go and sit at one of many bar-restaurants competing for custom on the sand. Alongside basic amenities, the entry fee to the beach pays for a team of litter pickers to continually sweep the sand, gathering the vast amounts of rubbish washed up by each tide. This is a feature of all beaches in Ghana, where the sea appears to be the final destination for much of the nation’s waste, organic or otherwise.

By far and away the most common item to litter the beaches are discarded drinking water bags, washed up in their hundreds. At the beach resort in Ada-Foah the local kids made their toy boats, origami-style, out of them. I’m sure there’s a point to be made here about the cycle of materials et al, but it’s too hot right now to try and be profound and I’ve just upended my water bag down my leg, so I’m going to sign off and take a shower. Just a little more silt and I’ll be ready to sow a new crop of cassava in my armpits.

Ghana 2. Survival Guide

Two weeks into life in Ghana and I’ve become acutely aware of the many hazardous decisions that daily life here thrusts upon you, if not actually how best to respond to them.

Take food for example. Dining out here presents you with two options: Western-style restaurants or the street ‘chop bars’. The former offer the range and luxury of British Beefeater restaurants circa 1989 at prices to make your eyes water. Alternatively, you can throw in with the latter: the street vendors whose ‘chop bar’ shacks of varying shapes and sizes serve up variations on a theme of starch + something once living. At around C3 (about £1.50) for a massive portion of fried chicken and rice these are excellent value if you don’t mind dining on a mini roundabout next to an open sewer.

Nearly all of us volunteering here with The Organisation are doing so on a budget, so a common goal is to seek out those elusive chop bars capable of at least shielding you from diesel fumes while you eat. Thus far, a five-minute stumble down the ring-road has produced Papa Nesto’s, whose laminated tablecloths depicting Japan’s finest sushi add an international twist to an otherwise distinctly Ghanaian menu.

Local dishes (usually carnivorous) include fufu – a sort of dumplings in soup; red-red (bean stew), and banku. This last dish is a kind of cassava-flour dough usually served with either a stew or soup, or more simply with a tomato and pepper hot sauce. The grey-brown banku dough is so dense that it actually exerts its own gravitational pull, sitting in your stomach like a ball of clay for several hours after ingestion.

All other Ghanaian food seems to follow a Fordist model of production: you can have whatever you want so long as it’s fried. And preferably once living. As Louisa has rapidly discovered, the word ‘vegetarian’ seems to be a recent and uncertain addition to the Ghanaian vocabulary. Rather like a transvestite asking where the toilet is, people visibly struggle to know how to respond when confronted with a request for ‘vegetarian’ food. Once you explain that you simply don’t want any meat in anything they usually relax. That would be plain rice then.

Food aside, other daily decisions fraught with danger include where to tread. Particularly at night the city’s open sewers present a potential death-trap, or at least an extremely unsanitary sprained ankle. Tropical dusk occurs early and very fast. At 5.30pm it can be daylight, yet pitch black only thirty minutes later. The alternative to what passes for the pavements is of course the road. While the battered tro tro minibus taxis look like they might fall apart if they so much as clipped you, Accra’s roads are menaced by some of the biggest, baddest SUVs known to humanity. The slogan of one regional car manufacturer is “drive to intimidate”. I kid you not.

Our volunteer placement here making promotional films for The Organisation comes with its own particular range of hazards. It seems that the ignominiously departed previous management left a trail of ill will in its wake. Supposedly straightforward daily shoots to film happy smiling orphans etc have been met with a suspicion normally reserved for Goebbels. Admittedly a lot of peacemaking by the new management is now taking place, but nonetheless I’m beginning to flinch during interviews each time I have to ask “in what ways has The Organisation affected your project?...”

After a slow start we have begun to make our rounds filming the volunteer projects that The Organisation pimps people out to. Thus far we have visited and filmed:

-       a planetarium

-       a project recording Ghana’s artistic history

-       a school for autistic children

-       an artist’s workshop

-       the Ghana Red Cross

Whilst aspiring to produce World in Action, in reality we seem to be shooting a third-world version of The One Show. Our hopes that the Ghana Red Cross would yield gritty front-line reportage were dampened somewhat on discovering that their current national campaign is concerned with improving road safety. Okay, so crossing the road here requires life insurance, but it’s still not exactly…sexy, is it?

Things may change tomorrow however when we venture several hours by tro tro out of Accra into the wilderness to the Rural Orphanage Placement. One of the volunteers is about to leave; as it doesn’t look like she’ll be replaced any time soon we want to capture any tearful farewells on camera. Unfortunately the volunteer in question has recently developed malaria (apparently alcohol does reduce the effectiveness of many anti-malarial drugs), so we may need to carry her out on a stretcher.

There’s also the immanent possibility of going out into the sticks with another partner organisation, Development in Focus, to film the TB clinics that they arrange for rural communities. Louisa’s long-held dream to live the life of a character in an Austen novel may soon be realised when we both perish of consumption. At least this offers more drama and romance than the all-too-real prospect of drowning in an open sewer.

Ghana. Episode 1.

We are in Ghana. It’s big! It’s cheerful! It smells like a Glastonbury Portaloo!  After a six-hour flight we arrived here pretty much without incident. Standing in baggage reclaim at Accra’s Kotoka International Airport we did begin to wonder if our hold-alls had gone on to Kenya. It turned out that we were just operating already on Africa Time, which is GMT+whenwearegoodandready. Truly, there is a corner of this globe in which an Alderson can be made to look punctual.

Behind the immigration desk at the airport was a sign that greeted visitors to Ghana thus:

-         We warmly welcome you to Ghana!

-         Paedophiles and other sexual deviants are not warmly welcomed to Ghana.

-         If you are a paedophile or sexual deviant it would be better for everyone involved if you would go somewhere else.

In matters still capable of making the British squirm Ghana appears to be earnestly open. Alongside the (clothed) ‘Page 3’ girls in yesterday’s Ghana Mirror ran an article about the menopause. The next page was a full-page advert for the kind of cream that treats “embarrassing itching”. The paper’s international news included a story taken from the Sun about a disabled man getting his car towed. In Wales.

We were met at the airport by Kuarshie, one of the Ghanaian staff responsible for looking after the stream of volunteers come to work on the various projects they farm people out to. He appears to be one of the few staff managing to survive a radical purge of dead wood from the organisation, begun only days before our arrival by the new manager, Klwuha. Ethiopian by descent, she has left a job working in Holland for an oil company to be airdropped in here to Sort Shit Out.

Whether the organisation had really become as disorganised as she makes out is open to debate (just not with her). She is physically tiny, fiendishly organised and utterly terrifying. We may yet ride her coattails to some interesting parts of Accra, as she is embarking on visiting all the projects in the city that the organisation currently feeds volunteers to. Tomorrow morning we go with her on our first recce to see one of the organisations that we might film. Yes folks, what development project could more emotively reflect the needs of poverty-stricken Africa than…a planetarium. 

Alongside the obligatory orphanage and school for the deaf are a few more esoteric projects available for volunteers to help with, a reflection perhaps of the fact that Ghana is relatively wealthy by African standards. Yesterday we sat in a bar next to a Ghanaian wielding an iPhone. Frequently, requests to be your friend from people you meet on the street begin with “are you on FaceBook?...”

That said, Ghana still does a good line in rubbish-strewn wasteland. Accra looks like the surface of the moon, daubed with red and white Vodaphone advertising, to which someone has thoughtfully added a ring road by way of decoration. Some of the city’s most oft referred to landmarks are its massive noisy roundabouts, making it look like a post-apocalyptic version of Swindon. Accra is definitely not a pretty place, and on Friday afternoons those able to do so flee the city for the surrounding towns and villages, creating a gridlock of beaten-up tro tro minibus taxis and massive privately owned SUVs.

Driving in Accra is not dissimilar to driving in London – at any one time you may have up to four lanes of traffic, each notifying the other of where it bloody well intends to go by leaning on the horn. On the way back from the market this afternoon we watched a rather flash sports car careen into one of the open sewers that line each side of the road. I have a horrible feeling that it’s a question of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’, I fall into one of these myself.

Although the rainy season is supposed to have ended by now, there have been occasional downpours over the last few days. These have had the unexpected benefit of sluicing through the open sewer network, reducing the gag-inducing stench of the city to a more palatable odour, akin to that of a flatulent great uncle.

As we wander about town, trying to avoid falling into one cess pit or another, we get amazingly little hassle from local Ghanaians. Small children and teens occasionally shout Obruni! – ‘foreigner’ or ‘white man’ – as we pass by. Others, young and old, want to shake your hand and know where you’re from. The odd half-hearted attempt to sell you something is usually quickly forgotten if you offer your name and ask for theirs. We’re like Big Brother contestants opening a shopping centre  – passably interesting but by and large to be ignored.

It’s easy to forget that people of all ages tend to speak reasonable to excellent English. For the fact that most Ghanaians speak Twi (pronounced ‘chwee’) to each other, or Accra’s own Ga dialect, it’s disconcerting when a roadside stallholder of around 60 suddenly breaks into English to give you detailed cooking instructions for the unfamiliar root vegetable that you’ve just invested in from her stall.

Armed with a vague idea of how not to poison ourselves, this evening we managed to combine tomatoes, carrots and Unfamiliar Root Vegetable with super noodles in our first venture at home cooking. We are sharing a large house with around four or five other volunteers; unfortunately space is about the best thing the place has to offer. Louisa and I have at least been spared the single-sex dorm rooms. We thankfully have our own private room with just the one bunk bed in it. Louisa has the top as I still sleepwalk on occasion.

After six days here the initial shock is beginning to subside a little, and a growing filming schedule offers some potential order amist the chaos. On Tuesday we’re off to visit the Ghana Red Cross to see what there is to capture on camera there. I can’t think of a better place to be if tonight’s cooking takes its toll on our insides. Even if it does, until it rains again no one will be able to smell the consequences anyway.