Busy Busy Busy!!

It has been awhile since I last wrote for a few reasons…one is that the rest of the team has arrived and it’s been very busy around here, and the other is that the power and the internet have been more off than on in the last couple weeks. This would have driven me CRAZY a couple months ago, but I now find myself taking it all in stride and not getting too upset about it. Amanda would tease me when we first got here about how frustrated I would get if the internet wasn’t working for one day!! Amazing how things can change.

We went to Accra last Monday to pick up the team on Tuesday evening. It was very exciting to see familiar faces coming off the plane! We had a couple days in Accra and then came back to Sunyani to get started. It was a rocky couple of days for Amanda and me when we first arrived back. I felt very responsible for ensuring that everyone was safe and happy, and that is hard to do when you have a team of 11 people! I had to really take a step back and let some delegating happen. I also think that we suffered from a bit of reverse culture shock. It was quite overwhelming to have 9 Canadians suddenly in our daily lives after having 10 weeks of our routine with our Ghanaian friends. I think we have worked through it though, and now that we are full steam ahead with project work I am very happy to have the whole team here.

There are about 27 team members including Canadian and Ghanaian students and faculty. We have split into 5 theme teams and have decided on a variety of knowledge transfer strategies to implement in the next three weeks. Some of the ideas are:

*HIV/AIDS prevention and educations – assist the newly formed resource centre on one of the campuses, research stigma around testing, create partnership with public health nurses and nursing school, present at a primary school and at an orphanage

*Bushfire Management – connect with bushfire club on one of the campuses and create a bushfire management plan for the university’s community forest, work with volunteer fire fighters in neighbouring communities

*Plastic Waste Management – establish a composting initiative on one of the campuses and with a community woman’s group, hold a ‘campus clean-up’ on both campuses, assist in creating environmental club in community primary school

*Ecotourism – visit potential ecotourism sites in the area and do a needs assessment, create a brochure for existing sites in the region, work with newly formed ecotourism department on campus to assist with curriculum

*The SODIS Water project – test the SODIS process in the area, gather data on water borne illnesses in the area and present SODIS and data to Health Care professionals, get program set up to pilot the project with WASA (Women’s Action Solidarity Association) Widow’s group in Wenchi in the future

I am working on the SODIS Water project which I am really excited about!! If your interested in more info check out www.sodis.ch , but it is basically a way to use uv-rays from the sun to clean water of harmful bacteria to provide safe drinking water to rural communities. I have to admit I was pretty skeptical when I first heard about this process, but it seems to be working really well in a variety of places in Africa and around the world. I’m still researching it further so I am very clear about what it does and doesn’t do, but it’s pretty exciting. In a continent where HIV/AIDS is so prevalent, clean water is desperately important as most victims die of illnesses or dehydration due to poor drinking water.

3 weeks until we leave Sunyani, and 5 weeks ‘til we are home! Wow!

My Apologies!!

It has just been brought to my attention that the links to pictures were not available to non-facebookers!! Nobody said anything! Anywhooooo, I think I have fixed that. Check out the links to Amanda's pics of our time here so far. Let me know if any of them don't work, or if you are not a member of facebook let me know if you can access them ok!
Sorry about that!

L.

Catching My Breath!

It has been a busy week! Last Friday Amanda and I realized that it would be our last free weekend until the rest of our team leaves in the middle of May and that we had better take advantage of it. We got talking about it with one of the faculty members on the project team, Sylvia, and she invited us to her house to spend the weekend with her family in Kumasi, the bigger city we had visited the week before. We also had another family to visit in Kumasi so she helped arrange for us to spend Friday night with Sam’s parents (Sam is a friend in Nanaimo that is from Ghana), and then Sat and Sun night with her and her family.

It was such a great weekend! Sam’s parents were very sweet and it was so great to meet them. We even talked to Sam on the phone while we were there which was fun. Sylvia and her husband George and their three children, (George Jr. – 7, Ebenezer – 5, and Theresa – 3) made us feel like members of the family. On Saturday we went to Lake Busomtwi, which is a lake that was made by a meteorite impact. They were very excited to take us so that we could go swimming (the Ghanaians think it’s quite funny how much we Canadians like to swim, as very few Ghanaians even know how to swim.). It wasn’t quite the cool and refreshing water that we were expecting though…I hadn’t really thought much about it honestly, but of course a lake here would be quite a different temperature from lakes at home…it was HOT!! I don’t mean warm, I mean hot! We had sweat dripping down our faces as we tried to swim long enough that we wouldn’t insult or disappoint this great family that had taken us here especially so we could swim!! We didn’t last very long, but made up for it by taking the children into the water so they could play and splash around which they had never done before in a lake. We had a little picnic afterwards before heading home. On Sunday we went to church with them, and then took the kids to a pool at one of the universities…the kids wanted to take advantage of us being there and get in the water as much as possible as neither George nor Sylvia swim. It was another great day!

On Monday we sadly said good-bye and got picked up and taken to the airport in Accra (capital city) to pick up Rick and Anne, one of my instructors and his wife. We spent one day in Accra…you wouldn’t really want to stay much longer; it’s a big noisy city! Then we left for Cape Coast for two days. Amanda and I hadn’t realized how tired we were from the last two months, until we had this down time. I think we both could have slept for the whole two days, but no rest when there are new adventures to have! We had read about this women’s NGO that teaches women how to make crafts and clothes to sell to tourist, with all the proceeds going back to these women. They also have workshops that you can do, so Amanda, Anne, and I decided we wanted to try the batik workshop. For about $20 CAD you get to design and make your own two yard piece of batik! It was great fun, and I now have a lovely new sarong that I helped make! The women that lead us through it is an amazing lady named Eli (pronounced ‘Elly’) that has really prospered partly in thanks to the women’s NGO which is called Women in Progress. She has taken her success and is sharing it with some young local girls that have dropped out of school, usually for financial reasons, and is teaching them the art of batik-ing. Once they have shown her that they are willing to work and learn, she then starts to pay them to work with her. The girls were so great, and they obviously have a lot of respect for Eli. We will definitely be going back to do another workshop before we leave Ghana!

We then got back to Sunyani on Thursday in time for our team meeting on Friday morning, and helped Rick and Anne settle in, only to head off again for the day today! We went to Bui National Park today which is a fairly large park along the Cote d’Ivoire coast that is about to be mostly flooded by a new dam being built. It is also home to some 200 hippos as well as other wildlife, and is immediately surrounded by 3 or 4 villages, all of which are going to be looking for new homes! Rick is in the process of writing another proposal for a project that could involve Bui and he wanted to make some initial contact with at least one of the villages. So we had an informal meeting with the town elders who of course are expressing concern and are fearful of what is going to happen to them as the time gets closer to the dam being completed, which will be in about 4 or 5 years from now. It really puts the daily frustrations of life into perspective when you consider what these people are going through as they are about to be evicted not only from their homes, but from their whole way of life! Heart breaking.

The rest of the Canadian team arrives in 10 days, so it’s going to be very busy around here getting everything ready for them!

ps Pictures to come...I will post the link to Amanda's new photos when she has it up!

pps I saw Hippos today at Bui! 3 of them! Sooooooooooo amazing! I can't believe I forgot to say that!? Amanda has the proof.