September 23. No substitute for victory

There was no stopping us this week, as we once again won at Quiz Night. Most interesting question of the night: which is the second most populous continent? A: the one I’m writing from.

September 22. Meeting Annie

On Wednesday WiLDAF got a visit from Annie Zawadi, CCI Program Officer for Ghana and Togo. After chatting briefly with Annie at work I got to know her a bit better over dinner with Gabrielle and Ji-Young in the evening.

September 21. Fore!

Today was a national holiday in honour of the birth of Kwame Nkrumah, so I had the day off work. My friend Andrew, a volunteer from New Zealand, and I played nine holes of golf at a local course. The greens – which were actually called browns, since there’s nothing green about them – were a bit tricky, given that the amount of loose sand varied from hole to hole and often even between the ball and the cup. It was good fun, even if the course was not quite up to PGA standards.

September 17 - 19. Another weekend in Accra

On Friday evening I attended a concert featuring drumming and dancing at the Alliance Francaise. Saturday afternoon Duncan and I meet with Ji-Young, another CCI intern working in Accra, and an American named Brian that sometimes plays soccer with Duncan and I. We had a drink at a nice bar on the beach in the Jamestown area of the city, and then stopped in at the British High Commission Club for their curry night. The following day Duncan, Brian, and I went to another Ghana Premier League soccer game, and then stopped by at Labadi beach to watch the sun go down. Labadi is absolutely packed with Ghanaians on the weekend, and there’s a ton of activity, with acrobats, jugglers, guys selling rides on horses, and lots of crafts and trinkets for sale.

September 13 - 17. A busy week

This week was a bit of a busy one, as I scrambled to send off an application for a doctoral scholarship that, as I found out on Monday, was due in by Friday. I also drafted an article about WiLDAF’s training activities designed to increase women’s participation in next months local government elections, which will be published in CCI’s newsletter, “Sankofa.” I did, however, make time for Quiz Night Thursday evening, where we came in a solid second, just a point or so behind the winners.

September 3 - 5. Go Dwarfs!

After things wrapped up in Axim on Friday afternoon, it was time to meet Duncan and a big group of friends at a beach resort 25 minutes west of Cape Coast. From Axim I caught a ride back west with my WiLDAF colleagues as far as Takoradi, where I then caught a tro-tro towards Cape Coast and finally a taxi to the resort.

The resort was quite nice, and we did a little swimming and played cricket on the beach. On Saturday we all headed in to Cape Coast for the Oguaa Fetu Afahye festival. The streets were teeming with people, and we watched as seven local chiefs were paraded around town while held aloft in decorated wooden beds. This being Ghana, where one uses one’s head to carry just about anything smaller than an SUV, each of the beds was held up by four men standing under the corners. This job was perhaps only slightly better than that of the poor guys that had to walk the parade route carrying huge drums on their head while another dude just behind them ceaselessly banged on the drum in an apparent effort to increase profits for those in the hearing aid manufacturing business.

On our way back to Accra on Sunday afternoon we again stopped in Cape Coast, this time to watch a Ghanaian Premier League soccer game between the Cape Coast Mysterious Dwarfs (best team name ever) and the Accra Mighty Jets. The atmosphere was quite good, with the quality of the soccer probably just below that of the Vancouver Whitecaps.

August 29 - September 3. A Field Trip

On Sunday I awoke at 5am to catch a taxi to the STC bus station, where I hopped aboard a bus to Takoradi, in the Western Region of Ghana. Once in Takoradi I was picked up by John, a lawyer who works in WiLDAF’s Takoradi office, and taken to meet the rest of the Accra WiLDAF team. When I reunited with them I was told that there were actually two groups heading to train women in two different communities, one being a small inland village called Tarkwa, and the other a beachside town known as Axim. I was given the choice to spend the week in either place, and opted for Axim and the beach.

The week-long session seemed to go very well. My role was to record the goings-on of the sessions in order to compile a report afterwards. My task in this regard was complicated slightly by the fact that about 75% of the conversations during the week occurred in the local language, but I was able to get a decent handle on things through the other 25%, plus some helpful translations from the rest of the WiLDAF crew, John, Mercy, and Richard.

Monday through Thursday were taken up with group work and brainstorming on issues such as leadership and communication skills, how to advocate effectively, and identifying sex and gender roles in Ghana. On Thursday afternoon, WiLDAF assigned the participants (about 25 in total) to five groups encompassing a number of local electoral districts and gave each person a dozen posters advocating for an increased role for women in politics. The idea is that these groups will coordinate their own training sessions and awareness-raising activities within these electoral districts, which will hopefully increasing the number of women running for and elected to public office.

On Friday the participants put on a public event at a local outdoor meeting ground to share what they had learned during the week. They were able to attract about 60 people who listened to their short speeches and watched a role play designed to stress the importance of having women in decision-making positions, as well as how to best advocate for that goal.

Overall it was a cool week. It was interesting to get out of Accra and spend a week in a smaller town in a different Region of the country, and it was very encouraging to see how many people are concerned to ensure adequate numbers of women are making important public decisions.