The good, the bad and Jo Grainger

Hello my devoted readers, another literary masterpiece is coming your way from Ghana.

This week was a big one for my NGO (WUZDA), as we had a delagation of other dvelopment workers come to see how we conduct community based research, using a method called "Community Score Card". Its used to ascertain the needs of the rural communities that we work with. There were 5 people, 2 from Uganda, 2 from Malawi and 1 from the UK (although she was a yank).

On Monday Alhassan, Mohammed (field officer) and me went to a village outside of Tamale called Zuo to arrange a visit to their health care centre, as well as the usual office work.

On tuesday the delegation came, we had meetings all morning with public service providers and in the afternoon we all went to Zuo, saw the centre and met the community where a discussion was had (mostly in Dabani, which im not quiote fluent in yet).

The next day we all went up to Bimbilla where the diustrict office is to meet the district assembly and some more of the communities we work with. The journey takes about 2 and a half hours, the problem being that the second half of the road is not tarmaced, leading to a rather bumpy ride and a tad of car sickness. It was great to actually see what WUZDA does in reality and how it has improved the lives of so many. My favourite bit of the day was whilst having a meeting with a community called Juanaylli a dog came and sat in the middle of the circle and proceeded to lick its bollocks for a good few minutes, tasty!

Thursday morning was a last evaluation meeting to discuss what had been learnt and the rest of the day was spent in the office.

On Friday we all ate dinner together, thank you to those who cooked it! Im starting to feel a little guilty as I still havent cooked a meal yet. Im putting it down to the lack of sainsburys ravioli. Today was also one of the happiest so far, my direct supervisor Alhassan (who i spend about half of my day with and have grown very close to) just had his first child, a baby boy! Im very excited to meet him and they told me they were going to name him Aron Junior, but im pretty sure they were joking!

On Saturday Imuru (our landlord's brother & friend) came and took me to the local football pitch where I trained with the local under-16 team. They were bloody good, even with half of them playing without shoes. They play great possesion football and are ridicuously fit, unlike me. After 10 minutes under the African sun I was ready to collapse and give myself to the vultures. We played for about an hour in 2 teams with no goals and the aim of the game purely to keep possesion of the ball, encouraging good passing, movemnt into space and fitness.

Today ive chilled most of the day nad just been to my bosses for dinner. Time at the cafe is running out so got to go.

Will write soon xx