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