Faxes, love and development

Good morning from Ghana!

I'll begin with an funny, but slightly scary, story about a woman who has declared her undying love for me.
Since I had my bag stolen a month ago ive been trying to sort out the insurance in England and getting a new passport with the British embassy in Accra. The lack of sufficent technology i.e. scanners, adobe acrobat, reliable internet etc... has been so frustrating! To get all these forms filled out and sent ive been going to a fax office in the bus station in Tamale. Ive probably been about 5 times and spent less than an hour and a half there. However, last night I recieved a text from the woman who works there - Agnes (no she is not a Scottish man, rather a 40 year old 5ft tall Ghanaian). The text was a little disturbing with her proclaiming her love for me, and then this morning calling me at 6.20 three times! I'm a little scared but the main problem is i'm going to need to send more faxes and there is no way I can go back there!

Anyway enough about Agnes, i wanted to write something about my experiences and views of development.

It can be a pretty frustrating business to be involved in, take this case study as an example.
A German woman called Ricarda has been living and volunteering in Ghana for nearly a year and has spent the last month living in a rural village called Kadjeso attempting to assist them with their development. She has worked with my NGO (WUZDA) in the past so was in the office the other day where I got a chance to chat to her about it.

She went to the village with about 250 pounds to spend on helping them with a specific area of their economic activity. When she arrived she spoke to the people in the community attempting to find out what would be most beneficial to them. After a community discussion the general feeling was that a gari presser would assist them most. (Gari is a type of food product, which before it is sent to market must be squeezed to remove the water from it). To press it they had been placing, large, heavy stones on top of the bags of gari to squeeze out the moisture. The problem with this method is it takes around 4 days per bag. Using the presser would take around 5 hours per bag. So it was decided she would buy a gari presser for them.

However two issues arose; firstly with only one machine and around 30 women involved in gari processing it cannot benefit the majority of them. Secondly and most importantly came the issue of transport. The market is around 24km away from the village with a very poor network of roads. Noone in the village owns a car so the women carry their produce to market on their heads. Even if they are able to produce more gari, or whatever food, it is of little assistance as they cant physically get any more to market. The women know this and so have little incentive to produce more goods.

This demonstrates some of the frustrations one can face, with what actually being needed (new roads and a car) being far too expensive to even consider. As well as it being very difficult to know what steps to take first in the developent process.

DON'T read this and think that development cannot achieve anything! There are ways round this problem, such as purchasing more pressers and some donkeys to assist with the transport. That is the great thing about development, overcoming these challenges. (Don't you love a bit of cheese)

This afternoon i'm off to a town called Bimbilla about 2.5 hours away for 6 days. I'm going with my boss, Karim, and we'll be visiting a few communities in the area, meeting the district assembly, talking to the water & sanitation boards and meeting the women who live in a witch camp. I'll update you in the next blog about what we get up to and anything interesting that happens.

Thanks for reading! xx