Journeying to the east

Sorry to sound unsympathetic to those of you shivering away in the chilly climes of the UK but it’s still getting hotter here in Cape Coast. In fact, a quick blast of cold UK air every now and then would be very welcome ! We are generally coping with the heat and humidity and are used to feeling hot and sticky most of the time.

We recently spent a few days travelling in the Eastern Region and Volta Region of Ghana. We stayed a couple of nights at Atimpoku at a beautiful location by the river Volta. It was really peaceful and there was a great view of the river and the Volta bridge.

We were very fortunate with the accommodation (we hadn’t been able to book in advance) as this particular place had just one room left (all the chalets were occupied). It was a bizarre room behind the reception, basically a bed in an office / study and we shared the staff shower and toilet outside (which was quite quirky!).

From Atimpoku we visited Akosombo – home of the Akosombo dam, a hydro-electric dam which produces electricity for most of Ghana and parts of neighbouring Togo and Benin. Apparently it generates 1020 Mega Watts of electricity, which we understand to be quite few light bulbs worth! It was a very interesting visit and brought memories of GCSE Geography lessons back to life.

We then travelled further north to the town of Hohoe, whose points of interest included a vulture colony (although disappointingly they weren’t singing ‘We’re your friends’ like in the Jungle Book !) and visited Wli (pronounced ‘Vlee’) falls. The scenery in the Volta region is much greener and much more hilly than the coastal area around Cape Coast – it was both interesting and refreshing to see a different ‘side’ of Ghana.

Update from Steve

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a project in the Keea district where a charity called the Sabre Trust www.sabretrust.org are building a new Kindergarten school. The trust has partnered up with Davis Langdon, Arup, A-Kon (Ghana based quantity surveyors) and Atelier (Ghana based Architects) for this project. It is basically a prototype Kindergarten classroom which is designed and built using sustainable principles and resources wherever possible.

I also had the opportunity to take part in a ‘Staff vs students’ football match at Cape Tech (the teachers are playing in the yellow shirts). I lasted for about 20 minutes before being substituted. The younger forwards left me standing on a couple of occasions (I blame the heat!!! Or was it just that they were about half my age ?).

We have now (eventually) started teaching the new first year students and I am getting to put to use some of the

resources I developed over the summer and the early part of term. It is still

quite frustrating though as lessons are often abandoned at little or no notice (or so it seems – or it may be just a communication error) for other school activities like try outs for the athletics team, i

nter-house quizzes and ‘entertainment’.

On Fridays the building construction students continue to work on the Mothers Union counselling centre site. After the students’ hard work the ‘Mothers’ provide food such as Kenkey (ground maize soaked in water and made into a dough) and fried fish for them at the end of the day which the teachers distribute between themselves and the students.

Update from Vicky

I have now finished my lectures at UCC and the students are on study leave preparing for their end of semester exams. They say that they enjoyed the lectures, especially the practicals, despite the fact that the resources (e.g. bars for bar reading and dot cards for C.I.) were ‘home made’. Most things I had made out of ginger biscuit boxes, of which Steve and I had accumulated an alarming number !

Steve masterfully engineered a couple of mounts onto which we stuck loose prisms to create two prism bars (of sorts).

There have recently been some interesting cases at the eye-centre, including this 10 year old boy who had never had an eye examination before. He was found to be extremely long-sighted (+14DS) and visually impaired (even when wearing spectacles). He is one of a number of patients to have benefited from some magnifiers donated by Burrows Opticians. The others have included a 22 year old student with oculo-cutaneous albinism who was still in ‘basic’ (junior) school, having great difficulty with his schoolwork due to his visual impairment, and a nurse in his late thirties with end-stage glaucoma who was unable to read labels on prescriptions and medicines etc.

There's not much sign of Christmas here yet, although we imagine it's a different story where you are! It will be interesting to see how things change over the next few weeks.