A day in the life of an obroni

This is another random blog entry with no real focus. Nothing major has happened, but there’s so much to say!

Some cool stuff has been happening at work for me lately. I was put in charge of the open house we held on the 22nd and it actually went quite well! The girl who has initially started organising it left for Togo a week before the day, so I was basically in charge of pulling it all together and making sure it ran smoothly – a bit difficult to do in Ghana. For starters, everything was late. One of the groups that was to perform was late by an hour, as was the food, setting up the projector and the PA system. Luckily, this is the norm in Ghana so I wasn’t blasted for it. I was blasted for everything else though – why aren’t these photos in the slideshow? where are the guests? (you mean the ones that were only sent invitations 2 days ago??) etc etc.. The actual event ran quite smoothly compared to the normal Ghana things, and at the end my boss shook my hand and said I’d done a good job. Score! After the formalities and stress were over I chilled out in the office for awhile, venting my frustrations to Kevin, before we headed back outside to find everyone dancing! A guy had put music over the PA and everyone in the compound was dancing, including random people who’d heard the music while walking past. So good.

Also, I’ve found work to do for my final 2 weeks at WAAF (after a month and a half of sitting around..) The foundation has a group of 15 HIV positive people who make up a team called The Almond Tree. They’ve been trained by 3 Canadian volunteers over the past 4 months or so in skills needed to start their own businesses and become independent. They’ve been split into groups and each group has been trained in a different skill – bead-making, bread-making, and tye-and-die, batik and sewing. 5 of them even want to head off on their own and start individual businesses – selling slippers (thongs/flip-flops), selling Togolese and Beninese fabrics, operating a chicken coop (called God's Grace), sewing clothes made to order, and owning a provisions store (called Psalm 1:24 just like everything else here haha). Even in the short time that I’ve been around they have made some amazing improvements, and it’s great seeing their optimism! One of them just turned 70 so we had a party for him with a cake we’d made and everything! (yes I made a cake, one of the many things I didn’t see myself doing in Africa…)

Anyway, the point of my story is that 2 of the volunteers have come to the end of their time here so they’ve headed home, and the other one is travelling with her mum for the next 2 weeks, leaving The Almond Tree group to handle everything by themselves. In that 2 weeks, they will be applying for business loans, setting up their businesses and also starting to sell the products that they’ve already made. It’s a really exciting and scary time for them all, especially considering some of them have never worked, some don’t know English incredibly well, not to mention that all of them have HIV and fall sick occasionally. SO Kevin and I will be taking over the role of the other volunteers – guiding the group in their decisions, teaching them computer skills (starting from how to click a mouse) and helping them fill out their application forms. It’s going to be an amazing couple of weeks :)

I made dinner for my family and they actually really liked it! I made an old family favourite, tuna risotto, because it contained boiled egg, rice and tuna and I figured it might be a hit. Gladys asked me for the recipe so I’ll give it to her as my parting gift, and Sarah is still walking around saying ‘tuna risotto’, which I find incredibly amusing.

I headed to the market yesterday with Amanda, the girl who came to Kokrobite with us last week. It was quite the experience! We got it all over in one day, shopping from 10 til 5:30ish and covering the Kaneshie Market, Makola Market and Art’s Centre. I spent 600000 cedis in all (about $80) and I bought incredible amounts of stuff, mainly gifts. I had decided I’m getting a dress made while I’m here so I bought 2 yards of material, which is very exciting! Kaneshie was okay – it’s all in one building, but it’s mainly foods, fabrics and provisions. That’s where I bought my material. Makola was a bit crazier – it’s a massive, sprawling market that’s spread over blocks and blocks, and the only thing to do is keep walking down alleys and streets trying to look at stuff but not really turning in their direction so as to avoid being lunged upon by sellers. I think the funniest thing about that place was the guys walking around with one skirt or pair of pants. They walk up to you and hold the pair of pants against you while you’re walking and say crap like ‘ohh lady this look nice, you buy, you buy’, meanwhile the pants are a size 6 or something ridiculous that would not fit in a million years. We ended up just saying ‘are you crazy?’ to the guys, which was funny. When we sat down to have lunch after a couple of hours of the craziness, we could hardly talk to each other because we were so flustered and frustrated. Even while we were eating lunch we had people coming up trying to sell us graters, sunglasses, toothpaste, drinking glasses…

The Art’s Centre was the most insane 2 hours or our lives. It’s a compound with a whole bunch of stores in it filled with arty stuff – carvings, masks, drums, clothes, jewellery, paintings. Walk inside the compound and there are 3 guys waiting to take you to their store first. We walked in the main area, which had lots of little stalls in it and got SURROUNDED by people – ‘lady, lady, you come, I have earrings you like, name your price’ I’ll give an example of purchasing from these people. Say I wanted to buy a really cool carving. I say ‘how much?’ ‘200000’ ‘ohhh too much, too much! It’s not worth 200!’ ‘how much would you pay? What’s your price?’ ‘I was only looking to pay 60000’ ‘ohh this is worth much more than that! You pay 150000’ ‘no I would only pay 60. oh well, thanks anyway’ walk off… ‘lady, lady, how much you pay?’ ‘I said I would only pay 60000!’ ‘too little! You pay 100000’ ‘no really I would only pay 60’ walk off again and then hear from the background ‘okay you pay, you pay’ meaning I can pay the price I said. Lee shoots, and she scores! At the end of that 2 hours, we had given up with polite and had just started yelling at people to leave us alone. I can’t even properly portray how insane this was…

1. The Almond Tree showroom. It was finally completed in the week of the open day, and it holds some of the jewellery and clothing that the group has made
2. Me in the office after the open day
3. Two of our patients setting up to do batik
4. Kevin with the cake mix, looking his usual excited self
5. Me and the three we were teaching English to - Meri, Idrissu and Janet. We took a normal photo and then Kevin said for us to do a silly one. I held out my peace sign, but the others didn't really know what was going on so they held out their hands too, Idrissu holding out the pen he was holding. Cute
6. Kaneshie Market
7. Me and Aman
8. This lady wanted me to take a photo of her and when I pointed the camera, she opened her mouth!
9. Amanda in the Art's Centre, looking pissed off, trying to bargain down the price of some batik tapestries