Brideau In Ghana

End of Placement Thoughts

2008-08-15T04:39:00.000-07:00

Hello again everybody!

I just finished writing my final report for EWB (wow, time flies...), and I felt that one section of it pretty much sums up my current thoughts on the West's influence in the developing world, so I've decided to pass it along for your review:

"The greatest development challenges in Northern Ghana, as I see them, are in the areas of food security, education, crop processing, unemployment, gender roles, and water and hygiene, with the overarching issues related to good governance, economic growth and general behaviour change that effect them all.

I feel that most of the problems that we see in Ghana are perpetuated by the West’s influence on them, and less on problems that are inherent in the developing world. For change to happen here, it must first happen in the West. My experiences here have led me to take on the motto of “Fewer Backpacks, More Luggage,” which involves challenging the image of the altruistic Western backpacker coming to help poor Africans. We must replace it with a view that the developing world provides a great opportunity for people from the West to partner with, and live among, their African counter parts, while creating economic growth through the establishment of business and the embracement of Africa as a great destination for tourists, without the continued proliferation of the negative stereotypes that have been created by Westerns. I feel that this approach to economic growth could have a positive effect on behaviour change, both for the West (who direly need it), and for the many Africans, who have come to expect that behaviour from the West, and will have a trickle-down effect that will have impact in almost all of the other challenges that I have listed, if only it could be combined with good governance.

Personally, I have come to dislike the idea of volunteers coming here at all. Anybody that claims they are volunteering their services for the benefit of Africans has a distorted idea of Africa, and is providing a disservice, not a service. I feel that more placements should stress the opportunity to work overseas as an internship, where you gain practical experience under the supervision and guidance of those with more experience, and as an opportunity to understand the culture and intricacies of the developing world to a depth that you never would get from reading a book. Somebody doing an internship at a radio station wouldn’t expect to change the radio industry in four months, and certainly wouldn’t go in with the mindset that they are going to help those at the radio station to do their job better - although they may be able to contribute in some ways - and I think that the same approach needs to be taken to overseas placements. I feel that things need to begin to shift away from the approach where large groups of volunteers come over to ‘help’ after receiving a small amount of general development training (or none at all), and then go home, and more toward promoting Africa as an opportunity for investment, and a place for professionals to make a real difference. Ghanaians are hungry for technology and knowledge, both of which have the potential for making serious change, and I think the West can play a large role in helping them if the right approach is taken.

I would say that before coming here I tended to criticise many areas of development, but could not come up with answers to the questions of where I fit in or what direction we need to go in, making those criticisms fall short of being constructive. After having been here - though I am very much aware of the level of unawareness still contained in many of my assertions – I feel that my stance is at the very least more justified than it was previously, and that I have vaguely formed opinions on the subject. I have also identified what I think is an area that I fit in and so now I can begin working toward that."

Finally, I'll leave you with the following question, which has asked to me by a Ghanaian friend yesterday:
If you took all of the Ghanaians, and shipped them out of the country, and replaced them with an equal number of Americans, would Ghana develop?

Have fun pondering!

-Ryan

Less Than Two Weeks

2008-08-09T07:27:00.001-07:00

Note: This post is not as long as it looks

Hey Everybody! With only a couple weeks left until I touch down in Toronto, and only one week of work left here, I’ve been pretty strapped for time lately. As a result, I haven’t been able to keep up with my usual pace of writing. Unfortunately, this won’t be a ‘typical’ post either, as I’m far behind in work due to being sick with giardiasis for five days now.

I’ll do my best to summarize the time since my last post. Here are some photo galleries that explain themselves via captions:

I attended a rally in Saboba where the presidential candidate for the NPP party gave a less-than-arousing speech: http://picasaweb.google.ca/ryan.brideau/Campaign
I nearly killed myself attempting to farm for six hours: http://picasaweb.google.ca/ryan.brideau/Farming
And most recently, I did a 5-day stay in a rural village called Zamsheigu (no, where I am now isn’t that rural. We have latrines, electricity, boreholes for water, schools, and easy access to a market. By northern Ghana standards, we’re living it up), where I picked up giardiasis: http://picasaweb.google.ca/ryan.brideau/Zamsheigu

Each of these really deserves more than a quick blurb - especially the last one - but in a few weeks you’ll probably hear me rant about each in person anyway (apologies in advance; I’ll try to limit my rants as much as possible), so this will have to due for now.

For the rest of this post, I’ll ease my conscience by posting excerpts from various e-mails that I’ve written. I’ve spent an excessive amount of time giving personal replies to e-mails, and I thought it was a shame that only one person would ever see them, so I’ve put some snippets here. There’s quite a few, but you only have to read the ones that interest you. Consider this a smorgasbord of ideas I couldn’t fit into my blog:

On believing me:

“Just as your response was an opinion based on your knowledge and experience, remember that what I say to you is merely that as well. Though I may be on the ground, this is much bigger than me and I can’t even pretend to have all the answers (if there even are any). The best anybody can really do is try, and so that’s what I do.”

On climate change:

“…while I cannot draw any exact links, just last year in Burkina Faso the waters got so high that they were on the verge of destroying a dam there. As a result, they opened up the dam, and it flooded Ghana (they had no choice really; if the dam broke, it would have resulted in the same disaster). The Oti River raised up high enough to destroy almost all the crops in the area that I’m living in right now. I’ve heard reports of people who were in Ghana, walking among rows of 6 foot stalks of corn one week, then two weeks later they were canoeing over top of the same area, where the corn stalks were 2 feet below the surface.”

On music:

At any public event there will be at least three people drumming, and church seems to double as a dance hall most Sundays, with the band playing an electric bass, a set of drums, a keyboard, and somebody singing. The curious thing is that, in Saboba at least, people have an amazing feel for rhythm, but are utterly tone-deaf. Usually you’ll have the drummer going crazy in the background while the keyboardist just does his own thing, meanwhile the bassist is just rocking out, not really paying attention to anybody else, and two singers just singing whatever they feel like, and not even trying to harmonize. Imagine if five people, each playing a different song, were put together, and that’s what it sounds like. People don’t really care though, and they dance to it anyway.

On class differences:

“This is a tough one, and I don’t have a good answer. There seems to be a difference between those who farm and those who have desk jobs. The latter tend to show off their money in public, but it’s hard to tell how much they really have. You could see them wearing nice clothes and driving a motorcycle, only to go to their home to see that they have no other possessions and live in a single 10 foot by 10 foot room. The few white people that live here make another class I suppose, as they are typically in a high position such as a priest or a doctor. There’s also a nomadic tribe here called the Fulani, which is an extremely mysterious group of people that live by themselves in the deep bush and raise cattle for people, and will often leave an area without telling anybody. I could almost classify them as Ghanaian hillbillies.”

On street vendors:

“The vendors were quite overwhelming for me at first, but I’m slowly getting used to them, and am starting to find them convenient. For example, when I’m on a bus going from Tamale to Saboba, and we make a stop in Yendi, people swarm the bus selling water, fried cheese, bread, crackers, various cooked meats, chicken balls, and just about anything else you can imagine. We don’t even need to leave the bus to buy things. When I start to think about it a bit deeper it kind of bothers me that people have to resort to this sort of thing to make a living, and at some point in the future it needs to stop if they’d like to ‘develop’ (whatever that means…), but for now it’s not really hurting anything. I actually saw an article in the paper here which talked about how there is a movement to beautify Accra, as right now it looks like a disaster zone for the most part, and the first thing they said to do was get rid of the street vendors, so I don’t think it’ll be much longer until something changes.”

On tigers:

“… there are no tigers in Africa (I know, it blew me away too…); they are actually an Asian thing! Crazy eh?”

On conditioning:

“From what I hear, most of the developing world is rather similar in terms of infrastructure, but differ in terms of degree. It worries me how accustomed I am becoming to Ghana, and sometime I have to take a step back and think about the things I am seeing, and try to imagine what I would think if I saw them in Canada. It’s crazy.”

“What surprises me the most about being here is how normal it feels. It doesn’t feel like I’m in some sort of exotic land far away from home; it just feels like I just left home and went somewhere else where things are different, and that it takes some time to adjust to them…”

On technological leap-frogging (for example, there are almost no landlines in Ghana as people went straight to cellular phones):

“Most definitely, and the cell-phone example is the first that comes to mind. I find it interesting that you say “I do think that we can save them from all the problems the "West" encountered along the way by sharing "new" technologies,” as I think that this is a major source of problems. The West was able to figure things out slowly, but surely, and the society was able to adapt to the changes as they came. They not only adapted to them at a personal level, but also in terms of infrastructure and our educational facilities. As none of these technologies were developed here, there are huge start-up costs involved with the implementation of most large projects, and the human resources needed to operate them don’t exist as the level of education hasn’t caught up with the technology yet. The result is that all the money from these technologies is essentially flowing out of the country and into the hands of international corporations that do have the means of operating them. OneTouch, the cell phone company owned by the government of Ghana, is about to have 70% of it’s shares sold to an international company because they just can’t keep up with the other international companies like Tigo or MTN. ‘Us’ saving ‘them’ from problems in this case is really more of the same ‘us’ exploiting ‘them.’”

[NOTE: Later the same day as I wrote this, I read the first chapter of Mastering the Machine, which talks about practically the same thing as predicted in the 1970's, only in a much better manner than I have.]

On Ghanaians developing Ghana:

“In Saboba at least, the people here are totally empowered and are dead set on developing Saboba themselves. It’s incredible. Just about every educated person I’ve talk to so far is getting an education for the sole reason that they want to come back home and help develop the area themselves...They understand the situation so much better than us, and many are attempting to attend foreign universities so that they can learn the concepts and way of thinking, so that they can take away what they feel will work for Ghana and apply it there themselves. I’m totally blown away.”

[As a side note, there are also a number of people here who are getting an education in development for the simple reason that it is an almost guaranteed job, and not for such altruistic reasons.]

On watching Band of Brothers with my host-brother:

“It was quite an experience to watch Band of Brothers with my host-brother. For one, as Hollywood-type movies aren’t big here, they aren’t used to seeing very realistic violence, so that seemed to be a huge shock to him. Also, during the scenes where a soldier would get injured and the others would try to save him, he would become extremely frustrated and would say things like ‘Just let him die!” “You’re going to get killed yourself!” or some other comment implying that they are idiots. This is surprising given how collective of a society Ghana has. In the end, he just described the whole set of events as pitiful.”

On civil conflict:

“Saboba was a conflict zone less than a decade ago. Tribal conflicts are vicious; guns and the whole works. Right now, there are two civil conflicts happening in Ghana, though they are with tribes that are not in my region. A little while ago I passed through a conflict zone, however, and we had to go through a number of police roadblocks. The conflict there is quite dormant now, but they police are still needed to check the importation of weapons.”

On roosters:

“…it’s so hard to convey just how much one of them can disrupt your morning unless you’ve experienced it yourself. I always found that there was a very romantic notion that surrounded being woken up by roosters; that romantic notion lasted about two days for me when I came to Ghana.”

On television:

“They only have a couple of channels, and they usually have Ghanaian versions of Western shows. For example, “The Price is Right” is called “Ur Guess is Right.” Imagine if you slashed the budget about 1000 times then replaced the crazed audience with a completely apathetic group of people and you’d basically have it. They also have a learning channel which plays constantly giving lessons on a number of different high school subjects.”

On Canadians:

“…they seem to have the opinion that they understand Canada very well, though most of the time they are totally wrong. They have a very idealistic notion of what it is like in the West. They find it extremely difficult to believe that there is such thing as poverty or homelessness in Canada, or that wealth can bring with it more problems.”

[Note that I would have been just as wrong about anything I thought of Ghana before coming here.]

On Western influence:

“Western culture is definitely much more prevalent in southern Ghana where people are more wealthy and are trying to imitate the Western styles and such, but it influences the north as well, but not as much as one might think. All the television here is Ghanaian based, and the movies that they watch are Nigerian made, so there is little direct influence from the West. The influences that they get are often channelled through things such as the clothes that the actors of the Nigerian films wear, through videos of Celion Dion or Westlife, and through hearsay and stereotypes, so often it is merely the surfaces of Western culture that they see, such as the clothes, and not much more than that. In terms of thinking, many of them want the Western conveniences, but either don’t know how to, or don’t want to, do the things that will get them to that point. Naturally, this causes a lot of problems.”

On photography:

“It’s so difficult to do. I was only able to capture Mariana[, the woman in front of the material,] because I snapped the shot as quickly as I could after asking her permission, when she was still kind of giddy about the idea of having her photo taken. As soon as she realized I was taking the photo she got really serious and so the second photo of her didn’t turn out nearly as well.”

On children:

“…it’s quite complicated, and is very hard to generalize. It differs from child to child and is also based on gender. As far as I can tell, young boys have absolutely no responsibility, and simply exist to shout things at me. The young girls, however, tend to do the cooking, water/firewood fetching, chores, and anything else that needs to be done. The place that I go to buy my Fan products actually has a little girl working there, who can’t be more than 10 years old, and I’ve seen her there days when she should be in school, which is a real shame. Gender roles here are shameful, and for that reason they are often major priorities for programs that get implemented by NGOs and other organizations. Most of the children [in Saboba] go to school, but I’m not sure how many actually stick with it. Those who live closer to the school, or who have more money, definitely have an easier time than those who don’t. Like I said, it’s complicated…”

On the appetite of Ghanaians:

“In response to your surprise about the portion sizes here, the appetite of the people is quite a curious thing, and I’m thinking it has to do with their way of life. My host-father, Samuel, is about 50-years-old, and is one of the most muscular people I have ever seen; there is hardly a bit of fat on his entire body. Given that, he needs to take in an extremely high amount of calories per day in order to sustain him during 12 hours of farming (not the kind of farming done with a tractor either; everything is done by hand). If his appetite is limited, he simply wouldn’t get through a day, and so I think his body has adjusted (that, or it is hereditary, which would explain how the children can eat so much as well). That being said, I don’t eat an extreme amount as it is, and so I think that the type of people who do indulge in the super-sized amounts of food could probably eat an equal amount as him, but it’d hardly be for the same reasons.”

On Gender:

“I find men and women rarely communicate or show any sort of affection, though on occasion I’ll see one of my host-brothers teasing my host-mother. The women tend to ‘bond’ together, though it is hard to define bond in this sense. They perform the same tasks together, at the very least. For traditional families, such as my own, the gender disparity isn’t so bad. My host-father farms manually six days a week, and it is damn hard, so I’d say the male/female roles are just about equal. Where the trouble lies is when a man from a traditional family gets a desk job, and still expects the woman to do the same traditional tasks; life becomes totally unfair for the woman.”

[In Zamsheigu, an NGO called ActionAID has succeeded in significantly changing the gender roles, so all men now help with cooking supper and doing chores. Mind you, the women still cook the first two meals of the day and still do the bulk of chores, but they are making progress. In addition, no women there attend school, and no child below the age of seven attends either, as the journey is too far to make each morning. Those who do attend, often attend sporadically.]

On sleeping:

“Sleeping is pretty rough, and for the first little while I was pretty much a pissed off zombie most mornings. I’m actually adjusting quite fast though, and am able to tune out most of the noise in the morning. This makes me think that the people that live here have simply become accustomed to it, or at the very least, that they wake up earlier and simply contribute to the noise.”

On insects:

“I was held hostage in my room last night by the biggest grasshopper on the face of the planet. The thing had a cross-section about the size of a nickel, and it wouldn’t stop jumping around my room. It ultimately rested on the curtain in front of my door, trapping me inside. Eventually I got past him and asked my host-brother for a net with which to capture him. Not understanding what I meant by net (I don’t think), Gideon came in my room, grabbed the closest thing to him – a towel – and just went crazy swinging at the creature. He managed to stun him, then picked him up with his bare hands!”

On the snack food and ‘convenience’ stores:

“The snacks are all made by the same company actually, Fan, so if a store sells Fan products, then they have a good variety. The store is more like a house, and confused the heck out of me when I first got here. You walk up to a desk that is about 20 feet in front of the house, tell them what you want (which means you have to already know what they have in stock) then they run inside, leaving their jars of money at the desk, and get you what you ask for. The process usually takes about 10 minutes and sometimes they’ll just come back out and tell you that they are out of whatever you asked for. It’s terribly inefficient.”

On aid:

“…I certainly feel your pain when it comes to almost resorting to giving personal aid just to stop the suffering you see right in front of you. It’s such a hard decision to make, but I try to see the big picture and realize that I couldn’t possibly help everybody that I come across, and that I’m here to help thing at a higher level that will allow these people to help themselves. But my god it’s a hard thing to look past…”

On goats:

“There will be more goats in the future, I promise.’

-Ryan

A Day in the Life

2008-07-15T06:02:00.000-07:00

Hey Everybody,

So far I’ve written about a number of differ topics, and talked about quite a few of my experiences, but as of yet I haven’t given you a good idea what a typical day is like here. Wait no more! Here’s the time line of a pretty typical day for myself. To see the photos that go along with the blog, since it would take me about 10x longer to post this if I put them on here, please go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/DITL

3:00 AM

The night gets cold, so the piece of fabric that I was using as a quasi-pillow must instead be used as a blanket. Unfortunately it is a foot shorter than I am, so I have to decide between having my feet or my upper body be cold. I go back to sleep struggling to find a comfortable position for my neck (I’ve managed to find one good one so far, but it makes my arms go numb, so it’s not really ideal).

3:30 AM

Those stupid, hateful roosters start crowing. Though I could never kill an animal, I seriously contemplate seeing how far I could kick one. Roosters are the devil’s spawn.

5:00 AM

I am awoken again by the call for prayers at the main mosque in Saboba. It is about a kilometre away, but the loudspeakers they have mounted on top of it that they use to call for the five daily prayers are powerful enough to wake me up in my room. I go back to sleep again, a little irritated.

6:00 AM

I am awoken for the last time by the sweet chorus of three roosters, a heard of pigs, and screaming children. I reminisce about the days where I would wake up to the gradual intro to Pink Floyd’s album “Wish You Were Here.” I usually sit up in bed for a while, planning out how I’m going to go about my morning. On occasion, I’ll just lie in bed and read for a while or do a bit of writing on my laptop. I then get dressed in my pre-work clothes, make a trip to the latrine and brush my teeth using a fraction of a small sachet of water and a cup. I dread the ice-cold bucket shower I have to take, and usually avoid it, hoping the day will be warm so that I can take a hot shower after work instead (often it is overcast and so it is just as cold at the end of the day, but it’s worth a try). I then take the time to iron all of my clothes (wrinkles are a major faux pas in Ghana), get dressed, take some pills to keep me alive and functional, and head out the door on my bike.

7:15 AM

I arrive at a breakfast place next to the large baobab tree in ‘downtown’ Saboba. I’ve been going there long enough now that when I walk in the cook just starts to make what he knows I want. I typically get him to fry a couple eggs, then take a half a loaf of bread, cut it up the middle, and fry that with the eggs as well to make an egg sandwich. I get a large Milo as well, which is like a light hot-chocolate. In total, it cost 1 Ghana cedi (~ $1).

This week, however, the egg-man mysteriously disappeared, so I’ve had to have an assorted breakfast made up of kuli-kuli (ground-nuts made into tiny, hard balls), bread, a spicy coco porridge and massa, a spongy timbit-like thing made from maize that has the flavour of sour-dough bread. For the longest time I’ve been eating mainly the same things to avoid being sick again, but I only have a few weeks left, so I’m making up for lost time.

7:45 AM

I make the short bike ride to work, sometimes picking up some 5 pesewa (~ 5 cents) water sachets along the day to keep myself hydrated. As is the custom, when I arrive at work I go to each room and greet any of my coworkers that have shown up early, and also greet the cleaning lady. When the other workers arrive, they do the same. On Mondays we have a quick meeting where we discuss the last weeks work and plan the coming weeks. After this, I sit at my desk and peck away at the work that I have been assigned until lunch time. If things are slow or I need a break, I’ll usually hop on my bike and go get a snack of cream crackers or something.

12:00 PM

When I first came to Saboba I would go to a local canteen that served either fufu (pounded yams) with soup, or rice. I didn’t really care for the fufu and the rice wasn’t the best, but the people there were nice. Eventually I started going to a place near a favourite drinking spot of mine that serves wachie, a combination of rice, beans, noodles, gari spice and a meat sauce. It’s really good, and it doesn’t make me sick like the canteen would, so it’s a new favourite of mine. Also a plus is that it costs only 50 pesewas instead of the 1 cedi I used to pay at the canteen. Once I get my food, I sit at my friend Salifu’s drinking place and am usually asked different questions about how this place differs from Canada. Every now and then something eventful will happen on the road in front of us that’s worth talking about, like when a man with a large pig strapped to the back of his bicycle crashed into a woman carrying a number of things on her head. It was the closest thing to a car accident I’ll see in Saboba I think.

2:00 PM

I head back to work and do more of the same work-related things.

5:00 PM

On the odd occasion if I have some things to get done on the Internet, I’ll quickly head to WorldVision to use their wireless. Otherwise, I’ll head home, and probably stop at a shop to pick up a FanYogo, FanChoco or FanIce (frozen yogurt, frozen chocolate milk and ice cream, respectively). If they have their Ludu board out I’ll stick around and play a couple games to pass the time. After this I’ll make the trip home and collapse on my bed for a while, then get up and do half an hour of a combination of different exercises and yoga to wake myself back up again. Following this I’ll take a bucket shower, which even if it is cold is refreshing after exercise.

The rest of the night varies from day to day, but could be spent doing anything from reading, cracking groundnuts with the family, learning to cook (they still won’t let me actually do anything yet though…I can only watch), writing, watching television or movies with my host-brother (seeing a Ghanaian’s perspective on Band of Brothers is an interesting experience), going for a bike ride, finding things to do in town, or, if I’m really tired, just sleeping.

8:00 PM

My host-mother finishes preparing a meal of tizet – a thick paste made from water and ground maize that takes the strength only an African woman can muster to make – and a soup that varies each night. The soup usually contains leaves of different forms – sometimes from the baobab tree, which creates a thick, slimy texture – a soup stock, ground hot peppers and other ingredients that vary from soup to soup. The amount they serve me is less than half what even the children get and I still can’t eat more than 3/4 of it most nights. People’s appetites here are unreal, and I’ve been told that even little girls can eat three times more than I can.

8:30 PM

By this time I’m usually tired and am getting ready for bed. Even though the time difference between New Brunswick and Ghana is only 3 hours, since people typically go to sleep and wake up with the sun to save on electricity, time is shifted an extra 2 or 3 hours. To end the night, I crawl into my mosquito net, try to find a position that doesn’t put any part of my body against the side of the net – something I still haven’t mastered even after two months – and try to go to sleep.

Weekends

Weekends are a little different for me. On Saturdays I’ll usually get up at the same time as during the week (roosters aren’t aware it’s the weekend), and I’ll go through the usual morning motions. This is usually followed by spending an hour or two doing my laundry for the week. Washing all of your clothes by hand is exhausting, and I’m seriously regretting bring the clothes from home that I did. I actually managed to forget all of my casual clothes in Canada, and only brought work clothes, but the khakis that I did bring get dirty in about five seconds and take forever to get clean. Ghanaian fabrics are much better designed for the conditions.

(Ghanaian material: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Material )

The rest of my Saturday is spent doing some combination of reading, writing, talking to people in town, getting EWB reports done, uploading photos for my blog or doing other miscellaneous activities. Saturdays are my recharge days where I take time to do all the things I feel guilty about doing during the week because they make me feel like I’m not ‘integrating hard enough.’

Sunday’s are like Saturday’s only with the occasional church-going experience thrown into the mix.

Also, every six days is market day in Saboba, where people from all the surrounding villages come to the market to sell their products. Until last week, I had been going to what I thought was the market. It turns out, it was merely the entrance to the market, and the actual market was about 200m down a dirt road. The ‘actual’ market is huge and is absolutely full of people.

So that’s a typical day put into a nut-shell for your consuming pleasure. It surprises me just how ordinary everything is becoming for me, and how what seemed like ‘experiences’ when I first got here now just seem like ordinary life. It was only while doing some of the photography for this post that I stopped to think about what I was looking at sometimes, and realized that I would be shocked if I saw the same things in Canada.

On that note, I have a quick question for you this week: did anything in this post surprise you? Better yet, are you surprised by how normal a given day for me is? I have totally lost touch with the concept of what would be surprising to an audience at home, so I would really appreciate some responses to this. While you’re at it, feel free to ask me some tough questions for once, or give me an idea of what you want photographs of.

In the meantime, take care,

-Ryan

Elephants, Trotros and Computers

2008-07-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody!

It’s been a while, eh? Don’t worry, I’m not dead, though I did get sick…again…and practically worked myself to death in the last week. It’s been a rough, but eventful week for me.

The weekend before last was our mid-summer retreat, which was held in Damongo (about the same distance West of Tamale as Saboba is East of Tamale). As much as it was nice to see the other volunteers again, it felt really weird being around a bunch of white people again.

A map with Domongo, Tamale, Yendi, Saboba and Tatale (where I ended up when I took the wrong bus) highlighted:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/General/photo#5220636929349982130

It is difficult to tell how much a place changes you when you are by yourself for so long. Having lived in Saboba without travelling to Tamale for nearly two months, Tamale seemed like a metropolis to me upon going back. The Tamale market, which consists of a Wal-Mart sized piece of land that supports a patchwork of wooden structures with rusted tin roofs, actually began to feel a bit like Wal-Mart to me. Finding anything in Saboba is a challenge, but so far I’ve managed to track down Timbits (doughnut holes for the Americans reading this), ice cream, cakes, cookies, and a man who makes sandals, belts, wallets and pillows, though it wasn’t easy to find any of these. It usually involved asking a lot of different people if they knew anybody who made anything special and then spending at least an hour tracking these people down. In comparison, buying things in Tamale was a breeze.

On the Sunday during the retreat, we had the opportunity to go to Mole National Park where, yes, I indeed saw elephants. Jealous? You should be. We spotted our first elephant when we had just barely entered the parks gates:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Mole02/photo#5218059409423896722

This one was plenty far away, but it was a taste of what was to come. Shortly after we drove into the parking lot, we got out of the Tro-tro (like a small bus) to enjoy the view. To my amazement, when we looked down the escarpment, we saw this:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Mole02/photo#5218059526700566706

The elephants had come to the watering hole for their morning bath. For the next little while we just sat on a balcony overlooking the plateau below. For the first time since being in Ghana, it actually felt like we were in the Africa I had always heard of. It was a heady feeling, made more bewildering by the fact that I couldn’t deny that, for a day at least, I was just another tourist in Mole. When you spend 7 weeks doing development work and trying to blend into a community, and then spend a day as a tourist, it’s like slamming on the breaks at 100 km/h; it does a number on your state of mind.

After this we ended up doing on a walking tour of the park. An armed guard, who comforted us by saying that he has had to use his gun many, many times led the way into down the escarpment and through the plateau.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Mole02/photo#5218061569489748722

I must admit that in some small way I was expecting to be disappointed in coming here, figuring it would be one of those tours where you walk for a couple hours staring at trees until you finally see an elephant, and then go home. To the contrary, it was anything but. I don’t think we went more than 5 minutes without seeing a wild animal, and in total we must have seen at least 15 different elephants (they all look the same, however, so my pictures don’t really do justice to how many different ones there were).

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Mole02/photo#5218064866271772098

For the full gallery, you can check out: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Mole02/

Near the end of the retreat, I began to feel illness coming on…again. You know, I should really be used to this by now, but each time it still sucks just as bad as the last time. With a pounding headache, 6 hours of travelling on dirt roads back to Saboba somehow seemed a little less than appealing. The journey was quite eventful though, which made it a bit more tolerable.

The event that stands out most for me happened just as the bus started to pull out of the station, and disturbed me quite a bit. A mentally disabled person started following along the side of the bus, yelling something in Dagbani to the passengers. His mouth was full of popcorn seeds and he looked really distressed, just yelling the same words over and over. Then, another mentally disabled person started taunting this one, which quickly escalated into a physical altercation. Something really disturbed me about how two mentally disabled people could be hitting each other while everybody else stood around laughing at them. This continued for about 15 minutes as the bus drove out of the station, with both of them following the path of the bus. In fact, at one point when I looked out my window, a third man just came out of the crowd and starting beating one of the mentally disabled people (I think he had accidentally bumped into the guy’s car). It was really messed up, but nobody else seemed the least bothered by it. Some even laughed and cheered on the man doing the beating. The treatment of those with disabilities in Ghana is still something that perplexes me. In general, people are very generous and don’t think twice about giving them food if they are hungry, but beyond that, they are seen as something to be laughed at. It’s beyond me.

Eventually the bus pulled out and began driving to Saboba. The bus driver had some form of reggae playing on the speakers, which I really liked, but forgot to ask about (he had it on loop, so I think I got sick of it by the time I got to Saboba). It quickly became apparent, though, that the driver was a psychopath. He was speeding like crazy, and trying to overtake other buses around blind corners and driving on the wrong side of the road for long stretches. Eventually the people in the bus began to stand up and shout at him (Ghanaians are much less passive-aggressive than Canadians). When we stopped in Yendi, one man rushed to the front of the bus and was just short of punching the driver. I feel that the man who ran to the front was totally justified in being angry, but this incident seemed to only enrage the already psychopathic bus driver, which made me worry about the rest of the drive. In the end, I survived unscathed, and ended up with a new story, so I’m happy with that.

The next day in Saboba, a Wednesday, was spent preparing for two days of workshops on the ICT curriculum, as I mentioned in my last post, which were given on Thursday and Friday. To summarize, as it a story worth at least 1000 words in itself, it was fraught with logistic problems – as was to be expected – but at the end of the two days we rocked it. My co-workers handled the introductions, many of the brainstorm sessions, and paired up with the teachers to assist them in their learning, while I functioned as the general director and lead facilitator. It was an incredible experience and really displayed IDC’s amazing ability at working as a team. The six teachers blew me away with their thirst for knowledge, and often had me dig deeper into topics than I ever would have expected, wanting to know all the details about how everything worked. During the free time given to them at the end of the final day, I glanced over the shoulder of one of the teachers, who had never used a computer before the previous day, to see that he had opened up MS Word and typed “The ICT training session was successfully implemented.” If I thought seeing the African wilderness was heady, this was a whole new level.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/ICT/photo#5220639145036656930

-Ryan

For the full ICT gallery, go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/ICT/

My Work

2008-06-22T08:03:00.001-07:00

One of the most frequently asked questions that I have been getting so far is, 'So, what exactly are you doing over there?' That's a fair question, and one that I should have probably answered a long time ago. So without delaying any further, in this post I'll hope to an idea of the kind of work that I am doing, how it fits into what EWB wants to accomplish, and why exactly a white-guy from Canada is doing it instead of a local Ghanaian.

Let's start with a quick history lesson. When Engineers Without Borders Canada began, the idea was that technology, if implemented correctly, would be the solution to all of the problems in the developing world. Ambitious, to say the least. Their original approach was to establish chapters in universities across the country, where each would develop a piece of technology, then try to implement it in the country of their choosing. To put it lightly, it was pretty much a disaster. After numerous failed attempts, EWB began to question its approach and look for more effective ways to help (whenever I think about this, the Canadian Heritage Moment comes to mind: 'Maybe our technology is the problem!').

Learning from past mistakes, EWB began to move away from using Western-designed technology, and more toward a partnership approach. Instead of trying to directly apply the engineering skill set to the problems they were facing, they have instead taken a much more long-term approach by strategically finding Non-Governmental Organizations that are already working in the country, but that may not be working at full potential, and using an engineering style approach in order to improve their capacity. We as volunteers are trained to approach the problems that we face in a very 'engineery' fashion, by tackling them in a systematic manner, turning large complicated problems into more manageable parts that can be tackled individually using frameworks and other tools. After developing these skills, we then hope to help develop the skill sets of those we are working with so that they can do the work they are doing better. This is hardly a one way street, however, as we end learning from them as much as we teach them, so it's a learning experience for both sides.

Before I go on, I want to make sure one very simple, but very important, point is clear: Ghanaians know Ghana better than I ever will. In coming here, I learned very quickly that not only do Ghanaians have an understanding of how Ghana needs to change that is infinitely better than my understanding, but they also are extremely passionate about making that change happen. This poses a very interesting question: what role could I possibly play here? The best answer that I have managed to come up with to that question is that, as it stands, their level of education has not been able to keep up with their passion, which is often an unfortunate reality of the developing world. My role, as I see it, is to fill in the gaps the best I can so that these people have the proper tools available to perform the tasks they wish to perform. I'll even go as far to say that from what I have seen so far, if the education continues to improve at the same rate it is now, they won't even need us for that role in 15 years or so.

The Integrated Development Centre where I work is an NGO that focuses on developing the eastern corridor of Ghana. We have a head office in Saboba, where I work, and a second branch about 3 hours south in Wulensi. In the past, IDC has worked on a variety of projects ranging from HIV/AIDS awareness, health care, food security, as well as water and sanitation and a number of other projects. It has functioned as a contracting organization, but under the new programs director, it is moving toward a new approach that combines contracted work with its own personal initiatives to ensure that work is constantly happening.

The Integrated Development Center:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba/photo#5206938834422676434

My job at the Integrated Development Centre covers a wide variety of positions, which makes it very difficult to pinpoint exactly what my job title is. As it is much easier for me to just talk about the projects I'm doing, rather than to give some sort of general overview, that is what I'll do.

One of the first self-initiatives that IDC has decided to take on is in the area of Information and Communications Technology, or to put it more simply, computers. Recently, the government has made it mandatory that schools teach their students a basic computer curriculum, and to our delight, it provided absolutely no training, funding, or equipment to do so. A quick survey of 6 schools in the area made the problem even more clear: not one of them owns a single computer; many of them don't have power; the one or two teachers that have some training, have only been taught theory and have hardly used a computer; they have no money for computers; they have no space to put computers if they had them; and overall, they basically don't even know how to begin teaching the curriculum. One of the headmasters stated that if he simply had a single computer that kids could see, and physically touch, it would benefit them greatly.

So as one of my first assignments I was given the title of project lead and had the task of coming up with a two day workshop to train a teacher from each of the 6 schools to be able to properly teach the curriculum, in both a practical and theoretical manner. As resources are extremely limited, we would have to use the available computers at IDC to do the training. If the two-day program is successful, I will then create a second three-day workshop to continue the project. Simultaneously, we are currently looking for funders to set up a computer centre in Saboba that could be used as an intermediate location for computer access, until the schools get funding and space to house computers themselves.

Another one of the projects I have helped with was the writing of a proposal for the Green Initiative. We proposed a 3-year project that aims to have a direct impact on 150 Farmer-Based Organizations (FBOs) in the Eastern Corridor of Ghana, and that has a budget of $125,000 US. Our basic idea was that we provide training, tractor services, and subsidized seeds for Soybeans, Groundnuts, and Cowpeas to a number of FBOs in three specified areas, and in return, they pay us back in seeds at the end of the growing season. In the second year, we then sell the obtained seeds to a new set of FBOs in the same area (to reduce shipping costs), having the previous farmers in the areas help with the training, as opposed to having us doing it again. In the same year, we take on three new areas, and once again provide our services, repeating the whole process once more, and making it last 3 years in total. To our delight, we found out yesterday that representatives will be coming this Tuesday from Accra to inspect our facilities, so wish us luck!

Another computer-related job of mine is my task to ensure that all of the staff at IDC are proficient in Microsoft Excel and Word, and that they can type over 30 words per minute. Within the first couple of days of arriving, I installed a touch-typing tutoring program and some MS Office curricula on each of the computers, and without even having to ask, a number of them took it up instantly. One co-worker, however, seemed to be a bit hesitant, so I prodded him a bit to challenge one of the other co-workers to see if he could pick it up faster, but he quickly declined. I couldn't seem to figure out why he seemed so hesitant, and decided to just leave it be for a while. Just over a week later, however, I came into the office to see that he had typed up a resume on Word, but noticed that it was formatted kind of strange, so I spent some time helping him get it to look right. After we were done, he informed me that until last week, he had never even touched a computer. He had been working at IDC for 8 years.

One of my co-workers, Emmanuel:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba02/photo#5211409767861698450

In between jobs, I have been given the task of training the accountant in MS Excel, and am helping to design a system that will allow him to digitize all of his records. This is a comparatively small task compared to my others, but it will go a long way in simplifying his job compared to doing everything by hand.

On top of all this, one of the fundamental problems I have been tackling so far is the general structure and functioning of the organization, which prevents them from working to their full potential. This involves putting into writing many policies that were not set-in-stone before, creating new financial documents which make it more difficult to commit fraud, making explicit minimum worker requirements such a MS Office proficiency within allotted times of working for the organization, and other things that will have an overall positive effect on the organization (I hope).

So there you have it. That is pretty much it for what I have actually done so far. In the future, I may be going to Wulensi for a time to work on Community-Based Initiatives for Food Security, which is a program where Partner Organizations (i.e. IDC) facilitate communities to determine ways in which they can best secure a source of food, and gives them a $10,000 budget with which to do the implementation.

Outside of my direct work on the ground, another one of my responsibilities as a Junior Fellow is to have an impact on the people of Canada both while I am here, and when I return home. These posts are a step in that direction, but I am always looking for new ideas. In fact, I'll just come right out and say that if you have any connections to people involved in the media, or know of any venues that would allow me to speak, I wholeheartedly invite you to send that information to me, or to put me in touch with those people. It would be greatly appreciated.

Well I hope that this has clarified for you the work that I have been doing here. As always, if you have any question at all for me, please send me a message. I always enjoy hearing from people back home (and again, my apologies to those who e-mailed me weeks ago and still haven't gotten a reply…I'm working on it, I promise).

Until next week, have a good one,

-Ryan

As always, here are a few questions. I didn't really talk about anything too deep this week so they are nothing spectacular (not that they normally are or anything…), but at least I'm trying!

1. What defines good development work?
2. Is really such thing as bad development work?
3. What benefits and what fallbacks come with Westerners trying to develop the third world?
4. For those of you who have not thought about doing development work: why? (This one is of particular importance to me, both as somebody who was once convinced all development work was bad, and as somebody who seeks to understand the difficulties involved in promoting it.)
5. On a scale from one to awesome, how much do baby goats rock? Baby goat gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/BabyGoats

My Work

2008-06-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

A Quick Glimpse at the Life

2008-06-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

Once again, thank you to everybody who is following me and especially to all of those who are sending me e-mails! I got a huge response from last weeks post, and I'll do the best I can to hit as many of those topics over the next few weeks. Like I've said before, I'm also making it a point to reply to all the e-mails I get as well, but forgive me if it takes a little long sometimes, as I only have internet access between 3 and 5 on Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes that doesn't even work, so time is a bit of a factor.

This week I'll try to give you a glimpse into my living conditions, and some of the upsides and downsides to where I live. For those of you who are eager to jump to the photos, you can check out my newest gallery at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba

So to begin, the ceremony to welcome me into the house was quite the experience for me. Well maybe experience isn't the best word for it…let's try painfully awkward. Yeah, that works.

It began with my boss Ken, my coworkers, and another man associated with IDC (whose name I unfortunately forget), walking into the compound where I would be staying (see photo below). We all sat in a circle together, with the aforementioned man playing the role of translator, as the head of the household did not speak English. He told me that traditionally, before any discussion begins, that it is custom to first drink water. Just then, I remembered what my coach had told me: that the water that they drink here comes from a tap just outside the compound, which conveniently enough for me, draws its water directly from the Oti River. So in short, if I drank the water, there would be a good chance that I would get a parasite or any other number of wonderful diseases. I got lucky this time, however, as the women had not yet fetched the water that day, and so he apologized for not having it available for me. Apology accepted.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba/photo#5206939762135612546
The compound where I am living. The open area you see serves as a general gathering area, a dining room, a living room, a place to crack groundnuts, and a bed for the majority of the family.

So there I sat, for a good half hour, while everybody around me talked in Likpakpaln, with the man giving me the odd translation, wondering what in the world is happening around me. Just as I started to wonder where all the women of the household were, one of them brought out some Maltas (sort of a vitamin-enriched beer) for us to drink. She handed one to each of us, then, in an act I can only describe as totally degrading, she knelt before each man and opened their beer for them. To everybody else there, this seemed like a perfectly natural thing to have happen; to me, not so much. There's plenty more I could say about the treatment of women at this point, but I think I'll save that topic for a future post.

Following that painful display, we made our way to my bedroom, where the men once again gathered in a circle, said a short prayer to bless the room, and welcomed me into the home as part of their family. This is when it first started to dawn on me just how different Ghanaians, and so I've heard most Africans, view the role of the family. For one, you don't have cousins, or half brothers/sisters, or any other sort of sub-designation; you simply have brothers and sisters. This isn't to say that they are just brothers and sisters in name – as far as they are concerned, they are brothers and sisters. For myself, upon coming into this household, I am not merely a guest; I am, in fact, a part of their family.

Shortly after the ceremony, everybody that had come with me left the compound, leaving me standing in my room, with not a single clue as to what to do next. My host-father tried communicating with me a few times, and I tried in return, but it seemed to be pretty much in vain. Eventually, one of my host-brothers (technically a host-uncle if you want to think of it in a western sense), Gideon, came in, and we began to talk. He is a local teacher, and has a college education, so he speaks English quite well, and has been an amazing help over the last few weeks.

The rest of the night, though not perfect, went pretty well. I had my first experience taking a bucket shower, which I've since gotten quite used to. The shower, as shown below, consists of a doorway which leads into a square mudbrick room, with a small drainage hole in the back, and large pottery vessel with water. Bathing with the sun just rising over the horizon in the morning, or under the stars at night, with a gorgeous view of the surrounding land is a great feeling, even if the water is a little cold first thing in the morning.

View of the compound, with the showers in the back:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba/photo#5206939182315027490

View from the shower #1: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba/photo#5206939504437574738

View from the shower #2:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/Saboba/photo#5206939607516789858

Things aren't always this pleasant, however. I'll admit that the first week living here made me want to quit and there were more than a couple moments where I would have been more than happy to get on a plane and go home. This was mainly as a result of the illness I experienced in the first 3 or 4 days that I was here.

To give you a feeling for what it's like to be sick here, I'll give you a here's a quick look at one of my least favorite moments overseas so far. Imagine that you are lying in bed, completely soaked in sweat from a combination of the fever you are running, and the fact that the temperature outside is actually hotter than your fever (it was about 39 degrees that day). "No problem", you think, "I'll just get something cold to drink so that it might lower my temperature a bit!" Then you realize that keeping things cold requires a refrigerator, and nobody here owns those, so warm water is the best you can do. Lucky for you, it also happens that the day is wind free and since you don't own a fan, there's not even moving air to keep you cool. "Great," you say, "my day couldn't get any better!" Then all of a sudden, your stomach starts to rumble, and you realize that you have less than a minute to get to the bathroom before things get really messy. It's a shame that the latrine is about 100m away and so you'll have to get out of your mosquito net, get fully dressed, and run down there, all the while trying to ignore the fact that your entire body aches and your head feels like it's going to explode. All the while, there is an ensemble of scream children and crowing roosters outside your window, adding to your already pounding headache and shot nerves.

Somehow, you manage to make it to the latrine. You open the door as fast as you can and turn on your flash light, only to see a dozen cockroaches scurry up the walls and past your feet. You yell an explicative and walk away from the latrine. Luckily, there's a field near by and it's quite dark out, so you'll be fine.

On the way back you fight off the urge to scream at the group of children who run after you shouting 'White man! White man! Hello! Hellooooo! White man!' When you come back to your room, you find that your host mother has laid our supper for you, which she spent the last few hours preparing for you, as she does for every meal of the day, and now you have to try to explain to her that you can't eat any of it because you are too sick to keep it down.

Wonderful!

Now I don't want you to think that this is a daily experience for me, and that I'm having a terrible time. Things have certainly gotten much better since then. The reason that I'm sharing this with you is that I felt it necessary to convey some of the factors which come in to play when it comes to something as routine as being ill. In Canada, I would have lain in bed, had all the conveniences in the world to keep me happy, and would have recovered quickly and without much help. In Ghana, you don't just 'get better.' The fact is that countless people die every day from the exact same condition that I had, because they don't have access to, or can't afford, medical help.

The next day when I went to the hospital, I was (unknowingly) walked to the front of a line of about 20 people, saw a doctor, was given a ton of medication, paid $2.50, and within a couple days I was fine. To put things in perspective, $2.50 is only 50 cents less than a days wage for a good paying job here, and there aren't too many of those to go around. I am also lucky enough to be living in the district capital, where there actually is a medical centre to go to, and to be white, which automatically grants me access to a doctor with a very short wait time. If only everybody was so lucky.

So what are people's options? Well I mentioned earlier about how closely knit the family unit is here. This idea of family extends far beyond merely referring to your cousins as brothers and sisters. In fact, if you have a job - any job - then you are not only the bread winner for your direct family, but you are also the bread winner for any relative that is still in contact with you. If your second cousin approaches you and asks for money, you are practically obligated to give it to them, even if it means you have to do without. This isn't just for illness either, it's for every possible reason one would need money. Since unemployment here is rampant, and employment insurance doesn't exist, having no job means having no money, and so your family becomes your support system instead of the government. In turn, you can expect them to do the same in you were in their situation. I haven't been able to convince myself that it's that bad of a system.

So there you have it, a quick glimpse into some of the roles of the family, the complications of illness, and the amount of privilege that many of us in the 'minority world' by virtue of the location where we were born. Keep in mind when reading this that I am hardly even scratching the surface on any of these topics. There's so much more to each of these that it would be an injustice for me to claim that I could tackle any one of them in a short piece of writing like this. Maybe in the future I'll try taking on some easier topics. I think next week I'll talk about goats.

Have a good week,

-Ryan

Some questions on my mind, and a fun activity:

1. How much is the function and organization of family dependent on the society in which it is contained?
2. In what ways will the 'development,' and movement from a subsistence to capitalistic lifestyle, affect this aspect of Ghanaians?
3. What things could we learn from the way Ghanaian families operate? What could they learn from us?

Finally, a very simple activity for the armchair adventurers among you: try a bucket shower. Go ahead, try it. Take a large bucket, fill it with cold water, get in your bathtub, and try to bathe simply by tossing water on yourself with your hands. If you want to make it even more realistic, do it with rainwater, or try it on your front lawn to get a nice view. I'm sure your neighbours won't mind.

Part 1 of ?

2008-05-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I last updated you that I feel I need to split this post into a couple parts just so that it's manageable for both of us. I want to try to bring everybody up to speed on what has been going on, and some of the experiences I've been having, so I'll try to take my time in setting the scene a bit before I go back to the development talk.

When I last updated you, I was still in Tamale, and just leaving for Saboba. Since then, it has been quite the ride. So far I've survived illness, culture shock, and taking the wrong bus and ending up in the wrong part of Ghana at night, as well as many other minor misadventures. These are all perfectly normal things to have happen, however, and you can take comfort in the fact that I'm perfectly fine at the moment, and am getting used to life here!

On a quick side note, I apologize in advance, but there will be no photos included in this update. I have not taken my camera out in about two weeks for the simple reason that I'm trying my best not to look like a tourist for the first while that I'm here. Any time that you bring a camera out, it has a huge influence on the situation and how you are viewed by the people around you. I hope you can forgive me this one time.

Now getting to business...

Driving from Tamale to Ghana is an experience in and of itself. As you enter the rural area outside of Tamale, the drive takes on a very peaceful and serene feeling as you drive through the green landscape speckled with mud huts and baobab trees. The sun set just as we were entering Yendi, which is about the halfway point between Tamale and Saboba, and with that came the light show that is the night during the rainy season in Ghana. As we left Yendi, the paved road became a dirt road, and the seat upon which I sat quickly transformed into a massage chair via the bumps in the road, and would remain as such for the rest of the ride.

The power was out in Saboba when we arrived, which is a rather common occurrence in Ghana in general. After leaving the bus, a friend of my coach, Nick, lent us an extra bicycle for us to use, which shortened the trip to Nick's place from a 30 min walk to a 5 min bike ride (which when you are carrying everything you own for the whole trip on your back, is a good thing). The bike ride was one of the most surreal moments I have experienced since arriving here. We biked down a dirt path which was carved into an open field, with only the lights of our headlamps to light the path, while all around us the sky was lighting up from storms that seemed to be occurring everywhere but where we were. The path ended at a thatched-hut village where Nick was staying, which would be my home for the night, as my place had not yet been set up.

The next day was my first day of work, which was mostly spent in a truck with my boss, Ken, driving to all the businesses and organizations in Saboba in order to meet every person of importance in the area, as is the custom here when a guest arrives (at least that is what I was told - I have no concept of what would be done if it were a Ghanaian that was coming to work instead of a Canadian). It bothered me that I could not tell the difference between things that were done for me because I was a guest, and things that were done for me because I was different, and rather privileged. After a while I stopped trying to figure it out and went with the flow, which I think was an appropriate thing to do on the first day.

On a less somber note, I got to rescue a baby goat from the bathroom at my work! The little guy seems to like to sneak into our building, and this time he ended up trapped in the bathroom and was hiding behind the toilet. When you're not expecting a small animal to be hiding behind the toilet when you go to the bathroom, it can be a bit of a surprise. Only in Ghana. I figured he would find his way out on his own at first, but a couple hours later I saw his mother outside bleating like crazy, and so I figured it was my duty to help. The little guy put up a bit of a struggle but I managed to get him outside and back to his worried mother. He managed to get back inside later but my co-worker handled him that time. Goats are a mischievous bunch...

Well, I'll continue this another time, as I have a lot to fill you in on. I'll give you a break this time and not pose any tough questions, but I would like you to answer a simple one: what would you like to hear about? I have so many things to write about that I don't even know where to start, so if you can give me some direction about what you want to hear, it would be greatly appreciated. Make a list if you want to be ambitions!

In the meantime, take care,

-Ryan

My First Week

2008-05-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Hey Everybody, sorry about the extreme lateness of this. It's quite difficult to predict when I'll have a chance to connect to the Internet here. This was written at least a week ago now, so I'll send another one in the next few days to bring you up to speed. In the meantime, here's a new-to-you update:

There is something very surreal about flying 12km above the Mediterranean Sea as the coast of the African continent slowly becomes visible in the distance. It's a moment where things start to become a little bit more real, and spending a summer in Ghana no longer feels like a commitment that is so far in the future. The Saharah desert quickly put things even more into perspective as I looked down at the dragon-shaped dunes that stretched on forever. It was such a change from the endless patch-like farms of the Netherlands.

As we flew into Ghana, the sun was setting and was quickly covered by a storm cloud that passed between the plane and the horizon. It was dark as we came into Accra, but lightning in the distance would light up the sky on occasion. For those of you unfamiliar with the climate, Ghana only has two seasons, the rainy season and the dry season, and we're just entering the rainy season, so storms are something I'll likely have to get used to.

As I stepped off the plane, the humid wind immediately hit me and my whole body was practically wet with sweat within 10 seconds. While it was dark out, it was still 30 degrees with greater than 50% humidity. According to the long-term volunteers here, we are just coming out of the hottest part of the year and things are much cooler now than they were (in fact, Mary claims that she has recently been wearing socks to bed to stay warm...). The one thing that I did not expect when I stepped off the plane was the smell of the country. It's unlike anything I've experienced before. The best way I can think to describe it is spicy strawberries with a hint of diesel fuel, and as ridiculous as that sounds, it's the only way I can think to describe it.

Once we left the airport, we hopped into vans and made our way to the Kokomele guesthouse. I've heard that Accra is supposed to feel very similar to cities is Canada, but at this point I really don't see very many similarities. While there were some big buildings and city-like things, every road seemed to be lined with people or shanties. At every stoplight, people of all ages would surround all the cars trying to sell anything that they could, and on just about every median people slept. All of this would be quickly contrasted as we passed through the rich neighbourhoods where every house was surrounded by 10-foot cement walls often topped with spikes or barbed wire. It was a bit much to take in all at once.

The state of much of the infrastructure was one of the biggest differences from what I was used to. All the roads here are lined with open sewers, which are essentially cement troughs which everything gets pumped into, and are an easy hazard for one to fall in. While in the few days that I have been here, I have learned to look past what I initially see on the surface in terms of the state of many buildings, it was very hard to do so upon my arrival. The room where I stayed in my first night, for example, had a sink next to the bed, which when you turned it on seemed to cause something to leak in the bathroom. We quickly realized, however, that what we first thought was a leak, was in fact the drain pipe of the sink being emptied out onto the floor of the shower, which in turn drained via a hole that was knocked out of the wall to outside. Whatever works, I guess.

We had to get up the next morning to catch the bus to Tamale, where our in-country training would take place (and where I currently am) so we went to bed pretty early. Since it gets dark around 6 p.m. or so here, most people go to bed pretty early in the morning and get up short after sunrise, which happens around 6 a.m.. I was woken up the next morning around 5 a.m. by the rhythmic sweeping of the women in the neighborhood as they cleaned the ground around their yard as well as a series of roosters taking turns crowing at the rising sun.

At the bus stop, we had a breakfast of various types of bread and other grains, along with some water. I am still blown away by how cheap everything is here. 500mL of water, which comes in bags and is called 'pure water' or 'sachet water' is a mere 5 pesewas, which is almost exactly 5 cents Canadian.

The concept of time is very different here than it is back home, and as a result, we were told by one of the LTOVs that the drive to Tamale would at best take 12 hours, but on average would be about 17, and in reality, could be much longer than that. At that point I just kind of accepted that I couldn't tell how long it would actually take and just tried not to think about it.

The drive was by far the biggest shock to my system yet, and there were so many moments where I stared in disbelief at what I was seeing. Just for starters, driving here is absolutely insane. The roads vary from dirt roads, to single lane roads with traffic coming from both directions at high speed, to regular highways, with pretty much no continuity among them in terms of size or quality. It became routine after a while for the bus to be passing transport trucks while oncoming traffic would drive onto the sides of the road to avoid being hit. There seems to be an overall contempt for regulations (if there are any?) when it comes to most things here. Most of the transport trucks I saw where stacked twice high and on the verge of tipping over (in fact we passed a truck which had fallen over recently, as well as two more which had rolled off the road and were simply left there). At one point I saw a transport truck which had at least 15 people on the roof of the trailer, driving down the highway. The rest of the Ghanaians on the bus with me seemed to think that this was a pretty normal thing, as nobody else said a word.

Related to this, it seems that car horns here are an unofficial language of the country, and are an integral part of the driving. They can mean anything from "Do you need a ride?" or a simple "How are you?" to "Get out of my way or I'll run you over" or just a general warning to pedestrians as you pass through a village where the roads are lined with people, at 120km/h.

I must admit that the ride was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for me. It felt to me like I was in an old cartoon where the same background keeps flashing by over and over again as the car drives down the road. The entire way to Tamale seemed to be lined with people and dilapidated buildings, and every possible stereotypical thing that I've seen on T.V.. I took very few photos along the way as I couldn't help but feel like I was on some sort of sick safari where the animals have been replaced with real people with real struggles, and where I was just a tourist snapping photos of the interesting creatures. At first I was quite shocked by everything that I saw, but after seeing so much of it, I began to feel desensitized and withdrawn, with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, wondering how I as one person could really expect to make much difference here in a lifetime, let alone 3.5 months. When I thought about it a little more deeply, I began to realize that I was experiencing the same thing that somebody watching a World Vision advertisement would. I felt pain for these people, and I wished I could help them, but at the same time I had no idea of the context, or why they were doing what they were doing and what brought them to where they were today. All I saw were snapshots of people's lives played over and over again for hours on end, with no real way to understand them or interact with them. I felt terrible.

In Tamale, I found interacting with people to be extremely difficult. While English is the 'official' national language, most people speak the local language and the English they do speak is better known as Ghana English. This basically means for the first day I had no idea what they were saying, and they had no idea what I was saying, even though we both spoke the same language. The way that we construct ideas often just doesn't translate here, and it takes a lot of retries to get an idea across, but I'm slowly catching on. Even if the idea were conveyed O.K., the words are often pronounced completely different, and so communicating often takes much more energy than one would expect.

I have found that if you respect their culture and make an attempt at speaking their language, people are extremely friendly here. At first, I found them to come across as cold, but as soon as you greet them their face lights up and they will immediately want to know everything about you. I talked to a Ghanaian I met last night named Kawsar for at least an hour, and he drove the importance of culture home to me when he said that according to Ghanaians, a person without culture is not a human being. That's a pretty strong statement. He said that when the colonists showed up an told the people of Africa that they had no culture, they could hardly have said something worse. It kind of makes you wonder if development is just about the Western world making up for one of the biggest mistakes in human history.

-Ryan, in Tamale

Some questions:

1. What role does the Western world really play in development, and what are the motivations behind it?
2. Should the development of a country be initiated from within, and not with such a direct outside influence?
3. What would happen is the West pulled out of Africa and let them develop on their own?
4. To what extent did the colonization of many African nations have on the psyche of those nations, and what are the repercussions today?

Training Over - Now for the Real Challenge

2008-05-07T23:37:00.000-07:00

Hello from Amsterdam!

What a week! I apologize for being a little bit behind in keeping everybody updated. I just finished a week in Toronto, living with 23 other volunteers in a single apartment, and spending morning to night for the last 6 days talking about development. Needless to say I'm a bit exhausted.

I'm going to try something new - I'll be sending these by e-mail as well from now on. I feel this is a better way to get discussions going and will make it easier for me to keep track of different conversations and questions being sent to me. If you don't want to be on the e-mail list, no biggie, just send me a message and I'll remove you. If you know somebody who might want to be on the list, get them to send me a message and I'd be glad to add them. In addition to just keeping you updated on what I'm doing, I really want to start a dialogue going and interact with anybody who is reading this. Each time I make an update, I'll respond to a few of the questions people ask me or incorporate the topics into the posts that I make, and propose a few of my own.

So onto the updates.

This has been an absolutely crazy week. Just to give you an idea of my schedule, here's a glimpse of it (keep in mind that most days went 1-2 hours longer than expected, and any breaks shown were usually filled with reading/homework):

A friend of mine put it best last night when he said that until this week, he always knew that poverty, development, and overseas work in general was immensely complicated, but until this week he never really understood what that meant. One interesting thing we did on the first day was to ask random people to help us define the terms poverty and development. The range of responses was astounding. It really gave me a feel for where people were in terms of their understanding of the topic. With that, I have a simple request for you: I would like you to respond to this message with a definition of what you think poverty and development is. Don't feel as though you need to get it perfect - I can assure you that that is rather impossible - but I would like everybody to try.

Lastly, as will probably be a theme, I will leave you with a few questions that I am currently pondering over. Some of these I've come up with on my own, and others I've borrowed from people that have mentioned them throughout the week.

In what ways do religion and cultural beliefs help, and in which way do they hinder, what we think of as development in the 3rd world? Is it possible for 'development' to happen without affecting their core values?
In Canada, a country which we think of as having made substantial progress in the area of gender rights, agriculture is still mainly controlled by the male population. In Ghana, roughly 70% of the economy is based off of agriculture. This leaves me with a couple questions: 1) Is it realistic to expect the same progress that has happened in Canada to happen in Ghana when so much of their livelihood is based around a patriarchal system? and 2) Is gender rights really an indication of development?

Well, I'm off for now. To see the photos I've taken so far check out my web album: http://picasaweb.google.com/ryan.brideau/JFTraining I actually have more than this but unfortunately I packed my cable in my other bag...I'll get them up as soon as I can. In the meantime, I wish you all the best, and I'll keep you all updated!

-Ryan

And so it begins!

2008-04-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

By tomorrow afternoon I will find myself in Toronto, and will be beginning the first of 7 days of training before flying to Ghana. I often wondered about how I would be feeling at this point in the months leading up to this. At best I figured I would be some sort of combination of scared and panicked. Scared because it's impossible for one to have any sort of grasp of what they are walking into until they are there, and panicked because I thought I would be nowhere near mentally prepared enough by this point. Truthfully, I am neither. I get the impression that my subconscious is screaming wildly, as every now and then I'll develop a nervous eye twitch which will last a few minutes, but outwardly, I'm quite calm. I'm actually quite surprised to be honest.

Since school ended I've had nearly a week to myself at home. This has provided me with two main resources: 1) A lot of time to think about what I'm doing, and 2) a lot of time away from people in EWB. These two things coupled have allowed me to gain a bit more insight into the ways in which those not directly involved in international development view the field. For this reason I've decided to write this blog in such a way as to allow somebody with no knowledge of development to learn something each time they read a post of mine. I will still do my best to keep the interest of those with experience abroad, or who have a vast knowledge of development, but for the most part, I will be focusing my writing to those with little to no experience, as I feel they are in the majority.

With that being said, I'll finish off this entry with a response to some of the mostly commonly proposed statements and questions I've received from people in the last week, and also some other little tidbits I think most people should know before they continue to read my posts:

1. Oh, so you're going to Guyana, that's amazing!

Close! I'm actually going to Ghana, and while it is only one letter in difference in terms of spelling, it is rather different in just about every other way, and is on a completely different continent. Ghana is located in western Africa, bordered to the South by the Gulf of Guinea (for more specific information about Saboba, where I'll be staying, see my last entry):

2. How many people are you going with?

Such a seemingly simple question actually requires a longer response than should really be necessary. In total there are about 40 people nation wide that will be going to one of the four countries that EWB does work in: Ghana, Burkina Faso, Malawi and Zambia. Of these, roughly 22 will be going to Ghana with me, but none will accompanying me to my specific district.

This is usually followed by:

3. *GASP* You're going to be alone, in Africa!?!?!

Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Nick Jimenez, a long-term volunteer (which basically means they spend four times as long as me training, and stay a minimum of 1 year overseas), will also be in my area, which makes things a little better. I'll also be surrounded by a ton of incredibly welcoming Ghanians, and according to GhanaWeb.com, "If gold medals were given to the worlds friendliest peoples, Ghanaians would definitely be semifinalists." It's hard to argue with that.

4. So where are you going to live?

Luckily enough, part of the $6500 that was needed to send me to Ghana will be spent on a 5-star resort which will be my home for the 3.5 months that I'm in the country - the rest of the money we swindle from tax-payers. Only by living in a 5-star resort can one really see the contrast between the rich and poor in the third world.

*Kidding!*

As of right now I actually have no idea where I'll be living, more than to say it will be with a host family in the area that I'm working. When I was first told that I was to be going overseas, one of the first questions I had was where I would be living and how it would be set-up. The past volunteers just kept telling me not to worry and that things would be worked out once I got there, which was less than reassuring. Since then I've learned to just accept the fact that things are much different there. As a stranger, one could literally go door to door and ask people if they would mind letting them stay with them for a few months and they would welcome the person in like family. It's hard to imagine that happening in Canada, as friendly as we claim to be.

5. That's great that you're going to Africa. [I/my friend/my third cousin twice removed] is sponsoring a child from there!

While in many cases I would be very tempted to start a rant at this point, I typically hold myself back so as not to come across as arrogant. Development and poverty are so complicated that for all intents and purposes, it's impossible to have a firm stance on any question or problem regarding the two. This isn't to say that one can't try, but if they don't realize the error of their ways, they can be certain that everybody else around them will.

Without going to far on this tangent, a common trend in development is to look back 10-15 years and say that everything that was being done then was completely wrong and that we messed everything up, leaving them worse off than they were. This leaves us with a rather simple question: is what we're doing at this very moment any better? We like to think so, but we'd probably be wrong, and we can almost certainly count on people 10-15 years in the future looking back at us as learning examples of what not to do.

Now back to the original question. There are two things that bother me about the statement, one of which is clearly more significant, but both of which are related.

The first one is the fact that Africa is more often than not referred to as a single entity, without any regard for the vast culture difference that can exist between neighbouring countries, or even within a single country. Ethnologue lists Ghana alone as having 79 different languages. Any attempt at simplifying the numerous countries in Africa into a single whole inspires the thinking that one can solve all their problems in the same way, which couldn't be further from the truth. Heck, trying to solve a single countries problems would likely fail if one thought they could apply the same solution to the entire country.

The second, and much more obvious, issue I have with that statement is the idea that a 'dollar a day' could end poverty. It really doesn't matter if it's $1 a day, or $100, it's not going to fix poverty. Things are so much more complicated than any world vision advertisement is going to want you to believe. I could go into how aid money is used by the governments of many countries to use as a political tool, how most of it will never reach the people, how even if it does, there's a good chance it isn't spent correctly, how food-aid undercuts local farmers and contributes to the destruction of the economy, and all the other issues surrounding aid, but that would make this post much longer than it already is. I'll probably touch on these issues more in the future, but in the meantime, I recommend the following two links to fill you in on some of the details:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfobLjsj230

http://www.netnomad.com/might.html

Now keep in mind that neither of these tells the whole story, and in fact, reading everything available on the topic will not give you the whole story. At the very least, these provide you with a side of things that most people are completely oblivious to, and hopefully will make you think more critically in the future.

Well, it's getting late, and I have to be up early to catch a flight. Hopefully this post gave you some more insight and will have you asking a few questions. Discussion is always a good thing. I hope everybody summer is off to a good start, and I'll be sure to continue to update you as soon as I can!

Godspeed,
-Ryan

The Situation in Saboba

2008-04-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

Ask and you shall receive, they say. Well I asked, and I certainly received.

My placement for the summer will take place in the Saboba district of Ghana. Before I get into any of the details about what I'll be doing there, I'll fill you in on the area in which I'll be working, so as to add some context to the work. (As a side note, keep in mind that none of this is 100% yet. My placement is subject to change at any time, and this is merely what it currently entails.)

I'll be taking most of my stats from Nick Jimenez's blog, www.nickinghana.blogspot.com, as he's currently working in that area and will be my coach overseas, so to see things from another perspective, I encourage you to take a look as his writings as well.

The Saboba district is located in the North-East of Ghana, in the Northern province. It is bordered on the east side by the Oti river, which serves as a natural border between the neighbouring country Togo. The district is mostly rural, with 97% of it's 110,000 residents living outside of the capital. During the rainy season, which will be starting shortly after I arrive, the already imperfect system of roads which network the area will become impassible due to flooding, completely isolating those in the rural areas.

Education in Saboba is a situation all of its own. Children do not go to school until they are 9 years old, as that is when they are old enough to make the journey on their own. As it is often quite a task to get to the schools, families tend to send their male children over their female children. Females that do go to school are often pulled out once they hit puberty to stay at home as the teen pregnancy rate is quite high, and this makes it easier to keep an eye on them. Combine these issues with a 55 to 1 student to primary school teacher ratio, the fact that 56% of teachers aren't trained, that the price of school increases as one rises in level, that children are pulled out of school to work if the family experiences a setback (which are quite prevalent due to illness and the nature of their subsistence lifestyle), and the 87.7% illiteracy rate among females, and the 80% illiteracy rate among males isn't such a surprise.

The Saboba district has an unbelievably young population, with 46.2% of the population under the age of 15. As a Canadian, one might strongly object to people of this age being set to work - in fact, it's illegal. But in Saboba, there are often few alternatives. If the father becomes injured and cannot tend the fields, who will? Even worse, if the main providor in the family passes away, not only does the family lose its main source of income, they lose a role model, and have to absorb the expenses associated with the funeral and burial costs? When these things happen, who is in any position to say that children should be in school, and not working at home? When it comes to development, things are anything but straightforward.

So where do I fit into all of this? Well, according to my placement description, I'll be working for the Integrated Development Centre (IDC), and organization whose main activities involve food security, good governance and human rights, and peace building and conflict resolution. Specifically, I'll be working in the capital, Saboba, and will be participating in the areas of food security, child rights in the area of civic awareness, and promotion of personal and community hygiene and sanitation.

When asked about my expectations for my placement, I has said that I wished to be placed in a location that would allow me to see first hand the realities of those living in poverty. Well, it seems my wish has come true.

-Ryan (in Canada, but starting to feel the realities)

Questions on my mind:

As a privileged white male, coming into an area with tremendously high illiteracy rate, where only those who could afford schooling can speak English, and where 97% of the population is isolated for half the year, and where children are needed to work to support their families, if spreading civic awareness on child rights was even possible to achieve, would it be appropriate given their circumstances?
Should I even be questioning the tasks I've been given? Seeing as I understand the situation far less those those who assigned it to me, maybe it's best that I just shut my brain off for a while and just do as they say.
How am I going to handle trying to learn a new language and how much of impediment to developing relationships will not speaking their language be?
Besides learning the language, how else can I lessen the barriers that will prevent me from experiencing the true culture of Ghana?

T-Minus 24 Days until Toronto

2008-04-06T10:27:00.001-07:00

Well I figured I would finally get the ball rolling and make my first post on here. As most of you probably already know from reading the title of this page, I'll be heading to Ghana in just a few weeks with EWB to do some volunteer work. The exact details of what exactly I'll be doing are still a mystery at the moment, however. Not to fret though, some of the other Junior Fellows have been receiving details about their placements lately so it shouldn't be too much longer for me!

Preparing for this has been quite the experience for me. I've spent the last few months doing pre-departure training to help prepare me mentally for what I'm entering into, as well as ensuring that I have a foundation of knowledge on the issues surrounding development, in hopes that this will result in me being a more effective volunteer. This has involved me doing plenty of readings, assignments, meetings with past volunteers, meetings with people from Ghana, as well as creating a personal development plan and an assortment of other things. What originally came across as standard readings and tasks to get done has since fundamentally altered the way that I view the world, and has left me questioning aspects of myself which I previously accepted unchallenged. While I've made a lot of progress over the last little while, new insights into who I am and where I need to be have been arising at a faster and faster pace, so I still feel I have a long way to go in the next three and a half weeks.

As time goes on I'll keep you all updated on my goings on, so make sure to come back and visit often! Also, don't forget to leave me comments; I want to get feedback from as many people as possible, especially when I'm overseas. If I don't hear from you often, you can expect a snarky e-mail from me, and nobody wants to get one of those (it'll be so packed full of snark you won't know what hit you).

Anyways, I'm off. Godspeed,

-Ryan (still in Canada)

P.S. If I ever go acronym crazy on you and you have no idea what I'm saying, check the little glossary to the left. It should clear things up.