The holiday is over !

Well we are pleased to say that the box of optical equipment which we had shipped from the UK, has now arrived at the Bishop Ackon Memorial Eye Centre where Vicky is working. Sometimes things are not quite as straight forward as we hope (!) but thanks to the persistence of the staff at the Eye Centre the box eventually cleared customs and survived the journey (over all the speed bumps) from Accra to Cape Coast.

The Auto-edger (machine which cuts spectacle lenses to shape) which was the main piece of equipment in the shipment, is now set up and in use in the optical workshop, and the technicians are quickly picking up how to use it.

Whilst Steve’s placement was still being set up for him, he spent last week in the optical workshop setting up the machine, working with the technicians, and learning more about glazing spectacles.

Vicky has now finished her second week at work at the Eye Centre. She is generally ‘refracting’ (doing the glasses part of the eye-test) as the resident Ophthamologist does the eye-health examination for all the patients attending the clinic.

Surgery, however, is carried out by visiting Ophthalmologists at regular (ish) intervals.

It’s a different system here for Opticians, as they are generally workshop technicians trained to refract, but aren’t involved with assessing patients eye health.

Last week a visiting Ophthalmologist spent three days at the eye centre carrying out cataract surgery. We were invited to go into the operating theatre to watch. Steve thought it was a unique opportunity and jumped at the chance. Vicky, however, decided that it was perhaps better to stay conscious ready for the afternoons testing (!) and regrettably had to decline the offer.

Having watched the first operation from a safe distance, Steve decided his legs could hold him and got a good close up view for the second operation and even had the chance to look through the surgeon’s microscope at the finished ‘work’.

This week Steve has started his placement at Cape Coast Technical Institute (pictures to follow) where he will be involved in teaching the Architectural Draughtsmanship and Design-and- Making courses. The college runs very hands on vocational courses and also has Automotive workshops, Carpentry workshops, Metal Workshops and Electrical Workshops and a construction yard (for practicing building skills).

We have been to another Sunday service at the Anglican Cathedral and last Sunday we attended a service at the Methodist Cathedral. It was a much shorter service (a mere two and a half hours) but started at 7 am ! The service was easier to follow as it was nearly all in English (our Fante language hasn’t progressed to the point where we can understand full sermons yet !) and we really enjoyed it.

The church was packed (despite the early start !) ; there must have been over 400 people there (a similar number to at the Anglican cathedral) and again there was a huge choir singing amazing choruses.

People really dress up to go to church here, it’s amazing to see the ladies’ amazing co-ordinated outfits.

We are having Fante language classes three times a week, which sounds a lot but still isn’t enough ! We are learning new sounds as well as new words which just adds to the difficulty. We’re sure it wasn’t so hard to learn when we were at school and had younger brains !

It was Dorothy’s Birthday (the wife of our host Kofi, who organised our placements) on Wednesday and we were invited to her birthday party at their house with some friends of theirs. It was another opportunity to enjoy some different tasty Ghanaian food (and delicious birthday cake). It was kind of them to include us in their celebrations.

So our initial tourist status has ended (!) and we will try to keep you up to date on our placements …….

More sight seeing around Cape Coast

The few days of settling in and relaxing that our host recommended before we start work has turned out to be longer than anticipated! We are now hoping to have our ‘orientation’ meeting next Tuesday after which we can hopefully start our placements.

So in the mean time we have been making the most of the free time and doing more sight seeing.
Yesterday we went to Elmina where there is another historic castle, from where slaves (even children) were exported in the Transatlantic slave trade and were held there in equally horrendous conditions as Cape Coast Castle.
We learnt that one third of those held in the castle died, their bodies were just thrown into the sea. Another one third of them died in the ships and were just thrown overboard.
It’s shocking and sickening that only the remaining one third survived the ordeal and reached the ships’ destinations to begin their lives of slavery.

Elmina itself is a very lively fishing port with lots of hustle and bustle, on a strip of land between the edge of a lagoon (used for salt mining) and the sea. Hundreds of people (mainly women and children) walk around the streets carrying goods on their heads ; water, smoked fish, charcoal, plantains, soft drinks, oranges, actually anything! Some teenage boys (with more energy and heat tolerance than us !) were playing football on the beach amongst fishermen repairing their boats and nets etc. (sorry not sure how to rotate pics yet!)

On Sunday we experienced out first Ghanain church service. We attended the Anglican cathedral where Rev Kofi de Graft Johnson (our host) was preaching.
We had been advised to go as smartly dressed as possible, which is the culture here (so definitely no shorts for Steve !).
However, that morning we experienced out first tropical rainfall here. And boy did it rain !
We are living at the top of a hill with a track road of red earth and had to walk down the very wet, muddy track to get to the main road to get a taxi into town. We realised we would inevitably get seriously muddy so we had to modify our Sunday best … Steve, wearing shirt and tie, rolled up his best trousers and put his flip-flops on ! Vicky, wearing smart blouse and black skirt swapped smart shoes for pink plastic flip flops and off we went ….
However, with every flip and flop of the sandals another red splat went up the back of Vicky’s legs and skirt so by the time we got into the taxi we were in a right mess (for some reason Vicky significantly more so than Steve !).
So we spent the 10 minute taxi journey frantically trying to wipe mud off our legs, feet and from between our toes with wet wipes. Yak !
We had of course taken our smart shoes with us so by the time we arrived we looked reasonably presentable….
Although we arrived 5 minutes late, we were one of the first to get there. In fact people were still piling in 40 minutes after the service was supposed to start.
We have since learnt that when it rains in Ghana life just stops and restarts when the rain has finished.
Anyway, the service was interesting! It was a very high church service with a lot of sung liturgy which we struggled to follow, but everyone else seemed to know it all off by heart. The songs were a mixture of traditional Anglican hymns accompanied by the organ and lively African songs sung to African drums (at which point the entire congregation seemed to turn into a dancing gospel choir! It was like being transported into a scene from "Sister Act").
The service was held in Fante and translated into English but it was still hard to pick up all of what was said. There were four (yes 4!) different collections throughout the service. Luckily we had been forewarned about this and had plenty of smaller notes and change on us. All in all the service lasted 4 and ¼ hours.
We stayed around at the end to chat to two other volunteers who were at the service. It turned out that one of them is a medical student at Oxford who is from Derbyshire and will be working at the new Derby City Hospital from this summer. Small world !

At the weekend we also visited a visited a series of canopy walkways suspended over the rain forest in part of Kakum National Park. It was amazing. Good to get to the other side (!) but a unique experience all the same. We are told that the rain forest is being cut down at a rapid rate and we saw evidence of this on the journey up to Kakum, where you can now see lone rainforest type trees protruding through areas of cultivated palms (presumably what was at one time rainforest).
There wasn’t much sign of wild life on the canopy walk. This may have all been scared off by the crowds of visitors squealing and chattering in front of us. However, we did see a snake coiled up in a tree near the visitor centre.

On our way back from Kakum we stopped for lunch at Hans Cottage, a small restaurant on a lake. We both tried Kenkey a local food made from ground up maize and water. Not like anything we have ever tried before !!!

All around the lake were hundred of little yellow weaver birds which we watched making their nests.

In the lake surrounding the restaurant were a number of crocodiles, some of which had come out of the water onto the restaurant terrace for an afternoon sunbathe!

Alarmingly the restaurant also offered pedalo rides on the lake. With Steve.s history of capsising we decided that this was not a good idea!

Whilst we are still enjoying running water at home, we now have no electricity !
We aren’t sure how long this will be for, by the sound of it this can occur for a few hours or a week or so. Anyway, we are going into town for some more candles to stock up !

Akwabba

Akwabba (welcome in Fante) is how we’ve been made to feel here.

And we’d like to say “Akwabba" to our blog…

Well, here we are in Ghana !

We arrived in Accra (the capital) on Monday night and spent the night there before moving on to Cape Coast on Tuesday afternoon, having met the Archbishop of Accra in the morning.

We are staying in a little bungalow which we are sharing with another volunteer (Anne) in the grounds of a large house on the edge of Cape Coast (about 10 mins drive from the town centre). We have settled in quickly and it is already starting to feel like ‘home’.

When we arrived there was no running water for the first few days, and it made us realise how we take for granted being able to turn on a tap, flush a toilet, have a shower etc, as we continued to try and use the taps and flush the toilet (on ‘auto- pilot’) even though we knew there was no water supply.

However, we used the containers of water stored around the house (by ‘Uncle Kofi’ who looks after the house ) for washing, flushing , and ‘showering’ (with a jug , that incidentally had a big leak in it !).

As we’re sure you can imagine, it’s very hot and humid here, and we are trying to get used to the feeling of needing a shower only a few seconds after we’ve had one !

Our host has suggested that before we start our placements we take some time to get a feel for Cape Coast and the way of life in Ghana. So this week it has felt like we are on holiday ! Our more formal orientation is due to start next week.

We’ve explored some of the local shops and markets of Cape Coast and are starting to get the hang of the systems and hand gestures involved in getting taxis to go where we want to go ! In Ghana they have a great system where you point in the direction you want to go as the taxi approaches. Not quite sure about all the signals we have been given back (!) but we will probably suss it out at some point….

The taxi driver then picks up any one else pointing in the same direction, as they go along.

However, we did nearly end up in a mini-bus back to Accra (2-3hrs away) not long after first arriving here….

We have visited Cape Coast Castle where it is estimated that 3 million Africans were held before being shipped to the Caribbean/Americas as slaves, over a 2 hundred year period. We were taken down into the ‘dungeons’ where up to 1400 men and women were held at any one time, waiting for ships to carry them across the Atlantic Ocean.

People were packed into the small ‘dungeons’ for up to 2 months with hardly any light or ventilation with only a narrow channel in the floor for sanitation.

The conditions were truly unimaginable.

It was a very uncomfortable feeling to stand in a place where such suffering and inhumane treatment occurred.

We have been spending some time with a small group of people from Edinburgh who are visiting Ghana for 2 weeks. Their church diocese is ‘twinned’ with the diocese of Cape Coast. They have been visiting various projects which they are linked to, including a school (called the Academy of Christ the King) which they had donated some sewing machines to, last year. We saw these in use by some students when we visited the school. It was quite humbling to realise how valuable the donated equipment was proving to be to the students.

We were more than happy to join our new friends from Edinburgh for an afternoon at the beach… it was pretty stunning as you can see …!

We have had only one internet café experience so far, and it wasn’t a very comfortable or effective visit (to say the computer was slow would be a massive understatement !). So if blog entries are few and far between, it may be because we’re struggling to endure the internet café experiences or that we can’t fit in the several hours that we need in there, all that often !

So, that’s all for now ……

Keep in touch !

Love Steve and Vicky