Picking A Winner

The use of mobile phones in Ghana is a much different experience to home. Phone calls are really cheap and texts even cheaper. This means plenty of use for the phone!

The essential item. Cheap phone. Security says it is your best weapon. Sometimes it is annoying.

Non-stop use. There is never a reason not to answer, and if you don’t answer, you will be reprimanded by constant phone calls or a stern talking to. Also it’s not common to wait the second or two that it takes for the line to start working once you have ‘picked’ the call. The caller and receiver will start: ‘Hello? HELLO? hEllo? heLlo? helLo? heLLo? helo? hellO? HEllo? HeLlo? HelLo? HellO?’ (and so on), and then finally; click, the airways open up and it’s on. You have to close your ears or leave the room because the volume for chatting is high. There is a lady at our work whose reputation precedes her and colleagues refuse to travel in her vehicle because the conversations are so imposing.

Everyone asks for your phone number. I was riding my bicycle home last week and a small school child on his bike that I rode past asked me for my number. Really? Luckily the conversations are short. The record so far is 30 seconds. Basically just asking how you are. If you answer correctly with ‘fine’, then it’s time to call the next person. My tactic of pretending I missed the phone call when screening calls doesn’t work. People are very persistent. Multiple phone calls, regardless of time of the day (5am is apparently acceptable) means it’s best to pick the call.

Phones are #1 priority, meaning people often have multiple phones, definitely multiple sims, and they are never ignored. If you are in a meeting, another phone conversation, in the middle of lecturing someone, driving a motorbike, bartering for groceries, you name it, the call will be answered. Loudly.

In meetings, simply answer loudly, but to keep your manners, ducking under the table, or throwing your head back (so you talk upward, not across the conversation, interruption problem solved) is suggested.

Ringtones are a whole different story, but of course loud and imposing. This is why it is good to side with your colleagues and help them choose a ringtone that you don’t mind, otherwise you are stuck listening to Celine Dion snippets all day every day. I’m sure using ‘silent’ here is unheard of, but I daydreamed about a library the other day….

Throwing your head back when on the phone means noone can see 
you and you aren't interrupting ...... apparently

You’re Invited

Ghanaian food is….interesting. Think fats, carbs and protein in its most basic form. And worst form too. All my professional life I’ve told people to avoid palm oil at all costs. Here, well it’s a daily staple. A traditional dish called ‘Red Red’ is basically beans with fried plantain (starchy banana) and it’s red because of the palm oil it is soaked in. something to be proud of.

Vital ingredients in Ghanaian food as I have come to observe;

·                 *   Palm oil

·                 * ‘Onga’ a preservative rich, salty sort of stock powder

·                 * Pepper (pronounced pepp-air in quite a posh way) or chilli as we know it

·                 * Oil

·                  * Blue Band – a faker type of margarine (yes, apparently it is possible)

·                  * Probably more oil

·                  * Meat of any type or of many various types

·                  * Dried stinky fish

·                  * Tomato paste

·                  * And then probably deep fry it all again

·                  * With a dash of oil on top for flavour (palm oil probably…yumm)

It may not all be that bad, but you are 99% of the time left with a red stained plate because of the palm oil. Heart disease isn’t really on the radar here….yet. I can just imagine the struggle to try to get Ghanaians off the palm oil. I really hope I’m never involved. Like taking beer away from Aussies!

Needless to say, I still enjoy learning about traditional foods, even if I’ve landed in the most delicious-food-barren country. I am trying my hand at perfecting Groundnut Soup (peanut soup), with mixed results. Sounds easy but isn’t so easy when you try at home without recipes. There are no standards here, you go to one place and have a watery soup with a fly floating in it, and to the next with a delicious rich, well balanced soup that is perfect. And it’s definitely not going to be consistently good/bad at the same place either. So you are always guessing! We share it with our guard to see how it fares in comparison to 'real' Ghanaian food. He is quick to say it is delicious, yet our work colleagues aren't as subtle. We've been told it's raw and gritty, so now it's not as quickly shared... But they do enjoy our commitment to Ghanaian food.

Communal food is the norm here, you are always ‘invited’ to partake in the offerings of friends and colleagues, even if it is hard to stand in the same room as the smell emitting from the plate. But it keeps the people here well nourished. As they say ‘sharing is caring’.

Groundnut Soup with a Rice Ball....and a fly

Wa and the Wild (Upper) West

2 weeks in Wa for work went as follows; I was outside a shop and met a Canadian, exchanged phone numbers, and I found myself as a dinner guest with 3 Canadians, eating vegetarian crepes and drinking delicious wine!

I explored the town - the Wa-Na’s place (the local chief) where the armed military guard got extremely angry at me for not saying hello. I hastened out of there for the central mosque, colourful and hidden, this is a large Islamic area in Ghana - Fridays are amazing. Then to the markets where it is fun to look for jerseys or rejected clothes from your home town. Shirts and throw aways turn up from all over the world, Ghanaians wearing Australian school jerseys, table tennis shirts etc is quite amusing. Makes you think just how many charity or ‘fun’ shirts end up in strange places.

The ‘touristy’ attractions are mostly outside of Wa, in the only taxi in town we set off to Sankana, with my door constantly flying open along the way. Community entry custom means getting the chief’s permission to enter and explore the town; he was drinking at the local bar, so it was natural to join. Pito, the local brew, with a good head of fermented froth on it was shared. Interesting, I can’t say if I like it yet. 

In 'No Fear' the taxi - the door that kept opening

 Two men were summoned from the markets, to be our guides. They took us out into the fields, headed for the famous slave caves. The first cave...... it was hardly a cave. We looked around a bit confused, thinking it was a joke and laughing waiting for the punch line. Politely they explained this was the cave where the locals cooked - hiding from the captors.

The 'kitchen'

Further on through high grass was a large rock that was the lookout rock to see when the captors were coming and alert the locals. With high hopes for the actual caves fading, this helped when finding the cave had collapsed inside (or so it was said), so the cave that apparently housed thousands of locals hiding from slave captors looked like a little crevice that only a small child could fit inside. The journey, however was a whole lot of fun. One of the guides wanted to marry me until I told him I couldn’t cook the local food, what a turn off. I amused myself with asking silly questions such as ‘where are all the lions’ and didn’t expect the answer ‘oh! there are none here - only leopards!’ leopards!!! What! 

The cave that housed thousands of slaves....

Back in the bar for another half hour, thankyous to the chief were made and enquiries about our next destination. Noone had heard of the mushroom termite hills - even with the sign at the entrance to the town advertising them! Much denial ensued, including promises they were what we had just seen (!), finally it was decided to set off to the next town and see for ourselves.

This chief was out of town, so the second-most-important-man in the village sufficed for permission. Apparently it is the wrong season, ‘go and come when the dry season is here’. An interesting tourism approach. Reasons included ‘because of the wild animals’ and ‘you won’t be able to get there’, ‘you won’t be able to see them’, a little skeptical. Yet 2 guides came and we entered the walking track in the ‘No Fear’ (can-go-anywhere) taxi as far as possible. Thank goodness for the guides, helping navigate the walk through grass fields double my height with no tracks. In a large field with lower grass, I expected to cross it, but realised the guides were pointing to a little rock. The termite hill!! My expectation of these ‘mushroom shaped termite hills’ was big boulders THREE TIMES my size - It was up to my knee!! But it was a beautiful sunset and a nice walk; again, plenty of good chat, and our taxi driver loved posing for arty photos such as ‘a man lost in his village, thinking’ on top of the mushroom termite hills.

Children at the chief's house

The walk through the fields

The field with the mushroom hills

Amazing termite hills

Here is one of the termite hills! Can you spot it?

Milling About

 

'Man Lost'

 























The Wa-ventures continued with a reggae night at a hotel. The speakers were walls of noise, a full stage of instruments, so I expected big things. Rastas everywhere. But once it started and it was just person after person singing to a backing tape I was very disappointed. The main act finally came on at about 1am, and sang the same song over and over, and there was only a handful of people there. But it was quite the experience anyway.

 
A fantastic 2 weeks and insight into ‘growing tourism’, much more fun than being a tourist in a touristy place. The adventures will continue, I now know a little of the local language and some locals.

National Immunisation Days

27-29th October was Ghana’s National Immunisation Day (like all UN things, this has been acronymised to NID). For these three days, every child under 5 is vaccinated against Polio and given a Vitamin A supplement. Ghana is not the only country vaccinating, it is a global scheme under the World Health Organisation to eradicate Polio. There have been no cases reported in Ghana since 2008, and the country is well on its way to proclaim it has been eradicated, globally the last eradicated disease was smallpox back in 1980.

The days are an amazing feat in themselves. Volunteers from the community are equipped with a small esky, ice-packs, vaccines, marking sheets, an indelible ink pen, chalk, and targeted area maps. They set off on foot early in the morning to their specified community and literally door-knock from house to house to find every child. The polio vaccine is a 2 drop liquid dose, once orally administered, the child’s left pinky finger is marked with the ink pen and then the liquid vitamin A is given as well. This ink lasts a few days, and helps identify the children who have and have not had the vaccine during the 3 days.

My job was to monitor the reach of the volunteers in the Upper West Region. Doing spot checks in the communities, and cross checks against the paperwork submitted. We set off for a few hours drive to reach a far off district near the Burkina Faso border. We came to the Lawra local clinic to find the targeted areas and immunisation numbers for the day and if there were enough supplies. The blue Vitamin A capsules had run out, these were 1000IU (international units), for the small children. They were left with plenty of red capsules, 2000IU for the older children. The volunteers were suggesting they just use half of the red capsules for the small children, however this was not suitable as Vitamin A overdoses are serious, and this was a supervisor talking. So we advised against this method (my co-worker lectured actually, loves a good rant).

We went to a small, almost inaccessible community and looked for marked houses. Houses with a chalk ‘W4’ with a circle around it are classified as completely vaccinated houses. If it says ‘W4’ with no circle this means the volunteers have been but the vaccinations were not complete (ie. a child was not at home when the volunteers came). We entered some houses, however it was the middle of the day so everyone was out in the field somewhere. Children were at school. We found a house with plenty of elderly people, who said the volunteers had been the previous day. There was a circle around the ‘W4’. Chalking people’s walls in the name of health!

Visiting a house marked with a 'W4' to check all children actually are vaccinated

'W4' tagged house in Wa

Out in the communities

Driving past a small single room building maybe 4m x 3m, lots of children came to the door (the sound of a car is foreign, and so it is always worth a look). We drove in, and as we did lots of children scattered, running away out into the field (!) or back inside. As my colleague put it we were ‘causing some confusion’. We got out of the car and the teacher came to the door. This tiny building was a school for children all ages. No ventilation, no segregation between years/age, all jammed in together. Most of the children had the black fingernail, but we found one that had been missed. Possibly not at school yesterday.

The next school was larger, in a different community. 1 teacher came out, with his earphones in, listening to the radio. All the children in the school were milling about. We entered the classrooms looking for the children under 5’s, we came to a classroom with about 30 small children, all covered in chalk! they did not have a teacher, so they had been playing all day and now were covered in war paint and huge smiles. We were told the head teacher was away today, so school was closed. No learning, teaching or supervision. We once again found a missed child, and noted their details. This was disheartening seeing a school so useless and so many children willing to learn, well behaved and respectful of us, in their uniforms but with noone leading them or stimulation them.

We stopped along the way back to the clinic every time we saw a child. The response to us (and particularly me being white) was either intense curiosity, or complete fright. A small family was in their groundnut (peanut) field, harvesting the season. There were two small albino children helping out their father and siblings. It was amazing to see, they were freckled and out in the sun, so white, yet all African features. Their sibling came over and proclaimed his love for me. He was 6 year old! The father had known about the vaccination day, yet had taken one of his sons out to the field and therefore was not vaccinated. This child’s details too, we took.

You may wonder why we did not vaccinate the children that had been missed, it was my question too. However the vaccines come in a 20 dose vial, so opening it for one child is not effective. The volunteers will have to go back with correctly refrigerated vaccines to reach these children. I still think we could have reached 20 children in our day, however I don’t believe this is our job.

Day 2 as I was purchasing my morning staple of egg and bread at the bus stop, I witnessed a child being vaccinated by some volunteers. They were coming to hotspots like this to reach transient children, and ensure even these were vaccinated. The volunteers would return every hour here, or when they were close, to find new children.

I imagine if this was implemented in Australia. Would we get dedicated volunteers to work for 3 days straight for long hours, in the heat, walking tens of kilometers per day for free? Never. And we could never cover the entire country in this way. True, Ghana may be the size of Tasmania with the population of the entire Australia, but there are some truly remote communities and plenty of unregistered and therefore unaccounted for children.  All in all it was a great snapshot and insight into the great lengths people go to vaccinate the children of Ghana.