Archive for June 2013
Being Lucky
0Tuesday, 18 June 2013 by Renee
Last Monday Adam and I came home from a morning jog on which we were relieved of our phones and the small amount of money were were carrying on us. An annoying experience, but we never have to look far to be reminded how good we've got it...
After spending a good half hour dissecting the event with Sammy, the gym instructor at the small gym inside our compound, he asked us if we had heard the news about our neighbour. We hadn't and asked for more detail.
While we didn't exactly know her well, Adam and I had chatted with her and her family around a fire in her front yard, across the road and down a property from our own place, one evening a couple of months ago. As I was walking home in the afternoon, I had been making small talk and quizzing her sister about the ingredients she was carrying, and ended up with a dinner invite. While it's hard to decipher between courtesy invites ("Please, you're invited") and genuine ("Please I actually want to share my food with you") invites, we decided we might as well try and make friends with the neighbours, but hedged our bets and ate first. That was a good thing as it was indeed a courtesy invite, but they were happy to chat to us for a while. Theirs was a house typical in this new part of Accra, a strangely large but incomplete shell that families camp in until they save up enough to have the next stage built. We sat on wooden benches and chatted in broken Twi and broken English, family members translating for each other, and while we missed some of the conversation, I'm certain that the pointing to my legs and the reference to the colour of cow bones were linked...
Sammy explained what had happened. The girl, maybe late teens, early twenties, had died. She was trying to give herself an abortion.
No matter your standing on abortion, it's an absolute tragedy; at every point in the series of events that led to our neighbour's death, there were actions that could have been taken to save at least one young life, and perhaps even two.
The need for sexual and reproductive health education, including family planning, is huge here. I recently read a statistic that 750,000 teens end up with unplanned pregnancies every year, and deaths from unsafe abortions account for 11% of all maternal deaths. In 2008, the risk of maternal death was a 1 in 66 chance in Ghana, while it was 1 in 7400 in Australia.
While there's a lot of poverty here, it was the first time someone's story and the broader situation had really touched me. I know things like this happen all around the world. But somehow it's so easy to think of it in abstract. In a remote location. Out of sight. Not across the road from my house.
What a way to put my new job in perspective.
Later I shared the story with my colleague at work, trying to make sense of it all. An, awful, awful tragedy, he agreed, but then enlightened me some more. People are ashamed, and don't want to talk about the issue. Then it happens to them, and they try any old wives tale they've heard - herbs, chemicals, Guinness with lots of salt, but the most common? Swallowing ground up glass. Such a violent thing to do to yourself.
"Eh! Ghana-ooo..." he said sighing and slowly shaking his head. "Do you know, you are lucky, Renee, sooo lucky. If I had my time again, I wish I could have been born in a place like Australia".
So many people here want to leave (we hear "Oburni! Take me to your country!" all the time) and my go-to response usually is to focus on the positives, the culture here, and potential for people to change their country's direction ("but chale, if all the people who think like you leave, then who will make Ghana a better place?").
But this time, I had nothing. "I do know, I'm very lucky."
What on Earth Am I doing in Ghana?
0by Renee
It’s a question I ask myself often. I never meant for this blog to be only happy-snaps and travel tales - if you only followed this blog you’d think we’d been on a seven month long holiday, which is definitely not true! From now I’ll try to rectify this. And I'll start by explaining what I'm up to.
My assignment here, was to work with a network-based NGO working in the field of sustainable agriculture and rural development. Specifically they are meant to work with networks of small-scale farmers organised into farmer based organisations, to provide education and advocacy to improve the outputs of small scale farmers, and overall, reduce rural poverty.
My job was to help with stakeholder engagement, project scoping and development, research and proposal writing. When I first started, my supervisor, the national coordinator was enthusiastic, there was so much to do, he said, activities left, right and centre. I was excited. It took me less than a month to realise that what he actually meant was, that basically nothing was happening, that the organisation was in a state of disarray, and that I was going to be busy because I, as the foreigner, was going to fix it all. I was up for a challenge, and knew it was going to be a hard slog, but this seemed a bit ridiculous.
There were no projects on the books, just one being wrapped up. Core funding - the ever-elusive, stability-providing core funding - had dropped out ten years prior. Which isn't uncommon (who want's to fund boring things like project scoping, support staff salaries, and rent?), but the organisation had never really recovered. The only remaining full-time staff was the national coordinator who spent most of his time travelling and a lovely middle aged man who cleaned and ran errands, and taught me Twi when there nothing else to do. My intended full-time counterpart was in fact a volunteer agricultural scientist who worked only during the school holidays and the finance officer had left.
You can't really blame them – with your NGO in such a state, you’d say anything you could to get in on a programme promising to place qualified, experienced Australians with your organisation for a whole year for free, wouldn’t you? And the idea of the programme I’m on*, is not just to place us in fully functional, well-oiled machines, but rather place us with organisations that are doing good work, where we can learn from them but also fill gaps and improve things in some way, so the organisation can do even better work. But with next to nothing to latch onto and improve, I just couldn't. Without the support of an ag. scientist and finance officer, I could hardly help them develop better projects and proposals, and I was left, relatively unqualified for the task, to dream up my own projects and proposals to help local farmers. I did what I could, got to develop some new skills, and managed to fit in some regional travel, but by January I decided with the manager of the volunteer programme that brought me here, that I needed to change organisations.
It wasn't an easy thing to be transferred - I had come all this way to help that particular organisation, on the premise of developing skills in sustainable agriculture/rural development, but perhaps the most difficult part was that they had been (however unrealistically) pinning their hopes on me. No matter how much you know it's in everyone's interests, saying "sorry guys, I can't be a part of this" felt an awful lot like giving up.
Nothing happens quickly in Ghana, so I had to hang in there for some time before I actually transferred assignment. But now I have been in my new organisation for two months. I'm in a similar role with a bit of monitoring and evaluation thrown into the mix, but working for an organisation that works primarily in the field of sexual and reproductive health. While Ghana has made huge improvements in HIV and AIDs rates in the past ten years, the broader issue of sexual and reproductive health and related gender equality issues persist, especially HIV and AIDs prevention. My current organisation uses interactive drama and theatre methods to educate people on these issues and to improve their confidence in making positive, healthy choices and exercising their rights - rehearsing for life, you could say.
It's a remarkably effective method. Of course there are organisational challenges, but there are some amazing projects going on and I'm enjoying the exposure to the public health scene. One project is with sex workers in one of the biggest slums in Accra, and we're about to embark on a pilot project with prisoners in prisons around Ghana. Most of my work is currently office based, but once I start collecting data for evaluations I'll get to go and meet some of our programme's participants - which is always my favourite part of research.
And what about Adam? Well despite the issue of "how can a development practitioner and a violinist pursue their careers simultaneously?" plaguing us for the best part of the last five years, it turns out he's one of the busiest people I know here! Music plays a huge role in life here. Within no time, he was in touch with musicians and was playing gigs all around town. In January he started working with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ghana (yes it exists) tutoring the string sections and playing in the section too. Although they are public servants, they are mostly self-taught and there are no auditions - if you've got an instrument and can keep up, you're in! Needless to say they all seem to appreciate having someone like Adam to tutor them over an extended length of time.
It's been a bumpy ride in ways that I hadn't expected, but I'm learning heaps, especially about how development organisations work, don't work or should work.
*Although it would be easier if I could just blurt out what programme brought me here and the organisations Iv'e been working for, our media policy would mean that every post on this blog would have to be reviewed by the media relations team. So, if you want to know more, I'm happy for you to contact me and ask away!
