Life in Bolgatanga

So our arrival to Bolga was a bit confusing, because when we arrived and called Ibrahim (we thought that was Ibrahim) the guy said that he was in Accra at that time. Luckily, it was not Ibrahim waiting for us in Accra, when we just arrived to Bolga. We are still not sure, who the person was, but he never called us again...

After 5mins Ibrahim himself arrived to pick us up and took us to his place. Ibrahim works closely with Youth Harvest Foundation, which is the organisation helping us with schools. We stayed at Ibrahims house for a few days to familiarise with the town and know where the schools were. Once more, we were amazed by the facilities we had, because we had shower and running water and electricity.

After a few days it was the time for us to leave Ibrahims house and move to our host families as planned. Girls live with one family and guys with another. Both families have 5 kids and are quite familiar with volunteers coming and staying at their place, so we are treated nicely and we also have possibility to see the life of Ghanaians from a close distance.

Robert is the father in our family (guys). He works with small projects like installation of water pumps in communities. The usual day for him starts at around 5:30am in the morning and this is more or less a traditional time when Ghanaians get up. He then prays untill 6am and then takes the goats to the field. Robert explained us that usually people keep goats so that they could sell them and increase their income. One mature goat is worth at least 60 Ghana cedis which is about 20 pounds. This means that if a person has a lot of goats he could make good money by selling them. So he comes back to the house by 6:45 and starts getting ready to work. Robert finished his work by 4-5pm and then stays at home and relaxes. Ghanaians go to sleep quite early, which is around 7-8pm.

The place we live is quite far away from the Youth Harvest Centre where we usually relax or work and even further away from schools we teach in. For this purpose we use bikes. The big difference we noticed between Bolga and Kasoa is that Kasoa is so full of cars and traffic is always very heavy and all the people seem to be in a hurry, a bit like in Europe, while in Bolga people are generally more relaxed and like riding their bikes and motorbikes to go to places. So the trip from our house to Schools takes around 30minutes on bike, which we find to be a good morning exercise.

Bolgatanga is a place where quite a few religions mix up, but surprisingly everyone lives in peace and everyone respect others. The town seems to be quite safe and all the people we met told us that. We had an unexpected unfortunate event when one of our team members lost the passport from the pocket. Surprisingly, the same day, on our way back we were stopped by some people, who knew the person who found the passport, so we got it back immediately. Apart from this incident our stay in Bolga was pleasant, we have quite a few people constantly helping us out with our project and this makes us feel welcome.

Finally, we have also had a meeting with Municipal Director of Education in Bolgatanga. He expressed his interest in our project and even mentioned that he might send a person to observe our lessons and give us feedback on how we are doing. We hope that this is going to be a useful contribution to DIEM.