Nothing much today

July 8^th, 2013 4:45pm

It has been a quiet week here in Ghana.  I've not really accomplished much since I got back from last weekend’s adventure.  It has been fun watching the groups of European students on holiday pass through the hostel.  We've had several groups pass through to northern Ghana this past week. Groups from England, Scotland and a mixed bag of European have all passed through Crystal hostel this past week.  The students are very amusing.  They are pretty terrified of Ghana.  I hope when I arrived in Ghana I was not as green as the students I've seen pass through here.  This past weekend the group of kids from Scotland thought their shower was broken because they could not get any hot water.  I did not have the heart to tell them there is no hot water in Ghana.  “Auntie” says that they will learn quickly when they get up north.

                Since not much has been going on I thought I’d use this space to recount a couple of the smaller adventures I've seen here in Ghana.  The first is that we've had our first case of malaria here at the hostel, and it was ‘Auntie’ who got it.  It did not really slow her down, she says she has had malaria more times then she can count.  She did not go to the hospital, she just had her husband go and buy some medicine.  She even worked through it since the hostel has been so busy.  She did maybe do a bit less work herself and a bit more ordering around of the workers.  She even went to church on Friday night because she had to pray for an end to her sickness and that we got power.  We had a bad week of power outages, even a period of three days without power.  She also did not want the Scottish group to not have any power on their first night in Ghana.  I guess her prayers must have been answered because she is feeling much better and we've had a good three days of constant power.

“Aunties” grandson Kafui

“Aunties” grandson Sadin

                The second story happened at the school to which I go to teach English.  I was waiting outside the school for class to start last week, when a young black girl came running up to me and said in a  perfect New Zealand accent “Bloody hell it’s nice to finally see another white person.”  She was very nice and told me how her grandmother was worried she was not growing up properly in the Muslim faith and had her sent to Ghana to attend a proper Muslim school.  She could not wait to turn eighteen so she could go to America to finish her studies.

                The third story happened at our local favorite food place Trust God.  A large Ghanaian woman was not satisfied with the food she received.  She asked for her money back and they refused to return her money.  After about five minutes of very loud shouting, during which time all business had stopped she proceeded to take the bag of food she had bought, all Ghanaian take away food comes in plastic bags, and throw it as hard as she could through the service window and it hit the kitchen wall and exploded sending rice flying everywhere.  She then walked away and they again started serving customers.  As a side note we are no longer eating at Trust God as a few too many people have gotten sick eating their food.  The only problem with that is that it is by far the best meal option taste wise on our street.  There are a few other options, like Richard the chicken man, Mohammed the steak man and Mona the egg sandwich lady, since none of their business have any signs or names we just refer to them by what they do, but none are as good as Trust God.

The last story had to do with our work project.  I was sent to the Ghana survey office with the surveyor to find the location of an Accra city water main that runs near our berm project.  We got the co-ordinates for two points of the water main and got a quick look at the as-built plans.  I was told after that the head surveyor of Ghana wanted too much of a bribe to give us a copy of the plans or more than two points on the water main.  I then calculated the distance and angles for finding the two points from two control points they had given me, this did impress the people at the job site a bit.  We then set out to find the pipe from the two points we got from the head surveyor.  The main problem with finding the pipe was that the control points I started from were measured from the corner of a well, one meter out and one meter left.  This kind of control point is not very accurate and if either of the two control points is a bit off it can mess you up pretty bad when you need to go four hundred meters away.  After we marked out the first point we had the workers dig for the pipe and found nothing.  I was busy double checking all the calculations I had done while the surveyor, George, tried to find the other point.  George and the survey crew marked out the second point of the pipe and dug and this time found the pipe, everyone cheered.  If we had not found the pipe the only option would have been to spend days digging by hand a trench where we thought it was located in the hopes of finding it.

A Ghana survey monument

Berm construction

Johnny

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

Barbecue and Soccer

June 23^rd, 2013 11:20am

It is a beautiful Sunday morning here in Accra and I have power and internet for once so I decided what better to do than write a blog entry.  We are planning to go see Accra Hearts of Oak play a soccer match versus the Tema youth today at 3.  It is the last game of the season in the Ghana premier league so it should be a good game.  Accra is trying to move up to fourth place and Tema is trying to avoid relegation.

We had a barbecue for Jordan’s birthday last night.  We bought a bunch of crab for ten dollars and some fish and had vegetables and garlic bread to go with it.   It was very good, but the only problem is that as a former chef I always end up in charge of the cooking.  People don’t realize that cooking in a large professional kitchen it not the same as cooking over a small coal fire.  We managed and it turned out pretty good.  ‘Auntie’ had to help us out a couple of times when the fire kept dying on us.  At one point she grabbed the grill with her bare hand, as I saw her reach for it I yelled out a warning as you would to a child.  She just grabbed it as if it wasn't hot at all.  She then told us her first job as a young girl was as a kenke vendor.  Kenke is a fermented corn and cassava dough that is boiled in corn husks.  As a girl she would have to grab the kenke out of the boiling water bare handed, and I though year of cooking had made my hands resistant to heat, but I would not have dared to touch the hot grill.

The gang celebrating Jordan's birthday

Me and my grill

With the success of the barbecue we are thinking of starting our own grilled crab store on the street here.  We want to call it ‘Obroni & Obroni’.  Obroni means white man and gets yelled at us every time we head out.  Mostly small children yell it and then you go through a very formal “Hello, how are you today” back and forth.  I think mostly they want the opportunity to practice a bit of English, as they learn English in school but for the most part don’t speak it at home.

After the barbecue we went out to Accra’s party district, Ossu, and had a few drinks at a small bar.  On the cab ride home we got stopped by three different police check points and got searched once and had to pay two bribes.  Luckily the bribes were only 1 cedi (50 cents).

My survey assistant cutting some branches away so I could see him

The pipe installation continues

Surveying Africa

Johnny

Teaching math in Ghana

June 19^th, 2013 9:45am (delayed posting due to lack of internet again)

As work here has been going pretty slow, I've started teaching math and conversational English at a small school here in Accra every Tuesday and Thursday to keep myself busy.  I am teaching at the Ossu children’s library (http://www.osuchildrenslibraryfund.ca/), it was created by a Canadian lady named Kathy Knowles.  It was the first library she started in Ghana and she has gone on to build many more.  She is coming to visit Ghana soon and the children who hang out at the library are preparing a song and dance show for her to welcome her back to Ghana. 

The Ossu children's library

It is a lot of fun and the kids in my math class are very enthusiastic. The math students are around 16-17 years old and are trying to get ready for their big end of term exam.  I think their schooling is a very structured environment, as they stand up every time they speak and loudly shout out answers as a group when I ask a question.  The book they use for math is pretty poor, it has the theory and many examples, but if you don’t understand it has little in the way of explanation to help you out.  That has been the hardest part about teaching math is trying to explain something that I have just done so many times that I no longer think about it.  

The mosque bring constructed next to the school, where my Turkish student works and lives.

Soccer kids

My math class

The English class is for adults who want to work on their ability to speak English.  I have been surprised by the quality of their reading and writing, but their speaking lags way behind.  There are adult students from Turkey, Somalia, Ivory Coast and northern Ghana in my class.  We just sit around and talk about what they are up to and try and role play some everyday situations like going to the store to buy bread.

The entrance to the library, I believe the brick shapes are supposed to be Ghana on the left and a very poor version of Canada on the right

Work is continuing slowly on the sewage plant drainage system, we continue to run into ground water, which at this point we cannot do anything about.  There is a plan in place to pump the water out but so far we are having issues finding a suitable pump.  We also spend a day trying to buy a cement mixer, which was an adventure.  The contractor, Dieu, and I spent the day driving around looking for a cement mixer to buy, with no luck.  At the end of the day when we had given up, the surveyor, George, said he knew a guy who could get one and would even deliver it a rarity in Ghana. 

Dr. Yanful also invited us to hear him speak on the topic of Acid mine drainage.  It was a very interesting presentation, on a very interesting subject.  He talked about how you can seal in the mine waste with layers of clay and sand, which should hopefully keep it out of the environment.

Johnny

Project choices and Jazz

June 16^th, 2013

Note: I started this post Thursday, finished it Sunday and am posting it today as this is the first time I've had internet in a while.  Again Darkuman is suffering from an internet shortage, I guess it is better than a water or electricity shortage.

             I have just recovered from a head cold.  I must have caught it over last weekend.  I missed two days of work, but at the pace things move here I did not miss much.  It is very odd to catch a cold in this heat, and it really left me feeling drained.  On Monday we met with Dr. Yanful from Western, who asked how things were going.  He has also tried to get us involved in a couple of waste management problems with Zoomlion.  He has us on an e-waste recycling depot that they may be building in the future.

We had a meeting Thursday with a Spanish company who is interested in working with Zoomlion to develop e-waste recycling in Ghana.  It seems to be a long way off to me, the people in Ghana are very good at getting the most out of a product and making it last as long as possible.  I also believe that by the time an electronics product becomes e-waste in Ghana most if not all the valuable materials will have been removed.  As these materials are one of the main financial motivations behind e-waste recycling it may be very hard to implement.

I’m not sure if this is the project for me in Ghana.  I was very satisfied working on the drainage system and seeing the various aspects of project management that were involved.  The contracts and management systems are very similar to those used in Canada, which may be because all the project managers have spent significant amount of time working in America or Britain.  The other students I am here with have their hearts set on working on a design project.  I just feel that the waste management projects are in such an early stage it is closer to concept generation than a practical example of building design.  I decided to give it until the end of the week before deciding which of the projects I will finally decide to work on for the remainder of my time in Ghana.  I am sure that even if I spend most of my time on the sewage plant drainage system, there will still be plenty of opportunity to keep up to date on the design project and any interesting things that come up on that project. It may even be easier with us students split up, as keeping three students engaged at a time is pretty difficult.  

Yesterday the lady who runs that hostel was getting ready for her mother’s 85^th birthday.  She was in charge of bringing the fufu for the party.  She spent all day preparing it, in the early morning she was pealing and chopping plantains and cassava.  After cooking the plantains and cassava all day she had a pair of the local boys take here cooked plantains and cassava to the local fufu machine.  For a small fee they mash the plantains and cassava for you in a homemade machine built out of an old lawnmower engine and some wood.  This saved a ton of time and the traditional method of pounding the fufu with a large mortar and pestle is very labor intensive especially for the amount “Auntie” had prepared.

Cooking the plantains and cassava

Automated fufu pounding

Last night the whole gang from the Hostel when out to Accra’s premier jazz club for dinner and drinks.  It was the first club I've been in here that was packed and even charged a cover.  I had a pork chop for dinner, a real treat here, as you do not see a lot of pork on the menus of Ghana’s restaurants.  It was a very nice place and the headliner, Ebo Taylor, was very good. 

Club +233, +233 is Ghana's international dialing code

Poster for the Ebo Taylor concert at +233

Ebo Taylor and his band

Johnny

Weekend in Western Ghana

June 9^th, 2013 5:41pm

Today I got back from four days in the Cape Coast/Elmina area of Ghana.  It is a coastal area that is very popular with tourists and is also where the majority of the volunteers and missionaries spend their time off.   The weather on the trip was wonderful, it did not rain once, the same cannot be said for my return to Accra, it was pouring rain and we had no power.

The first night was spent in the rain forest just north of Elmina at a place called Hans Cottage.  I went on a canopy walk high up in the rain forest in Kakum National park and saw some crocodiles and a lot of birds, sadly no monkeys or elephants.  There are monkeys and elephants in the rain forest north of Elmina and sometimes you can get to see them, they do have caged ones at the zoo but that felt a bit like cheating so I decided not to bother visiting it.

The rainforest

The rainforest canopy walkway, it was very shaky and could use some much needed maintenance

A few of the many birds I saw around the rainforest

A crocodile

Elmina is a fishing town and was the first place Europeans set up a base to trade for gold and ivory.  Cape Coast was the British seat of power while they ruled the Gold Coast of Africa.  I stayed in Elmina right across from the Elmina castle (castle of St. George), it is the oldest European built building south of the Sahara.  It was built by the Portuguese to trade for gold and ivory and then it was taken over by the Dutch and used as their base for the slave trade.  After the Dutch the British took over and used it as a trading post for gold, ivory and salves.  I also visited the Elmina fort (St. Jago fort) and the Cape Coast castle.  The Cape Coast castle was the largest of the castles built for the salve trade on the west coast of Africa.  It was constructed by the British and was used as their seat of government up until 1877.  One of the best parts of the Elmina/Cape Coast area is all the outstanding fresh seafood that was available and at very reasonable prices.  I had sole, red snapper, lobster, prawns and calamari and all were exceptionally fresh and well prepared.  I also spent some time on the beaches of Elmina and Cape Coast as well as a very interesting morning at the Elmina fish market.  It was very interesting watching the fishing boats leave in the evening and the watching them all return in the morning.  As the ships return people line up along the dock and they immediately start buying and selling the fish before it has even made it to shore.  A fisherman will hold up their best catch and the buyers on shore will start yelling out their bids.  As soon as a price is settled on the fish is tossed on shore and the taken to be cleaned of cut up to be sold in smaller pieces.  As more and more ships return from the night of fishing they start docking three or four deep and people have to carry the fish across the other ships to get to the fish market all the while watching for bids and other people trying to get the ships ready to head out for another night of fishing.  

The castle at Elmina and a few of the fishing boats getting ready to head out for the night at sea

Tuna at the fish market

The bridge to Elmina which has been closed to traffic because it is falling apart and has holes in the road, so you have to walk across and pick up another taxi if you want to get to Elmina

Fishermen returning from a night at sea

The Elmina fish market on the far side of the river

The beach at Cape Coast and the castle

The fort at Elmina as seen from the Elmina castle

Cannons at the Cape Coast castle

Johnny

Work begins!

June 6^th, 2013 7:08am

After a week of waiting for supplies for the drainage system we are installing at Accra’s sewage treatment plant they finally arrived and work began on Monday.  Now that work on the project has started it is a lot more interesting, it was getting pretty boring waiting around for people to deliver the supplies. 

Pipes

Sand and gravel

I’m taking Thursday and Friday off this week to spend four days in Cape Coast checking out the old salve forts and they have a large rain forest park I’m planning on visiting.  I’m sure it will be a fun little trip.

I’m starting to feel like I’m fitting in here in Ghana, daily activities aren't a chore any more, and for the most part I can find what I need and get it without too much trouble.  I’m starting to feel like an ordinary Ghana citizen, getting up in the morning and heading off to work on the tro-tro with everyone else. 

Our current favorite lunch spot

Coconut vendor: he cuts to top off of the pointy ones and you drink the coconut water then he cuts it open and gives you the flesh in a little bag to take with you

I’ve also gotten used to some of the local food and how the small mom and pop restaurants on the side of the road work.  There are small one person restaurants along every road here, they are called chop shops and each one offers the same few items.  These are the places where most Ghanaians eat lunch and maybe dinner if they are not preparing it themselves.  You have to order by saying how much money you want to spend, and they give you the quantity of food of whatever you order equal to that value.  The choices are pretty limited you can get plain rice, fried rice, or jollof rice.  Jollof rice is a Ghana dish; it is very similar to fried rice but much spicier.  You can get a piece of grilled chicken or a tilapia fish to go with which ever rice you chose.  Other than that you can get soup, there are four types: groundnut, palm nut, light and sometimes okra.  They are all very spicy, based off a fish stock and have very mild flavour, other than the spiciness.  I have not notices any great difference between any of the types of soup, other than the okra soup has bits of seafood in it.  After you select the type of soup you want, you need to choose a starch to go in it.  There are three to pick from, fufu, banku or rice balls.  Fufu is a dense ball of dough, made from plantains and yams, that has the texture and stringiness of soft mozzarella cheese. Banku resembles and dense ball of oatmeal and is made from cassava and plantains.  All the starch options are very plain and sit in your stomach for a day, definitely not a good choice if you wish to do anything other than take a nap after lunch.  To top it all of you pick a meat to have in your soup, chicken, goat, fish or beef.  All the meats are burnt to a crisp and very tough.

An amusing thing about the chop shops I have noticed is when they show pictures of what is available they show the meat as live animals.  If they sell beef, they will show a picture of a cow and not a steak as you’d see in Canada.  They also have very amusing religious names.  One of my favorite places to eat right now is ‘Trust God’.   

Breaking ground on the drainage system

The walls of the trench started to cave in, everyone was trying to come up with a way to fix it

More work, the wooden cross is called the traveler and is used by lining it up with preset elevations and then you can tell if you've dug enough 

The pipe fitter being called into action from his afternoon nap

Another of the daily adventures is my tro-tro ride to work.  The morning ride is always a spectacle.  Monday a giant police man dragged a guy off the tro-tro and carried him by his belt, while using the poor guy’s head to clear people out of the way, and threw him in a police car.  The whole ride to Atomic junction people were talking none stop about it with many wild theories about what the guy had done and why he though escaping on a tro-tro was a good plan.  On Tuesday I was entertain for the whole ride by a man who was 77 years old and had been on his death bed in the hospital when Jesus came and saved him.  He said he was as fit as a 40 year old now and spent his days praying and sharing his testimonial with the people of Accra.  He preached, clapped and sang for the whole ride which is just under an hour.  And finally on Wednesday I was seated next to a lady and her baby and as soon as we started our trip she began to breast feed her baby, then she changed him, all the while using my lap as a change station and storage area.  She was also on her phone the whole time, she never said a word to me she just put stuff on my lap and then sat her child on my lap while she searched for things in her bag.  The tro-tro is always an exciting way to start your day.

 

Roadside towel and carpet vendor

A goat I think

Johnny