A Day With A Camera

Before I start with the photos of the day, I have a photo of the human rights group I am working with.  The photo was taken to mark the last days of the 4 people in the back row center before flying home to Australia and Italy.

On Tuesday, February 25th, I was again suppose to hold my first training for mediators at the community center in Old Fadama slum.  However, it had rained heavily overnight.  It rained so hard I cold not sleep as the noise was louder than the ceiling fan.  I went to the community center but the people to be trained could not attend due to the rain.  The slum has dirt roads without any drainage and many of the buildings in the slum are built so that you step down into the rooms, below street level, and then there are leaks.  An unexpected rain creates havoc for so many people.  My walk to the community center required a lot of puddle hopping and walking on edges of buildings to avoid the bigger puddles.

On Wednesday, I returned to Old Fadama and the first training went well.  In fact I covered my entire talk in little over 2 hours.  It's 4 men, a mechanic, a fashion designer who makes clothes for sale, a weaver who makes the colorful cloth, and a scrap dealer - he collects all kinds of metal and brings them to the port to be shipped out.  The next lesson I plan to cover a number of fact patterns I expect they will see in the mediations and include some basic law as well.

So here are some photos from the slum on Wednesday.  The puddles are the remnants from Tuesday.

Yes that is a goat.  There is a small herd that wanders through the slum eating what ti can.

That's me in the white shirt.  

The community center.  The home of FLAP - Fadama Legal Assistance Program

This is the view from the door of FLAP.

There is a professional soccer league in Ghana and on Wednesday afternoon we attended a game between the Accra Hearts of Oak (best team name) versus the Cape Coast Dwarves (worst team name).

Games are not well attended

Look closely at the sign.  It's next to the ticket booth and they are selling insurance for in case you are injured while watching the game.  I hear it can get crazy when the national team plays.

The stadium is next to Independence Square and I walked with two others past the square on the way to the two-tro station called Tema Station.  The black start is an important symbol here is on the center of the flag.  It stands for a pan-africa ideal.

Two shots of the "High Court".  There are other courts in more modern buildings and two blocks away, a large brick building is being renovated to be the new home for the High Court.  This is where more serious trial matters are heard, similar to Superior Court back home.

This is the sign outside the High Court and the same sigh is outside the complex that holds a number of other courts including the Supreme Court.  "Justice is NOT for sale!"

From the courthouse, it is just a block to Tema station, which covers a few city blocks and is where the tro-tro routes start and end for this section of the city.  The station has a market in an among the tro-tros selling to the people coming through the station.  There are so many people that I never felt comfortable trying to set up a shot, so these are all grab shots and I apologize for the haphazard look.  There are other organized large markets in the city.  This one is here because so the people are here, similar to "Circle" that I described before.  These pictures are better the bigger you can enlarge them.

I am standing in line waiting for my tro ($0.40 to go across town).  I took this shot because the green building is a mosque serving the station.  This a strongly christian country (cabs and tro-tros often have sermons loudly playing)  with mosques interspersed throughout Accra and in small towns.  I see men dressed in robes and knitted caps and women in a style of head scarves that covers their heads and shoulders.  I am not aware of any tension between the christians and moslems.

I got to take this picture of people because no one was paying attention to me.  It's a huge pile of "costume" jewelry and the bags to the left are filled with more.  I assume these started as donations from western countries.  Please enlarge this one.

Water and electricity (with photos!)

Below is a picture showing how most people here consume water.  It’s called a sachet (pronounced “sa-shay”).  They are sold all over the city by headporters for 10 peswa’s ($0.04), mainly through the windows of cars and tro-tro’s.  Water sold in sachets is always safe to drink. In my house and office, there is always an open bundle of sachets in the refrigerator and many more stored away.  My guess is that the sachet uses the least amount of plastic and thus costs the least in a place where everyone wants access to cheap drinking water.

You simply bite one corner of the sachet and make a hole with your teeth and then suck out the water.  Or, you can avoid sucking and just squeeze it with your hand.  Unfortunately, Ghana is littered with empty sachets.

 

Note the piles of dirty dishes next to the outdoor tap in background - due to no water for 6 straight days

In Accra, most ”houses” have access to water.  In contrast, in Old Fadama slum (where there are no real houses), people rely on business to supply them with all their daily water.  People go to these places to pay to fill up containers of water to carry home and to use toilets and showers for a small fee.  I pass one of these when I go there and you pay 30 pesewas ($0.40) to use a toilet and 10 pesewas to use a urinal ($0.04).

A lot of houses have a single tap and then use buckets for kitchen use, showering or flushing the toilet.  Water does not run in the city all the time, or everywhere at the same time, so homes have all manner of water storage, from barrels to black “polytanks” that range from small to gargantuan.  Nicer homes have the tank elevated on the roof or a concrete tower, thereby creating water pressure for the pipes leading to kitchen and bathrooms, etc.  As a result of this system, whenever the water does run, everyone is re-filling their tanks and barrels at the same time, which create a huge draw on the water system. 

At my office, the water only runs on weekends and they have a man whose job it is to have the tanks filled on weekends.  My house has just 2 barrels because the water generally does not shut off for more than 24 hours.  Except that last week, the water shut off on Monday night and came back on Sunday.  The barrels ran out in 3 days.  We started using sachets to fill buckets to flush toilets and take showers.  Dirty clothes piled up along with dirty dishes.

Electricity is more regular, although we do get infrequent rolling black outs that generally last a few hours.  It’s bad at night because the fans stop and it’s too hot to sleep well without a fan.

My house has compact fluorescent light bulbs everywhere and no appliances, except for the refrigerator, a TV that is not used very much, and a few computers and phones to be charged.   One of the sons was telling me that they could afford more appliances but not the electricity to run them.  The little electricity they actually use costs on average 35 cedi’s (about $15) a week.  That’s a little more than $60 a month for very low wattage usage.  Less than what I pay a month for my house full of gadgets and appliances.  Imagine a house full of appliances here. 

Electricity is pay as you go.  When you hit the limit for what you paid, it turns off and then you have to go to your local electric company office and pay for more usage.  I went one evening after work with one of the son’s who feared the electricity would get turned off that night.  To his surprise, a lot of people were paying that night and we stood in line for 2 hours.  It amazes me how much Ghanaians put up with without complaining.  It is as if they do not expect more of their government services.

I have a few pictures of my house - exterior and interior

View from inside the gate and wall - two houses, one on left for host family, one on right for tenants

Kitchen of my house, most meals are cooked here.  The stove is the table top burners at far left.  There is no oven.  The sink is small, below the window.

Dining room/living room.  I eat my meals here.

Hallway with 4 rooms, leading to living room and then kitchen.  My room is to immediate left.  I live alone and another volunteer is in another room and a student from Gabon lives in a third room.

My room.  I usually straighten up before I leave in morning and it gets messy fast because there is little storage space.

A school visit

Today (2/21/14) was an interesting day.  Three volunteers (including me) and a projects abroad worker traveled to Teme by tro-tro, which is the big port for Ghana.  The road follows the shore from Accra to the east and you can see ships offshore waiting to unload containers or leaving.  As you get into the city, you see areas crammed with containers.  For a few miles, you can see the shore has numerous cranes for unloading ships and along the road their are holding areas for thousands of containers.  The roads is lined with trucks waiting to haul away the containers and there are more lots filled with trucks.  After the port, we leave the tro-tro to get into a cab (the tro-tro ends in Teme).  We drove past some fish canneries and then the buildings begin to thin out as the road runs along slum neighborhoods that stretch to the shore.  Looking down to the water you just see low roofs with lots of home made aerials on poles about 20 feet up.  

We then got onto a dirt road that followed closer to the shore and we start seeing huge stacks of wood along the road and smell smoked fish for the next few miles, until the cab drops us off at what seems to be the end of the road.  A phone call is made by the projects abroad person and a man quickly appears who walks us up a road to a small school behind a white concrete wall.  The school is made of cinder block with no other finish to the walls, the floors are rough concrete and there are no screens or windows, it's all open to the outside air.  The roof is corrugated metal.  Kids are moving around in the school and it all seems orderly.  It is a "basic" school, or what we call a primary or elementary school.

For the last one hundred yards approaching the school a man follows us.  His legs are thin and useless and he walks with flip-flops on both hand and uses his knees for balance as he pulls himself forward.  His knees are worn tough, like feet, and the ground he walks on is red dirt and stones.  This man follows us into the schoolyard and enters a small room at the end of the building and asks us to come in.  I never got properly introduced to him but he is instructing people to bring in chairs and after greeting us he introduces us to his secretary.  I found out later that he is the founder/owner of the school and, I assume, the headmaster.  (I also later learn that the man who met us where the cab dropped us is a contact person for Projects Abroad who arranges for us to get into the schools and make presentations.) 

We talk about why we are there and the headmaster then brings us to an empty classroom.  It looks like two separate classrooms, but missing a wall between them.  At each end are blackboards so the two classes face away from each other.  About 15 teachers come in and sit in rows and we sit up front facing them.  The talk is on alternatives to using the cane for discipline.  We saw a cane on the headmaster’s desk in his office and saw some teachers carrying canes.  There two canes sitting on a table not far from our seats.  They are thin round pieces of wood, some thinner than others, and are slightly flexible for a better lashing.  

We make our presentation, with each volunteer taking turns to speak until all topics are covered.  I think we did a good job.  Then it came time for the teachers to ask us questions and get a discussion going.  We responded to a few general questions and then I said I have a question for them.  I asked, “What do you do if a student answers a question incorrectly?”  The answer came quickly, “We cane them.”  This led to a good discussion.  I asked why they cane and one said it is because the child “refused to learn”.  So this got us into a really interesting discussion that was great to be part of.  I introduced the idea that the child may not have understood the lesson the first time and needs the teacher to re-expalin and review.  I believe we made a dent on a number of the teachers, who started to nod as we explained this and how children imitate their teachers and learn that violence is a solution to problems and about the difficulty of learning if you are scared, etc.  The headmaster, who at first seemed to be asking questions to challenge us (i.e., he asked us to explain why when they used to lash kids more those kids were better with their lessons), ended up telling the teachers that no one is to cane a child unless it is under supervision of his office, with 3 lashes maximum ( I previously asked and was told that they give up to 6 lashes).  Lashes are generally on an open palm or backside.  The headmaster's comments were primarily motivated by a concern than a teacher would hurt a student and jeopardize the school, but he did add that caning was to be the last form of punishment, only to be used if all else fails (something we emphasized).  I later learned that there is a rule that teachers may only give 3 lashes maximum.

We also discussed the role of positive reinforcement and rewards to get kids to learn and behave, but none of the teachers followed up on that.  I hope we do this again, as I got a better sense of things and can tailor it better to the group.

My sense of the teachers was that they did not understand how children learn.  They simply relied on the cane to motivate students and expected it to work.  (Back at my house I asked one of the sons about caning and he said he was hit in school - a lot.  He spoke about being afraid and intimidated in school by the teachers.  He strongly opposes caning.) 

As we left the school, I asked permission to take some photos and you can see them here.  I think they are self-explanatory.  The school is small – about 5 or 6 rooms.   The schoolyard is the space inside the wall, and is all red dirt.  I don’t know if it has a bathroom, as I did not see one.  While we spoke, I could see a young boy peeing against the wall on the far side of the school yard and then walking back to his class while tucking in his shirt.  It seemed to be the normal thing to do there.

This shows the room we held our presentation in.  It's all one big room.

This photos shows almost the entire school.  There is one classroom to my left and the office behind me.

The wood posts are where you would expect to see a wall to divide the classrooms.

View from the road.  The pile in the school yard is construction rubble.

After we leave, we make a long walk back in the noon day sun on one of the hottest days yet to where we can find a cab.  I had already sweat through my dress shirt during the presentation, back and front (water was provided at the school).  As we walked, we found a man selling “fan milk”, a cheap ice cream product.  It felt so good to have a frozen treat.  You suck it out of a plastic sachet and while it's quickly softening and melting inside.

My last pictures are of the fan milk man, the piles of wood we see along the road for smoking fish, and the cab we left in.  This is a fishing region and without refrigeration, smoking is how they preserve fish.  I see smoked fish stacked in the stalls around Accra.  

The fan milk guys blow an old bicycle horn to get business.  You see them all over Accra, as well.

The cab back to the two-tro station in Teme.

Kokrobite - weekend #3

Just completed weekend number 3.  This time I travelled with a about a dozen volunteers to Kokrobite, a small beach community about one hour from downtown Accra by drop-taxi.  The total fare was 25 cedi’s ($10.00), door to door.   Drop-taxis are cabs you flag down and they will take you anywhere you want to go.  Before you get in, you ask the driver how much he will charge.  This is just the starting point for a brief negotiation and once the price is settled, you get in.  Usually the range of negotiations is 5 cedi’s ($2.00) or less, and rarely the range is bigger, maybe 10 cedi’s ($4.00).  It is intimidating at first because I often don’t know what the price should be and I don’t want to be taken advantage of.  After a number of cab rides, I’ve figured out a system out.  If I don’t know what the fare should be. I just cut the opening price by 5 or 10 cedi’s, depending on how high the driver starts.  (I’ve never been quoted over 25 cedi’s).  I then see where negotiations take us.  If I think the driver is sticking to a price that is too high, I walk away.  The driver will then either lower the price or drive away.  This way I figure I either get a better price or I now know how much to pay the next driver.   Before I leave this topic, the other kind of taxi is a shared taxi, which drives a designated route and charges a set rate.  They pick-up and drop-off people as they go.  A compact car holds 4 passengers and the wagons (look like a Subaru wagon, smaller than a Volvo wagon, and holds 7 passengers – these can be torturously snug and hot when full).  Shared cabs are usually a lot more comfortable than tro-tro’s and they charge a little more.  Drop taxis are most expensive.  With a shared taxi’s I can go most anywhere for just  $.40 to $1.50.

Around Accra, and the surrounding cities, I have noticed that generally the neighborhoods closest to the  ocean are the poorest.  It may be because fish is preserved by smoking and it is smelly and the hills appear to have nicer neighborhoods.  If the main road runs close to the shore, you can see communities made of a continuous jumble of homemade huts running all the way down to the ocean.  To get to Kokrobite, we followed a main road out of Accra heading west for about 30 minutes and then turned off on a road that heads about 3 miles down to the ocean.  The closer we get, the neighborhoods get poorer and poorer.  We then turn off onto another road takes us all the way to the ocean and the community is concrete homes with space between them.  The road then turns parallel to the shore so that one side of the road runs along beach front property.  It’s a cute little area of guesthouses on both sides of the road no longer than one city block.  This is Kokobrite, or at least the one part of it.

We stayed at “The Dream”, a small blue hotel with little "cabins" on the property situated across the street from the ocean.  Price was  20 cedis ($8.00) per person for a little cabin with 3 beds and a bathroom.  Most volunteers bought their meals at a stall on the street across from the hotel that has a window facing the street.  The stall has a sign, “The Rice Master”.  The volunteers love this food - basically hamburgers, fries, fried rice, fried noodles or fried chicken.  I was told the burger was the best in Ghana, so I  bought one.  Very mediocre with a flat tasteless patty of meat.  Next morning I went to a different hotel for a great breakfast where I ate my first bowl of muesli (close to granola), as well as drank my first cup of brewed coffee since coming to Ghana.  Unfortunately, milk here is still either powdered, evaporated or condensed.

The Dream hotel has a path across the road to the ocean and the beach is beautiful.  Long and seemingly endless in one direction and ending at a rocky point in the other direction.  There are a large of number of long fishing boats painted in bold (faded) colors along the beach, with a lot of men working on boats or fishing nets.  I never got to see any real action with the boats.  I saw one boat come in and another go out, but no hauls of fish.  My guess is that the weekend is for repairing and mending.  But there was fish around.  My favorite was the woman who sat in front of our hotel and boiled these big prawns, which they call lobster.  They have a girl carry a platter of them on her head with a bowl of hot dipping sauce.  One cedi ($.40) per "lobster".  You pull off he heads and you are left with what looks, and tastes, like a small lobster tail.

Happily, the beach and water was far cleaner than last week.   Big rolling waves on both days that were fun to play in.  Where the path to the beach ends, there is a little bar, like a long bamboo porch with tables one row deep so everyone is right on the beach.  I sat there with some guys on Sunday and had fresh squeezed pineapple juice that was amazing.

It’s hard to believe we were so close to Accra.  Lots of little boys played naked on the beach while lots of people hung around the boats working or gossiping, or ran little concessions selling food, clothing and crafts.  The tourists were certainly outnumbered by the locals - there is nothing close to high-end tourism here or hotels of any size.

Here are the pictures - again, enlarge them as much as you can.  The little blue hut was the most popular eating establishment.  It generally took over an hour to get served, but the owner would find you and deliver the food.  At night, there is a one room bar with a window on the street with speakers pointing outward belting out music, so people just hang out.  Down the street, another small hotel with bigger grounds had a reggae band.  A very cool place to be – day and night.

                          Welcome to The Dream.  Behind me is the path to the beach.

 The blue stall on the right is "The Rice Master".  The green one room building on the left is part of "The Dream" and has a window facing the opposite direction selling drinks and playing music.  Where the girls are sitting and eating Rice Master is where the ladies later set up to boil crabs and prawns.

                      I took all my beach pictures Sunday morning before the sun broke through.  

In front are some of the smaller naked boys who act like they are having the happiest day of their lives.

Mending the giant green nets

Mending a blue net

Making repairs

This man eventually began riding along the beach.  I also saw a horse.

The boat in back is getting hauled onto shore.

They have laid down 2 boards with a roller to help pull the boat onto the beach,

In all these pictures, you only see boys playing - no girls.