Stage three and the Volta region

July 3^rd, 2013, 11:40am

Before I left for Ghana, Western University require me to take a 2 day seminar on international travel.  Most of the information was pretty basic like make sure you have a passport, immunizations and some money.  One thing I did take away from it was the four stages of travel for an extended trip.  The first stage was for the first few weeks you’re in awe of your surroundings and a bit scared of your new country.  The second stage was the honeymoon phase where everything is the best and you want to move and stay forever.  The third stage which usually comes after 2 months is the hateful stage, were everything about the country is horrible and you get a bad bout of homesickness.   The fourth and final stage is acceptance and you just become part of the country you are visiting. 

One of the reasons I spend two nights a week teaching English

Before my trip to the Volta region last weekend I believe I was very much in the third stage, because everything in Ghana was driving me mad for the week before I left for Volta.  It was all I could do to stop people and tell them “That’s not how that should be done”. 

The soccer match I attended last weekend

Stage three peaked for me when I got into my first tro-tro accident on the way home from work one evening.  Our tro-tro was going down a small dirt road when we came upon a broken-down tro-tro in the middle of the road with no way to get around it.  The driver and the mate, the guy who collects the money, of the broken down tro-tro had to push it out of the way, and because we had stopped right behind them they could only push it forward, which happened to be uphill.  They both started pushing the tro-tro up the hill, but did not have enough muscle power to make it all the way to the top, and since no one was in the driver’s seat to push the brakes, the tro-tro proceeded to roll down back down the hill and crash into us.  It could have been a scene right out of a three stooges’ movie, I laughed and everyone else on the tro-tro stared to assign blame to either our driver for stopping to close, the other tro-tro for breaking down, or for the other driver and mate for not being strong enough. 

Working on the sewer treatment plant

Also Ghana is a very loud county, music is played at all hours of the day at extremely high volumes, even in shops or on the street, anywhere there is power someone will be blasting music or sometimes preaching.  The noise levels combined with the majority of things not being quite correct had me out of sorts for a week or so, but four days in the lovely Volta region have me feeling much better about Ghana now.  I have decided to go full on Ghana, no more watch, no more worrying and maybe a bit more afternoon drinking for my sanity.  As an example of my new Ghana world view, I was at immigration control on Tuesday and when I got to the front of the very long line I proceeded to have a ten minute conversation with the lady at the desk about how her weekend went, she had to attend a funeral so not that well.  If it had been in Canada I probably would have been stabbed in the back for making a line of 30 plus people wait while we had a nice chat, only to find out in the end she could not help me.  I know this because in Canada I would have been the person doing the stabbing, like in all those long Tim Horton’s line when the person gets to the front after ten minutes and goes “Let’s see now, I’m not sure what I feel like today, maybe a…”

The Volta region was very beautiful.  I stayed on the Volta River downstream from the Akosombo dam.  The dam provides sixty percent of Ghana’s electric power, the other forty percent comes from oil and gas.  Lake Volta behind the dam is the largest man made lake in the world.  I had a lot of nice seafood caught fresh from the Volta, grouper fish, shrimp and some octopus, but I don’t think that came from the river.  I had planned to go on a lake cruise for the day, but the boat they used for the cruise had burned down and would not be repaired till September.  I also did a tour of the dam, it was very interesting.  The dam is an earthen dam, which is just a giant pile of clay and rocks.  The original vision for the dam was for its power to be used to support a large aluminium industry, but that never got off the ground.  I also spent Monday, which is Republic day here in Ghana, at Botti falls which is a sacred site and was supposed to have a large traditional festival on Monday.  The falls were very nice, but the festival was aimed a school kids who were bused in for the holiday.

The Volta River

The Volta Bridge, for all the engineers

Botti falls

Crowds of people at the Botti falls festival

Akosombo dam

Work on the sewer project is continuing.  We are getting to the hardest parts of the project where the water level is very high and has been causing our trench to cave in.  We have had to work in very small sections with the water being pumped out continuously.  It is slow going but we are slowly getting there.  We have also had to extend the project, the drainage system is being extended to protect some of the northern neighbors and we have had to add a berm along the north side of the property to prevent surface water from reaching the neighbors.  Everyone on the project agrees that neither of these extensions are necessary, but the neighbors have been complaining loudly to the local government officials.  I did find out that the northern neighbors do not even own the land they live on, it is all owned by the university and they just have not taken the time or effort to force them to leave and bulldoze the homes build there.  I’m also told that the neighbors are upset because they felt that when the driveway to the sewage plant was paved, they should have also paved their road as a courtesy. 

Johnny