So what on earth has Andy been doing apart from clogging up hospitals?

Well, I was brought out here by VSO to work on the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership (CCP) with two main roles:
1. Train VSO’s own project manager to plan and deliver the project and improve the management systems
2. Train the staff in the district partners – Departments of Community Development, Co-operatives, CocoBod (the Cocoa Board) and the Ministry of Farming and Agriculture
Pretty soon after getting here I feared that role 1 (which should have taken up 80% of my time) was not going to go anywhere. There’s very little I can say about this online given that VSO Ghana’s future relies significantly on these types of projects.
Having spent three months trying to find different ways to approach the problems that I was here to address, I made the decision in December to stop and look forward. Through a combination of disappointment and illness, I’d been pretty down about the whole experience and had begun to spend a lot of time moaning about the situation and finding it difficult to see a way forward with the work.
Come December I stopped blaming and started taking ownership for resolving it. First by telling VSO I would no longer continue with Role 1. I think I’d made some minor progress with that role, but if I’d stayed here for 10 years I was never going to be able to tackle the fundamental issues that needed to be looked at – problems that have now bred wider problems – unless things a lot bigger than me changed, so it was therefore time to cut my losses.
Since then, my CCP focus has been wholly on helping the project’s district partners to identify their own training needs and to deliver one or two elements before leaving. Just as I was making progress on both, unfortunately I was sent home for some r & r which delayed things still further, although it opened up new opportunities that arguably have been the most rewarding aspects of the working experience. I’ll blog separately these, but I just wanted to give a bit of context first.
I learned some pretty valuable lessons in all this. Trust my gut instinct and act on it – it’s usually better than my reasoned judgement and it’s certainly quicker to come to the fore. There is always another way, so don’t be scared to take a leap even if that looks like failure to begin with. Recognise the importance of doing something you enjoy and that others appreciate and benefit from. The poential in great people is always there, you just need to be open to seeing it and them.
The last one I’ve only realised recently, looking back at how massively better working life in Ghana looks through the lens of having achieved things and as a result of having met some brilliant proactive, enthusiastic, passionate personalities along the way in people I didn’t see them in before.
Later I’ll blog a bit more about some of the bits and bobs I’ve been up. I'll also try to persuade Lucy to take up her quill...
Andy

Cain and Mabel...and Jesus

An acknowledgement to Christmas and Hogmanay is slightly overdue on the blog. I hope you all had a top time wherever you are.
We certainly missed friends and family over the holidays, but we managed to make the most of it ourselves. There were times that being here felt a little lonely, but this was not one of them. We hosted a party on Christmas Eve, with around 20 volunteers and 40 neighbours, colleagues and friends coming along.
Tradition dictates that on Christmas Day, you must slaughter some animals that you’ve been fattening up all year. To feed our guests, we invested in two chickens (Cain and Mabel) and a sheep (Jesus) and enlisted the help of friends to do the needful.

Mabel had the last laugh, crapping on Lucy's foot before the deed was done.

In their memory…

Phew, I'm about to begin again...

Many apologies for the pathetic lack of updates the last few months. It was a bit upside down for a while and since that point we've been crazily busy. I only have 6 months to catch up on so I'm going to chuck up all the posts I've had half-written for ages.

Going back in Feb/ March was very strange. We're so grateful to all of you who helped us out - too numerous to mention all, but particularly Jean & Douglas, Mark & Fiona, Fiona & Phil, Paul & Leanne, Col & Caz, Phil & Hope, Evin, Mike, James & Cathy.

We didn't take many pics but here are a few...




Odd being in the cold and snow. Odd being surrounded by goods, rampant commercialism etc, odd feeling ill. But the main thing that was odd was that having worked for several months in Ghana to feel a sense of place, being home made us feel that even less. Not that you didn't make us feel welcome, but we had no purpose being there other than to get better. And everyone else was just getting on with their lives as if we had never been away.

Lucy and I are both feeling great now - I can really see how ill I'd become now that I'm better. And that stone in weight I lost is back with a vengence.
Andy

Snakes on wheels

There is an extraordinarily light, dewy quality to the morning here if you can beat the sun. At 5.30am there is just enough light to cast shadows beneath the banana trees and across the the amber road. And there is the wonder of sliding rather than steeping out of your front door, wheels gliding silently across the concrete and then grinding a little as they force the gritty dirt to give way.
Setting off when you imagine all the world's asleep is like sneaking down to the Christmas tree in the run-up to December 25th when all the presents are still hidden but the anticipation of what is to come is at its peak and you are gazing upon a future event which you know is just a few sleeps away and no-one else can see what you can.
Pink breasted woodpigeons, bright yellow weavers and elegant white egrets strut and sing in the dewy light. Wooden shacks selling cream crackers from China and sardines from Thailand are creaking open. Men and women are shuffling through the muffled streets. Suddenly there is a crescendo of drumming and high-pitched shrieks and singing as we pass the Pentecostal church.
The wheels glide smoother as the road becomes tarmac - slick and grey in the brightening dawn. More taxis appear - some veering too close, most beeping their horns encouraging a racing heart and tight clammy grip on the handlebars. The simple movement - the knowledge you are both leaving and going somewhere and that you have a specific destination in mind - quells the other niggling questions about where to go in life and how to get there.
You can't beat the sun. By 7.30am it is beating us; warming the haphazard green fields of maize and cassava, turning the road pale, heating us from heel to heart, heel to heart.

I am intolerant of food tolerances and feel phoney about phobias but it seems to me that a preternatural fear of snakes makes a great deal of sense. They offer us nothing but fables and fall guys and master a texture, shape and movement so alien to humans and other mammals and so repulsive to me, that even a flash of their shape on television leaves me weak and nauseous. Having momentarily forgotten my fear of falling, being run over by a tro tro (the local minibuses packed with people, goats, chickens and merchandise driven like track cars), smashed up by a 4x4, or toppled by a rampaging goat, (remarkable how many fears can whizz through one's mind while my husband swears he's been thinking of Scotland's chances of qualifying for the World Cup) I begin to relax and actually enjoy the smooth sensation of rolling quietly alongside lush green views. Realising this momentary pleasure I look down briefly and see an enormous dark grey snake sleeping on the road. My front wheel skims its lustrous shiny sides and I start screaming (for those who've read earlier blogs from the husband this might explain claims of a mad woman shouting Rake!) and shouting SNAKE repeatedly - as if that might provide some kind of protection from fangs filled with deadly venom. By the time the husband has caught up, I've burst into tears. The reaction is part outrage that a creature I have done so well to avoid while walking in the bush (by clapping my hands loudly - a not altogether foolproof method) has dared to leave its natural habitat. The husband seems quite confused but simultaneously impressed by the turn of speed I'm capable of (something which could easily be used against me on later rides when I claim I can't go fast). He explains very calmly that it would have been "just warming itself on the road because that's what they do". Thinking, wrongly, that if its explained as an everyday occurence that the wife will not then spend every minute of every cycle in Africa, expecting another snake to be lying in wait on the road. Great.

Malaria

Having justified the right to write the Ghanaian blog whilst on a brief break in the UK, I realised it might be best to explain that we're only back for a few weeks and that we're back because we were both ill. It seems that despite taking regular anti-malarial prophylactics, it is still quite feasible to get malaria. I'm not entirely sure what treatment Cheryl Cole took but we'll be looking to follow her lead as long as it costs no more than £4.99. In Ghana people seem to get malaria so regularly that those suffering from it get about as much sympathy as someone suffering a common cold. It feels significantly worse and seems to last much longer but they would be astonished to hear of this fuss we can make of it here. I don't have a picture of the malaria parasite to illustrate this blog so instead I offer a photo we took of one of the traditional fishing boats with the words "Oh God" on its colourful hull. His name crops up on almost every sign in the country, in some form or other, and the main response after being diagnosed with malaria or typhoid or whatever other tropical treat, is to seek help from God rather than medicine. Back to the Cheryl Cole treatment...

Looking back

It's most likely obvious to the majority but I've just realised - when pondering how to write the blog whilst on a rather unexpected sojourn to the UK for malaria-related reasons - that by the time an event has been written about it is inevitably in the past anyway. By the time one describes the particular tone of the sunset in words it has usually become redder or paler or disappeared altogether. And so it is that I feel justified in writing about things which happened before we came back to the UK to rid ourselves of tropical diseases. The first thing is that Ghana seems infinitely more appealing and rosy now we're not there. The memory of the heat fills me with nostalgia rather than making me sweat to the point of becoming dessicated. The constant shouts of: "Obruni, obruni," seem softer and less intrusive now they're no longer a daily occurence. Placing the looking glass in reverse, after a couple of weeks (for me - months for Andy) of drawing upon the wonders of the Ghanaian health service, our experience of being admitted to hospital in the UK and being treated by the NHS has been quite wondrous. Ghana has given us a new measuring stick by which to compare and appreciate - in this at the very least - how fortunate we are to have been born here.

Time

IT is not that meetings, meals or buses start late here. Events begin when they are ready. Buses (or at least the tro-tro minibuses used across the country for long and short journeys) do not leave early or late – they depart when they are full. Meetings start when the majority of the participants have arrived. The day starts not at a particular time, but when the sun comes creeping up over the horizon. It is as if there were a unanimous, unspoken decision taken in a time before clocks and watches not to challenge the order of things. And that decision has remained intact – despite the advent of new technology. Each day, each week is so loosely partitioned, the dividing lines are almost imperceptible. Each night there is a fleeting sensation, as day becomes the briefest palimpsest of thinly veiled layers - as the degrees fall as softly as eiderdown and light is edged offstage to be replaced by darkness. Each week is punctuated – for so many of those people we have met – only by church on Sunday. The year is not drawn up in four quarters. The vigorous changes of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are altogether missing. In their place is rainy, dry and then dusty. Right now we are in the dusty Harmattan. It is something that colleagues have spoken about with dread since we arrived. The days have turned milky white, the sun shrouded in white muslin, the air drier, heavy with dust that has been carried – somehow – from the Sahara. It begins when the air changes and the dust comes. If you ask when it will finish, people will tell you, it will end when it ends. Some will say January, others March or February or April. Equally if you ask when the bus will depart the answers will be varied and confusing. Ask how far it is to your destination responses will include: very far, not far, too far, close and very close. The assurance is always you will get there when you arrive. The specifics are something that will just happen and can not be controlled.