Ghana - Life in a rural village!

Once again, Ghana stands out as one of our most memorable ports – this time because of Fredrick Benneh Frimpong and our 4 day homestay in Senase village. Fred is a 25 year old Ghanaian from Senase and currently finishing his studies in the US.  He flew back to Ghana from San Francisco just for this trip and to check on the school you will hear about later in this posting.

When we signed up for the Semester at Sea field program to a rural village in northern Ghana, “2 hours” north of Komasi, we knew the drive would take longer than the 5 hours touted, so we doubled the expected travel time, and were not surprised when it to took 10 hours there and 11 hours back (we left the ship in Takaroti then met it in Tema).  

We joined 24 other shipmates on a trip that provided us a glimpse into a non-touristed part of a Ghana and the chance to interact with Ghanaians in their village and school.  We were well cared for during our 4 days, eating local dishes prepared by Fred’s family over campfires in their yard and sleeping in rooms generously vacated so that we had a place to sleep.

In our welcome briefing, Fred had suggested that we all might try to get up early and help our host families hauling water from the local well, sweeping and getting ready for the day.  It sounded like a great plan, but in reality, we just tried to hang on in this foreign environment.  Our bodies were not used to the 90+ degree heat (day and night) with no A/C and there were constant activities and people swarming around us at all times so by the time we fell asleep we were exhausted.  We sweated 24/7 and we found ourselves sweltering in our beds as we tried to fall asleep waiting for the oscillating fan to finish its 15 second rotation back to our bed.  Just before 4:00 a.m. the neighborhood roosters, which Jay called the Vietnamese roosters since they clearly were calling out dawn in the wrong time-zone, would sound their alarms and try to rouse us from our beds.

We spent our first day volunteering at the Semanhyiya American School that Fred had founded and built.  The school, whose name means “if we had not met,” was the result of Fred’s meeting Barbara Allison, a SAS lifelong learner who funded Fred’s university schooling in the US and who started the Godfred foundation that built  the school.  Semaysheya represents a new approach to schooling that is in stark contrast to the government run schools in Ghana.  Fred incorporated the best teaching techniques from London and the U.S. into his school’s kindergarten and 1^st grade classrooms.  They filled the initial classes with a lottery since they had so many applications for limited spots.  Now that they have a year completed, we are sure their new class of pre-K will be even more oversubscribed. 

Our 3^rd day started with a 5:30 wakeup call since the school bus left at 6 to pickup kids from neighboring villages.  Despite the early hour, we greeted by energetic smiles at each stop.   We arrived at the school by 7:30, served breakfast to the kids and began a morning of games and activities with the kids.  A highlight was seeing what the kids built from toys we brought from our toy company, Brackitz.   Another highlight was pehaps the funniest part of our day.  The students begin each morning by dancing and singing the Electric Slide and, even better, the Macarena.  By the time we finished delivering the kids back to their homes, we were exhausted by the heat and constant interaction with dozens of kids.  But Fred had one more treat in store.  He had organized a soccer game against the locals on the village field.  With heaps of spectators, Luke and Jay joined three students from the ship, the teachers and Fred's friends in a referee-aided 5-3 victory over a group of local players.  It's a miracle that Ghana's Black Stars regularly qualify for the World Cup but we suppose practicing tin that heat will kill you or make you stronger!

In addition to our time at Semanhyiya, we also visited different villages, government schools and hung out with the locals in Senase.  With the intensity of 4 straight days living at Fred’s parents’ house, we were able to see the realities of living in a subsistence farming community and the stark difference in teaching styles, facilities and overall resources between public and private schools. Ghana remains primarily a subsistence farming country with 60% of the population involved in agriculture, usually on a small scale. To achieve its long-term goals of becoming an industrialized country by 2030, it will need a new generation of entrepreneurs and leaders to challenge the status quo and bring about significant change. It is the very rare exceptional person who will come out of the rote-learning, fear-based model of teaching in the government schools prepared to drive the changes Ghana needs.  And so Semanhyiya’s model gave us a glimmer of hope, but the concept will need to be replicated on a much larger scale.  We plan to support the construction of the 2^nd grade classroom that will open next September and Fred is planning to expand his concept with other schools in nearby villages.  We think Fred has a great chance to succeed through his leadership and drive.  He and Barbara have created a model where the schools need support for construction but are self sustaining for operating expenses.

Although this was a tiring 4 days, it was the best trip we have taken through SAS because it allowed us to authentically interact with locals and understand a way of life that is so starkly different from our own.  We have made new lifelong friends and have found a new way to give back and make a difference in one small place in the world. 

To learn more about Semanhyiya and its founders, Fred and Barbara, visit this website.  The foundation is called Godfreds Foundation and was named after a bright young student named Godfred.  Fred's first aim was to make sure that Godfred had a path to a good future and would have opportunities that Fred never did.  Ironically, Godfred is too old to attend Fred's school since it only has pre-K - 1st grade (and is adding a new year of school each year as the kids advance). 

So that’s a wrap on our experience in Ghana. If you want to hear more about our take on Ghana, look for another post soon.  On the ship we had a lot of discussion about the costs and benefits of “voluntourism”, and tourism in general.  We will explore that and other things in a non-country blog post soon.

Ghana Stories - Views from Christy and Jay

We have finally figured out how to upload links to word documents.  We had several assignments for our travel writing class and we linked them to this page.  See the documents below if you want to read more about Ghana.

Anticipating Ghana's Slave Dungeons - Christy

Expectations of Ghana - Jay

Anticipation of Ghana - Christy

Beyond the Comfort Zone - Encountering Ghana - Christy

Playing Fairly, Hard - Jay

Reflections of Ghana - Jay

Reflections on Ghana - Hell Dungeons - Christy

Ghana Reflections - Christy

Ghana - Our Favorite Port - Again!!

Ghana is engraved in our souls.  In 2009, it changed us more than any other country on our around the world trip and it rocked us again on this visit.  It is hard to describe why Ghana affects our family this way.  In an effort to demonstrate why, we will include essays we wrote entitled Anticipations of Ghana and Reflections of Ghana.  These come from our Travel Writing class, which continually pushes Jay, Christy and Luke outside our comfort zone – just like Ghana did for us on our visit. 

Below is the overview of our visit to put our attached stories into perspective.  

We packed in as much as we could during our four days in Ghana and tried to experience different parts of the country than we did during our 2009 visit.  For our home base, we choose a beach resort near Cape Coast that is only 67 miles from Accra, but almost 4 hours away due to the unpredictable traffic.  Although we were often stuck in traffic, we were never bored because vendors swarmed the cars with baskets on their heads overflowing with items ranging from grapes to toilet plungers.  You could do your day’s shopping from your car!

The first day, we visited a friend from the Aspen Institute, Patrick Awuah, who left his job at Microsoft and returned to Ghana to start Ashesi University.  Patrick created what others thought would be impossible, the top university in Ghana.  It is producing the next generation of ethical leaders who are staying in Africa to change the continent.  Ashesi, and Patrick’s dedication, are an inspiration to anyone who wants to make a difference in the world. 

Ghana is infamous for its part in 400 years of the slave trade, where 60 million people were taken from Africa.  Of the 60 million people taken from their villages, historians estimate that only 12 million survived the trip across Africa, their time in the dungeons and the horrific conditions of Atlantic crossing to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.   We were surprised to learn that most of the slaves were actually taken to Brazil, with only a tiny portion going to North America.  Read the stories in our next post to get a glimpse into what we experienced during our visits.  Warning:  it is not easy reading. 

Our favorite experience in 2009, and again this year, was visiting a local village and learning from the similarities and differences in our cultures and circumstances.  This time, we visited a school and orphanage in the village of Equafo.   Our photos and essays try to reflect the energy and struggles of the children. 

We took over 700 photos in Ghana trying to capture the vibrancy of Ghana’s people, markets and towns.  Here are a few more of our favorites. 

The World's Friendliest People!

Luke and Ryan’s Perspective

For us, Ghana was an exciting and different place. There were two things that were really weird – people carried tons of stuff on their heads (platters full of things they wanted to sell, water, anything), and that people stood in between cars on the road and tried to sell things during stoplights! Some things were the same – pizza, chicken nuggets, kids played soccer – but mostly we saw things that were very different. The roads were very bad and bumpy and it took a long time to drive anywhere. When we got to the village, everything was different. Some people just slept in the grass, some houses were made of mud and the toilets were holes in wood over big pits in the ground. But the kids were very happy, and we had a lot of fun chasing tons of goats in the village and playing soccer with an old soccer ball on a dirt field. Except for the soccer ball, they had almost no toys. We are really lucky to have so many more things than they do. We gave the kids crayons, coloring books and Lego’s.

Jay and Christy’s Perspective

Well, we are six days out of Ghana and are just finishing digesting it (literally and figuratively – lots of tummy trouble aboard the MV Explorer!). We had a wonderful time and leave with very favorable impressions of this country and its people, although it’s not without its challenges. This is a very complex country. On the one hand it is the success story of West Africa, independent since the 1950’s and the poster child for democracy in the region. On the other hand, this is a very poor country, with abundant natural resources but virtually no infrastructure, with the wealthy shopping in Western style malls but the poor living in mud hut villages, and the world’s friendliest people but petty graft among its police force. Of course the real test is whether we would return and the answer is a resounding “Yes!”

We spend four days here. The first day we visited a private school in the capital city and shopped the stalls of the main market street. The school visit was impressive and provided a stark contrast to things we saw later in the trip. Shopping and bartering were entertaining and we will arrive home with numerous Ghanaian souvenirs and memories, including new "football" jerseys for the boys. The Ghanaians are proud to be the first African team to qualify for the World Cup next year in South Africa.

The second and third days provided the true highlights of the stay. We joined a Semester at Sea trip to a rural village called Tormonge for an overnight stay. This post will be a little longer than most since there is so much to record about that visit. When we arrived, hundreds of villagers welcomed us with drums and dancing that continued for over 3 hours in the stifling heat. Through various ceremonies, songs, dances and recitals, we were each given our African names (first name dictated by the day of the week you are born and the second name selected by our hosts). To help us with our short term memory issues, we each received a locally made pot with our new names written on them.
 

Luke and Ryan were huge entertainment for the villagers. We later learned that the village had seen about 20 tour visits over the last ten years – always by classes of university students. We were fairly certain that the village children had never seen white children before so they were very curious about Luke and Ryan. They wanted to touch them and followed them everywhere. When Luke and Ryan saw the baby goats in the village, they started a game of goat chasing. They would chase the goats and the village children would in turn chase Luke and Ryan. This provided hours of entertainment and thoroughly tired out our kids and their goats. We asked one dad whether the kids always chased goats and he paused, cocked his head and said “Not until your boys came here”. So Luke and Ryan have created a new sport, although one that we think may have been heartily discouraged once our bus left the village.

Tormonge was a fishing and pottery village. Their homes were mostly made out of clay – the same as their pots. While there were electrical wires strung throughout the village, it appeared usage was quite low. Grain was milled at the communal milling hut. They had very little and their way of life was a mix of space age and stone age, as one of our profs likes to say. They wore T-shirts with Western logos but wove their kente cloth by hand with crude looms, made their pots without pottery wheels, and fished from boats carved out of trees. In contrast to the school we saw in the city, the school here was bare – only desks and a blackboard in a concrete building. They had a library started by an African American but it appeared to be little used despite having children’s book in their native language. There were two flush toilets by the village center but it appeared they were reserved for visitors or leaders, as most of the village used the outhouse erected over a deep dark pit. The school kids played with a half deflated soccer ball, while the village team players each had their own ball.

In the afternoon of our visit we toured the village and saw everything in action. The boys continued their goat chasing, which resulted in a visit to the clinic for Ryan after he took a tumble. Then off to our family homestay, where we believe we may have had the nicest accommodations in the village. We had two rooms for the five of us, fans in the rooms and an open air shower in a detached structure. The highlight of the trip for Jay occurred in the shower as he stepped in with Luke. Luke spontaneously looked up at him and said “Daddy, we’re really lucky that we have so much - these kids have so little”. And so in a nutshell, Luke has already internalized what the highest goal of the entire trip is – we are very lucky to live in the place that we do, with the things that we have and none of us should lose sight of the advantages we have that most people in the world can never even aspire to.

That night we enjoyed a traditional Ghanaian dinner, accompanied by drumming and dancing. The slightly uncomfortable part of the evening occurred when we sat down to dinner in the center of the village and most of the villagers sat around the square watching us eat. While no one in the village seemed to be lacking the basic necessities, it had hard not to feel the huge divide between what we would consider a typical meal and what might be the usual dinner for most of those in the village.

On our third day, we ate breakfast with the villagers, and then returned to the ship.  On the way back, we made a pit stop in a national wildlife reserve, climbed a small peak, visited some caves, and saw two baboon troops and a herd of antelope.  A highlight was climbing through one of the caves to pop out the other end through a narrow opening.  The second highlight of the day was pushing our bus in order to get a rolling start after it refused to start!  The Shay Reserve is only about 2 hours drive from Accra and provided a lot of entertainment. 

Day four was a new adventure as we arranged a car and driver and headed to the beach. Ghana’s target is to multiply their tourism business in a matter of years and we got to see first-hand what they will have to work with. The natural setting was spectacular, although a little rocky for a swimming beach. The chief issue they will have is cleaning up the beaches and the water, as it was obvious that there is a very limited effort to do that at the current time.

All in all, we leave Ghana happy to have made the trip there and encouraged by possibilities of the country!