My adventures in Accra

So here is an update on my adventures of yesterday... I feel like I learned as much in four hours about Ghana as I have in the last four weeks, but that is getting ahead of myself a little.



Myself and Sarah, a girl in my program, are going to be volunteering this semester with a local NGO called Cencosad that does community empowerment and development work. Their recent focus has been on educating about reproductive rights in Ga Meshie, a very high density area part of the city. It could probably be classified as a slum, and the people's whole lives take place in the very crowded area. Yesterday was our first day on the job so to speak, although I confess while I feel I learned a lot about Accra and Ghana, I don't actually know what our exact responsibilities with the organization will be.



The head of the project we will be working with is a graduate student here at the university, so we were able to meet up with him on campus and bum a ride down to the office(otherwise, like on the return trip, it is a good hour's tro-tro ride). Nii, the project head, is also the most chatty Ghanaian I've met yet, and I think the whole time we were with him conversation was kept up. He asked us some questions, but also he had a lot to tell us about Ghana, Cencosad, the Ga people(which is the ethnic group of Accra and who speak a different language than Twi... go figure...).

Some highlights from the general conversation is that he does not think the election this December will be fair and sees Ghana as still having a lot of corruption... political campaign signs are everywhere but the general concensus among other students seems to be that they don't know who they are voting for... most people who have said clearly want the main opposition party as opposed to the ruling party, but the reason they give is that the NPP had their chance and a change is needed... we use that line in the US, but it doesn't always mean change will really come, but I guess hope is a fundamental element of democracy... He also talked some about NGOs and how some are there to actually work and some are what he called brief-case NGOs, there for the money...

At the office we got to read the quarterly reports and see what reproductive right education actually meant on the ground. Cencosad tries and reach as many people in the Ga Meshie community as they can through dramatization, education including peer education in the schools, and sensitization of local leaders... it is definitely a project still very much underway, and from some statistics we were given, a very much needed one... there is a lot of common misconceptions and sometimes the message they teach is as simple as it is ok to say no to sex...

From the office we were given a grand walking tour of the neighborhood which was incredibly educational and eye-opening. Ga Meshie probably isn't that much poorer than a lot of neighborhoods in Accra, but it is so very dense that it definitely strikes one. There is a lot of unemployment, and one of the main economic activities is fishing which is a dieing industry as the fish supplies become increasingly more scarce and as trawlers take the place of the local canoes... the human cost of efficiency... traditionally the men fished and the women smoked it and sold it... We got to talk with one of the fishers, although Nii had to translate, and it doesn't sound like an especially easy livelihood at all...

Another aspect of this small area was the remnants of the slave trade, for there was both James Fort and Usher Fort which had been used in that evil trade, and one of the markets, Sengal, still bares the name given it after the people brought down from the north and sold there... The area used to contain both the Dutch and the British Accra, but again only remnants remain, like how the London market which used to be where the Europeans shopped is now a meat market(and the amount of flies upon the meat there, including the head and tail and other odd parts of bulls was slightly nauseating...).

It was hot, we got slightly dehydrated, but soaked it all up. This probably only captures part of what I learned, for I feel there was more, but clear thoughts allude me... I do think though that whatever we do end up doing there will be invaluable, and I only hope we bring to Cencosad as much as I imagine we will take away from it.