I got back to Accra almost two weeks ago after visiting three more entrepreneurs but I haven't had a chance to update my blog. Things have been very busy with the project as I'm getting ready to leave work in only a week and a half! Here are some highlights of what I've been up to. Keep the questions and comments coming please.

women who inspire

Over the last weeks I’ve had the chance to meet really great women who have become part of my source of inspiration and also my joy. They are beautiful, intelligent, hardworking, compassionate, strong, caring and able. I am convinced that change should and will happen because of women like them. I realize that the following short stories might jump a little here and there - but then again that is what I've been doing too so bear with me please!

Sister Pat in her store

Sister Pat was kind of like my mother for the three days I was in Assin Praso. A single mother of two, she owns a store where she sells rice, soap, canned tomato paste and other provisions. Like other women in the market, she spends the first hours of her work day taking things out of boxes and putting them into nice looking stacks and sweeping the garbage around the store so the place looks clean and organized. With her hard work she has been able to put her two kids into a good school and make a home for herself in the one room that she shares with them. She is a business woman all around and I have no doubt that her charisma will bring her great success. I admire her hard work and her total commitment to her children’s education and happiness. [And as a side note, I also admire her sense of style…]

Eunice, Patience and Victoria

These three ladies are community health nurses at the district’s only hospital in Donkokrom. Their work is to visit the surrounding communities and do a bunch of preventive health care like awareness on AIDS and pre-natal treatment for soon to be mothers. They travel in the back of motorbikes (and sometimes a boat!) with a box of vaccinations and outreach materials to help those who are too far away from the hospital or other clinics. When I asked them about what health was like in the communities, I noticed a certain frustration in their eyes. Malaria and poor nutrition continue to be the number one problem and although the health insurance scheme is making it easier for people to get the health care they need, sometimes it is too late. But they keep focused on the slow improvements and get energy from each other and the people in the communities who bring them mangoes or a pineapple every once in a while as a way to say thanks.

Women making gari

Last week I had the awesome opportunity to visit one of the communities that KITE/SEND has worked with in installing a multifunctional platform, a diesel engine that can be used to process different things including cassava. When cassava is grinded, dried and made into a flour-like product called gari, it can be stored for longer and used later in the year when food is less available and the chances of hunger are higher. Some women also sell other processed grains in the market and make more profit than if they were to sell it without any processing. Because of the platform and the support from the farmer group they belong to, the women in the community can process the cassava close to their homes instead of walking to the next town with these big plates on their heads every day during the harvest season.

Madame Cynthia outside of her kitchen

Madame Cynthia is the wife of the chief of this community, a mother of four and an admirable multitasker. Apart from doing the washing, cleaning, cooking and fetching of water from the borehole, she does grain banking which means she buys produce from other farmers and stores it in one of the four rooms of the house and then sells it in the market when the price is high. Every morning her two seamstress students come by to pick up the material and sewing machines to open up the small sewing business that she runs at the side of the road. Sometime in between her farming and all of this, she also found time to learn how to use soybeans, a crop that was recently introduced in the area, in her stew to increase the nutritional content of her dishes. Madame Cynthia also makes the most tasty yam porridge ever!

Little Hanna eating breakfast

Hanna is the smallest daughter in the chief’s house. My favorite things about Hanna are the way she looks at things full of curiosity and how she quietly takes care of other small children around her. My hope for her is that she will be able to finish school, that she will be able to defeat the drought and hunger that have threatened her parents and provide for herself and her children. In fact, my hope is that every girl her age will be able to do that too.

more e-CARE

Since the last time I wrote about the project I’ve visited three more centers each of which is unique in the way it operates and the challenges it is facing. I have really enjoyed spending time with the entrepreneurs and learning about what they are doing and the support they need and trying to wrap my head around how things work and where I can have some input.

e-CARE centers are extremely easy to spot

One of the questions I’ve been trying to answer (in a very informal way and mostly to myself of course) is what kind of benefits is the technology of these RBC’s having on people? Because I’m spending a couple of days at the centers I’ve been able to observe the kind of services clients are looking for and what the entrepreneurs are looking to provide in the future. Cell phones are BIG in Ghana even in fairly rural areas so for most of them it boils down to selling units for cell phones. Providing typing services is perhaps the second most common thing, although some are interested in providing access to the internet and even computer training.

Matilda helping a client to get phone units for his cell phone

The center in Assin Praso is owned by Mr. Francis Mensah who employs two young ladies to work on the photocopying and typing. When he first got started he was having a hard time convincing the local government that they should give him the land to put the container on because, as he told me, they didn’t see the benefits that it could bring to the community. So because he is a builder by trade and he didn’t want this to stop him from starting his business, he made a concrete slab for the container at night when no one was looking! (I don’t know if I can believe this story but if it is true then he’s my new favorite civil engineer!) His center has the only photocopier and computer in town so the typing services are being used by many people including the primary and secondary schools and the water and sanitation development board community.

Mr. Mensah outside of his e-CARE container

The last center that I went to is in Donkokrom, the district capital of the Afram Plains across the Volta Lake. Donkokrom is somewhat isolated so it is hard to get products in and out of the town - I had to take the ferry across the lake to see it! Nana Ofori, the owner, saw the need for phone units in the district and the potential for an internet café and decided to open an e-CARE center about a year ago. At the moment, the center’s major activity is selling phone units to smaller retailers that sell them at the market or bring them to smaller villages surrounding Donkokrom. Nana is looking into expanding his typing services to an internet café that could meet the increasing demand among young people and government and health workers who come from Accra and other places in Ghana to work in the district. Nana is completing a marketing degree in Accra so with the help of his faithful employee, Isaac, he manages to coordinate transportation for phone units from Accra to Donkorkrom on a regular basis. I’m inspired by his vision and the fact that even though he has lived in Accra and could perfectly make a living there he has decided to explore business opportunities in his hometown that can provide employment and also access to services like computer literacy (if he is able to get a good deal on computers and an internet connection).

Nana Ofori and me

So what else am I doing apart from going on tro-tros and filling out surveys? Part of KITE’s vision for our placement was to provide some sort of support to the centers themselves. Although I would love to repair solar panels or give an intense workshop on finances and bookkeeping, I’m definitely not knowledgeable enough to do that! Instead, I’ve been holding short computer learning sessions with the entrepreneurs and employees on skills that could be useful for them such as typing, making posters and obituaries, using the computer to do their bookkeeping, and also discussing their ideas for the future including expanding or providing different services. I realize that this is highly unsustainable but at least it gives me an idea of the kind of support that entrepreneurs could benefit from.

However, my most important role is to communicate what I see to KITE and explore solutions with the rest of the team that can be used to change the way things work at the project decision level. There are definitely some obstacles keeping the entrepreneurs from doing more and being more successful with repaying the loan. For example, the use of the solar panels needs to be reviewed because the equipment cannot run on the battery alone for extensive periods of time and most entrepreneurs are still paying electricity bills because the batteries and the wiring are not appropriate for the solar system to work properly. Also, the entrepreneurs could benefit from closer contact with the e-CARE project in terms of support needed or maintenance concerns because right now there are few interactions between the project managers and the entrepreneurs except when technical concerns arise. Doing some research into the renewable energy products that are available in the market could also help to encourage entrepreneurs to sell them at their centers. The list is pretty long! Our challenge right now though is how do we do more than submit a report of things that need to change or recommendations that may or may be not implemented? The biggest challenge is the physical distance from the office. Shyam and I are trying to figure out how to engage the e-CARE staff on discussions of the processes of looking for a solution to some of these challenge. How do we make the most productive use of our time and still gather the data from the centers? What kind of tools can we work on with KITE to ensure that the project implementation is more effective? What kinds of recommendations are actually reasonable and easy to implement?

tro tro diaries

So far I’ve spent a big chunk of my time traveling on tro-tros to and from the e-CARE centers. For the most part I find it very entertaining because there is always something interesting going on. At the stations there is a ton of people selling bread, crackers, frozen juice or yogurt, fish, fruit, water sachets and pretty much any other thing you can think of. Tro-tros don’t leave until each seat is filled and things are loaded up on the top so there’s usually some waiting involved and with the heat it can get really hot and stuffy. I like to stare out the window and wonder what it would be like to walk around with a box of bread in my head all day with that sun and whether people will need to push the tro-tro this time for it to start!

Where did all the vendors go?

There are always some interesting characters in each tro-tro ride. In two occasions we’ve had men preaching and praying for twenty minutes and collecting money at the end. One of them started his sermon tapping a man’s shoulder and saying: “You are a Christian, let’s pray” – I was impressed at everyone’s willingness to participate in this moving church service! I couldn’t understand the rest of the words except for “Aleluya”, “Praise the Lord” and “Amen!”. Then we have the people selling natural medicine, extra special pens or combos of toilet paper and toothbrush for a fantastic price you cannot find anywhere else. There’s also always someone who wants to get my phone number before he even asks my name and someone who complains to the mate because the price seems too high or his balance is incorrect. My favorite is the woman who carries a baby in her back and manages to slide through the seats with her bags and all without hurting the baby’s head. Sometimes we also have the small boy who has to stand in front of her mother for the entire journey because she doesn’t want to pay for a seat. My most memorable ride so far was sitting between a big mamma with her baby and two bags, and a young Muslim man who kept asking me whether I would marry a Muslim man and hinting at the fact that he was single and lonely…

Squeezed at the back of a tro-tro

It is pretty hard to estimate how much time it will take to get to one place to another because anything can happen in a tro-tro and the people I ask usually say things like “You’ll get there by the evening” or “around five to six” (meaning any time in between or even seven). So I usually leave early and prepare myself for arriving at whatever time the tro-tro get us there. From what I hear though I’ve been really lucky because none of the tro-tros I’ve been on has broken down in the middle of the road … yet. There was a day when I had to evacuate a tro because there was a fountain of water coming out from underneath the driver’s seat when he stopped to check what was wrong. We all agreed it was overheating and because we were close to the station we simply waited for the next one. The roads here are all pretty flat as compared to the ones in Guatemala but it still makes me a little nervous to see how many things can go on top of these cars and how fast they can go.

There’s no doubt in my mind that having a better transportation system could really benefit Ghanaians: less complications for products to get to the market, more field visits from NGOs, less accidents and an overall more enjoyable ride! The problem is how is this going to happen? Shyam suggests changing the old German cars for safer ones but I don’t know how you would even go about doing that. I’ve come across a couple of road building projects that are being managed by Chinese companies including a really tall bridge and some paving of roads but, how sustainable is it for foreign companies to be building infrastructure and at what expense? Will the worst and more remote roads be fixed at all? For now I (and everyone else I guess!) will have to continue to enjoy the bumpiness of the roads and expect the unexpected.

Ah! Mate, I will alight at the this thing.

As much as Ghanaians speak English and I can understand everything they say, there are some expressions that are exclusive to Ghanaian English and I thought I would share some of them in case you hear me using them too!

to alight – verb meaning getting off the tro-tro or any other moving vehicle

tro-tro – most popular means of transport in Ghana: usually an old European cargo vans loaded with way too many people

mate – driver’s helper in a tro-tro who yells out the window the location of the next stop and collects the money

“Ghana, here…” – used whenever a Ghanaian wants to explain how things are in Ghana

Ah! – Expression to show surprise, disgust, disagreement or disbelief and repeated many times in a sentence

You seh? – What did you say?

the this thing – same as “the thingy” in Canada and used whenever the person doesn’t remember a word and assumes you know it

to chop – to eat; chop bar is a small restaurant

small small – small amount of something; as in “I’m learning small small”

you try – most popular reply when I try saying something in the local language probably meaning “you are really bad at this but I appreciate your efforts”

pass here – can mean walk through here, keep walking or cross the street depending on the gesture

small boy – small kid who can run errings for you

are you getting me? - attached to the end of every other sentence to ensure the other person is paying attention

sorry sorry – expression to show someone cares for you even if they had nothing to do with you getting hurt, sick or lost

back from the retreat

Hi everyone! I just got back from meeting with thirteen other EWB volunteers for a mid-summer retreat and as promised I’m updating my blog with a bunch of posts and pictures! The retreat came at a very good timing for me because I was beginning to feel a little tired from moving so much and I needed some time to reflect. It was really great to hear what everyone else is working on and the people they have met and learned from. I can’t believe that half of my placement has gone by already and after this week I’m filled with energy to start the second half. I hope that I can catch you up on what I’ve been up to so keep on reading!