This week started in a standard way with all the classes going as expected until Ibrahim showed up in one of the schools with another volunteer. We only said hi to him at that time, because we were teaching, but we met him later on when we were having lunch. Piet is from Netherlands as most of the volunteers who come to Bolgatanga, because Meet Africa is a Dutch organisation and there main office is there as well. Piet told us that he is going to be teaching PE in schools. It was rather nice to meet another white person, because there are not many white people in Bolgatanga.
As a rule, our bikes kept breaking and we had something like a sixth tyre replaced in last two weeks. The guy who repairs our bikes was getting annoyed by the fact that we come to him so often and lady who is supposed to pay him does not do that so we were also feeling a bit confused by the whole situation. Anyway, these kind of misunderstandings are quite common in Ghana, so I guess we should just get used to it.
We only had one lesson on Wednesday, but there was another thing waiting for us that day. Youth Harvest foundation recently started a project called step-up and Wednesday was the day of the launching event of the project. This project is for young girls that are not very rich and have no work. The idea is to train and provide these young women with the possibility to buy the sewing machines (and pay, as they say here, small small every month) so that they could learn how to sew and sell their works. As we have been told, the project was quite successful and there was also some interest from Netherlands, so some clothes were exported and girls started making money. This proved that there are initiative people coming up with these kind of projects in Ghana. We were pleased to help run this event and assist organisers, because we had the chairman of Youth Harvest Foundation and even the Municipal Chief Executive attending it.
Thursday started with an extremely heavy rain in the morning. Because of the metal roofs of the schools, the rain was making so much noise that we could not run our lessons. The kids simply could not hear anything because of the rain. We also noticed that other teachers stopped their lessons as well. The interesting thing here in Ghana is that nothing happens when it is raining. All the activities are stopped no matter how important they might be. The streets become completely empty and nothing starts happening again until the rain stops. The most surprising thing was when we went to run our second lesson and found the school empty. Apparently teachers let kids go home when it rains heavily. We thought that nothing would ever happen in Scotland if teachers or lecturers behaved like that.
Because we only had one class in the morning on Friday, we decided to visit Bongo village, which is not too far from Bolga. There was already an update on that so I am not going to go into details again (I finally uploaded some decent quality pictures to facebook, so you can check on that).
On Sunday we decided to have a bit of rest. Patrick went to the church with our host family and I relaxed at home (I thought 4 hours in the church would be a bit too much for me). After that and having some lunch, we went to the lake which is not too far away. We had a very nice swim with Ganew (Ibrahims son), Fabien and Bright (from girls family) in the lake. Because it seemed that it was about to start raining we decided not to waste any time and headed back to the town. Another reason why we were in a hurry was Euro 2012 (as we all know Patrick is Italian and Italy played Spain in the final). It was a really nice weekend for us and although we have been here for only 2 weeks we started feeling quite local, because some local friends of ours were always around.
That was our week 5 in Ghana. Week 6 is our last week in Bolgatanga and the last week of teaching as well. There is still quite a few things that we have to finish, but hopefully we will make it all in time.
PS. Sorry for such a delay, malaria got me quite hard. Now all four of us had malaria.
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