The travels of Tim and Megan: Ghana

Ghana

Ghana is a country in West Africa, bordered by Ivory Coast to the west, Burkina Fason to the north, Togo to the east and the Gulf of Guinea to the south. Ghana was inhabited in pre-colonial times by a number of ancient predominantly Akan kingdoms. Groups in the north of the country formed several Islamized states and were the middle men in trade between other larger sahelian Muslim states (such as Mali and Songhai) and the Akan kingdoms, especially in gold and salt trade. Trade with European states flourished after contact with the Portuguese in the 15th century, and the British established the Gold Coast Crown colony in 1874. The Gold Coast achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, becoming the first sub-Saharan African nation to do so, and the name Ghana (meaning "Warrior King") was chosen to reflect the ancient Empire of Ghana, which once extended throughout much of West Africa.

Ghana is home to around 24 million people, 4 million of whom live in the capital city of Accra. Ghana's goverment is a constitutional presidential republic and it is one of the most stable and safe countries in Africa. English is the official language, although there are dozens of regional African languages used as well. Ghana is the world's second largest producer of cocoa (after its neighbour, Ivory Coast) and it is home to Lake Volta, the world's largest artificial lake by surface area.

Madventurer

On 12 February, we set off from London Heathrow bound for Accra, Ghana. We had decided some time ago that we wanted to get involved in a volunteer project in Africa. During our research, we stumbled across an organisation called Madventurer, that offered a building and teaching project (for two weeks, in our case) in Ghana, amongst other locations. Ghana appealed to us for a number of reasons - it is one of the most stable and safe African countries, it is one of the world's largest producers of cocoa (and we love chocolate) and we enjoyed the wonderful run of the Ghana football team at the 2010 World Cup, where they were denied a semi-final spot only by horrendous cheating by Uruguay.

Madventurer was founded by a British guy called John Lawler in the late 1990s. He went to Ghana on a volunteer programme and he had such a great time that he stayed on and was made an honorary chief of the village for all of the building and development he had helped with! He then set up the Mad Foundation and later Madventurer so that others could follow in his footsteps and help to develop Ghana. Madventurer is now a worldwide organisation with projects spread across the globe.

We were greeted at the airport in Accra by Gideon, one of the Ghanaian Madventurer staff. Our flight had arrived a little late and it took well over an hour for our luggage to come out on the conveyor belt - our first introduction to "African time". So it was pretty late by the time Gideon took us from the airport to the Pink Hostel, where we crashed for the night.

It was an early start on Sunday morning. We checked out of the hostel at 7.30am and caught a taxi to the Accra tro tro station. It was already hot and sunny and there were a lot of people out and about - very different to a Sunday morning in London! A tro tro is basically a van used for long distance public transport. At the tro tro station, you find a van that is heading to where you want to go, buy your ticket (which is very cheap) and then you wait until the van is full before you leave - there is no set time that the van leaves, so you could be waiting for two minutes or over an hour.

As it turned out, we waited for about an hour but the time flew by, as we were amused by dozens of vendors trying to sell us things from chewing gum to French grammar books and by a preacher who recited chunks of the bible at us for a solid 15 minutes. The tro tro ride from Accra to Ho took about 2.5 hours and, while there was not much leg room in the van, it wasn't too bad. We were too busy talking to Gideon and taking in the fascinating sights out the window.

Ho and Sokode Gbogame

Ho is a town in south-east Ghana and is the capital of the Volta Region. It is home to around 70,000 people. Our accommodation for two weeks was a house on the outskirts of Ho, nicknamed the "Mad House". The house was about 3-4 minutes by taxi from Ho and about 7-8 minutes in the other direction from the village where our project was based, Sokode Gbogame. The village was small, but it had a reasonable sized school and a kindergarten, which served that and other nearby villages.

The Mad House was actually better equipped than we had expected. We were told that there was often a male dormitory and a female dormitory and that "showers" would be literally a bucket of cold water. However, we were delighted to discover that there were three bedrooms for volunteers in the Mad House and only four volunteers - so the two of us shared our own room! We were also pretty happy that there was electricity (most of the time) and running water (about half of the time) and that we had an actual shower and two flushable toilets. We had been bracing ourselves for bucket showers outside and longdrops in the garden, so it was like Christmas!

The other two volunteers were really nice. Gus, a 19 year old American guy, was on a medical placement at the Ho hospital and Cathy, a 22 year old girl from Gibraltar, was on the teaching and building project with us. We also shared the house with our Madventurer crew leader, a 23 year old English girl called Emily, who was also lovely.

The Mad House employed a Ghanaian cook, a woman named Enyo, who cooked us amazing food and did a great job of keeping the Mad House clean, and security guard, who kept watch at night. We are not sure of his name, but he was hilarious. He was a 62 year old Ghanaian man who loved his drink and often turned up at the house hours late for work, smelling of gin, but he always had incredibly funny stories to explain why he was late, including severe diarrhoea one day, malaria another day and an intruder in his house on another occasion. He was definitely a character. Finally, the Mad House was also home to a number of exotic creatures - we found a huge beetle on the lounge floor, a massive spider on the wall, and there were several lizards lurking in the back yard. The lizards were amazing - some of them were over a foot long and were decorated with several different bright colours.

On arrival at the Mad House on Sunday morning, we dropped our gear and went with Gideon to meet the rest of the crew. They were at Freedom Hotel in Ho, hanging out by the pool - a popular spot to relax in the weekends! It was scorching hot by the time we arrived at Freedom Hotel. We met Emily, Gus and Cathy, as well as a couple of their mates who were also doing volunteering in Ghana, but not through Madventurer, and spent the afternoon sitting by the pool and chatting to them. We had a few drinks and ordered some lunch (another example of African time - Freedom Hotel takes a long time to deliver your food!). It was worth the wait, however, as we had delicious chicken and vegetables with a side of fried plantain (a Ghanaian favourite - similar to banana but not as sweet). There were loads of local men playing like children in the swimming pool, which was quite funny.

Later in the afternoon, Emily took us for a walk through Ho, which was an experience. Loads of the locals were staring at us, waving and calling out to us. We pretty quickly became accustomed with Ghanaians, especially the children, yelling out "Yevu, yevu" whenever they saw us. Yevu means white person in Ewe (the main African language in the Volta Region).

We walked through the market, the heart of Ho, and saw lots of fruit and vegetables, fish and all sorts of crazy looking things for sale. Some of the roads in Ho are dirt roads and they are almost always littered with little wooden shack shops with bizarre names. Many of the names of shops in Ghana (as well as bumper stickers on cars and tro tros) relate in some way to religion, for example, "God is my Greatest Provider Fashion", "Thy Will Be Done Lottery Stall" and "God's Time is the Best" Fast Food - probably our personal favourite!

We eventually found ourselves at another favourite spot of the volunteers, White House, a pub that we visited frequently during our two week stay. White House was a pretty good pub - they did quite nice food, especially amazing french fries, a good selection of drinks, classic cheesy music and a real live monkey chained to the fence in the garden bar...awesome.

Everything was a novelty to us - there were chickens, goats, sheep and the like roaming the streets, seemingly not owned by anyone or restricted in their movements. We also loved the shared taxi system used in Ho. You can pull over a taxi anywhere (even if it already has passengers) and if it's going in the general direction that you want to go, you can jump in too, until it is full of course. Full usually means about 6 passengers in a taxi! A 3-4 minute taxi ride from the town centre in Ho to our house on the outskirts (maybe 2km away) cost us 50 pesewas (half of one Ghanaian cedi). This equates to about 22 pence in the UK. Needless to say, everything was very cheap in Ghana.

As Ghana is almost on the equator, the daylight hours are pretty steady throughout the year. It gets light around 6am and it gets dark around 6pm. Solid. This meant that we would often have dinner pretty early and would follow that with early bedtimes. We knew we had a big day ahead on Monday, so we had an early night on Sunday.

Photos below (photos 1-7 - Ho; photos 8 - 12 Mad House; photos 13 - 20 Sokode Gbogame)