OVERSEAS 4 - Programme and venues

As with all programmes in Ghana there was the challenge of "African time" with the itinerary optimistically suggesting a start time of 8.30am, whereas in reality we usually started nearer 11am. Some of the attendees arrived late but they had walked 3 hours to get there so we cut them a bit of slack and tried to give them lifts home when we could. On one occasion we thought the attendance was really good until we discovered that all the seats were occupied by village folk who had come to have a look, probably at me.

The venues were interesting, one church, one classroom (with 90 of us squashed into it), two meetings under trees and one in the World Vision Conference Centre. World Vision has done so much in the Overseas area. Mr Augustine really knows and cares about the people and their situations. He is also a lovely Christian man with a real call to enable the people to help themselves.

We targeted 32 communities and only two of them failed to turn up. In general they were extremely grateful to us for enlightening them and empowering them to take responsibility for their schools. One Chief even presented us with a thank you gift of two fowl and five yams! Some of the problems identified in the SPIPs included such things as shortage of teachers; lack of teacher accommodation, or teachers’ accommodation in a terrible state of repair; poor attendance of pupils; rural -urban drift or kayayei (where girls are sent to be ‘head porters’ in the bigger towns and often come back pregnant); lack of a source of water’ and the need to repair or build classrooms.