Working in Ghana

A little over a year ago I wrote an epic account of my purpose in traveling to Africa. That masterpiece was sadly lost to the evils of the internet and a laptop touch-pad. It’s loss has always haunted/annoyed me, and so to exorcise these frustrations I’m finally going to try again to set down the oddity that was working in Ghana. It will be sadly lacking in the detail, accuracy and reflection of the first attempt, but I hope that it will offer some closure for me and some revelation for those of you still wondering what I was up to last spring.

The best place to start would be with what I had expected to get from Africa, as that is really the best measure against which to judge and reflect upon the actuality. At the time I was thinking about what to do with my life and gravitating towards an education in public health, or the administrative side of the health industry. That inkling, combined with my penchant for travel, produced a desire to get my feet wet and see how things go on the ground in a medical hot spot. Therefore I found a program that would supposedly place me in position to observe and participate in such activities.

Judged by this measure of expectation, Ghana turned out to be a monumental failure.

After some confusion within the homestay family, my planned transfer to Volta was canceled and I stayed in the capital of Accra. Apparently too many people had already complained that the program in Volta was pathetically lackluster, ill-organized and, to say the least, uninspiring. At the time I was happy to stay in Accra, having become friends with Mack and Kendra.

So on my first day of work I was brought to the West African AIDS Foundation (WAAF). It seemed abuzz with people so I figured I had come to the right place. Everybody seemed rather busy, too busy, in fact, to spare me any time. I was left for a long while sweating on a couch in the back waiting for Eddy, WAAF’s leader, to arrive and give me some direction. When he did finally make it, he explained that WAAF currently had three programs in the works.

The first was in-patient out-patient consultations and advisory. The clinic only had one doctor, Eddy’s wife, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d be able to properly manage real patients without training. I was armed with patchy memories from health classes years past, which was surely better than nothing but not enough to be taken seriously. But surely WAAF would have a training program to remedy this shortfall. Surely…

The second program was community outreach to children via school based clubs and activities. This program was under the management of Nicole, an American who turned out to be married to a Ghanaian, and another woman who was a recent graduate of the University of Ghana. When I first arrived they seemed to be deeply involved organizing an “awareness carnival” at a local school, so I thought I would be able to use my experience with kids in that program. They talked pretty enthusiastically about what they were doing and laid out myriad plans for what needed to be accomplished. I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to be absorbed into their program.

The third program was a cooperative business development and skills training initiative. Volunteers from Canadian Crossroads (CC), Emily and Joanne were leading this program and it stood in stark contrast to the other WAAF programs: the volunteers had actual training and education in their fields and real funding to support themselves. The beneficiaries of this program were a small group of local AIDS affected adults who had lost their incomes and/or jobs as a result of having AIDS or losing family to AIDS. They were fifteen people in total, divided into three groups of five, each focused on a particular business. The bakery group was making bread, the bead group was designing jewelry, and the batik group was designing batik-patterned clothes and accessories.

But I had already decided upon the community outreach program and was pretty happy to get started. Imagine my surprise when the two leaders didn’t show up again the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Turns out the community outreach program suffered from a combination of Ghana-time syndrome and unmotivated leadership. Nicole seemed to be, in the end, involved in WAAF merely as a distraction until she could go back home. They didn’t have any real funding to speak of and therefore couldn’t act upon their grandiose plans. Being of the Ghanaian mindset as they were, they assumed I wouldn’t be interested in those tedious details. Of my eight weeks in Ghana, two had already passed and I was no closer to starting anything meaningful than I had been on my couch in Connecticut. Frustration loomed.

It was around this time that Lee and I started taking extended lunches to avoid the demoralizing inertia of WAAF. We were both motivated and bucking for a chance to work if only someone would present us with an opportunity. I was slowly coming to the understanding that, true to the saying amongst expats, Ghana would only take you as far as you took yourself, and that my initial desire to work in Ghana (as opposed to travel) would have to be compromised if the investment of time and money was not going to be a complete loss. Hence the first and arguably best tragically comic misadventure (all travel in Ghana must be regarded as such or you’ll lose your mind) in our trip to Wli Falls.

While travel had entered the itinerary, I still needed a raison-de-etre Monday to Friday and thus gradually inveigled myself into the business development team. There was going to be a changing of the Canadian Crossroads guard in April with a one week gap in management. I was prepared to uphold those prestigious reins and had convinced Lee to be my executive assistant in charge of coffee-getting and command-obeying. With such a exceptional corporate model to lead by I didn’t see how we could possibly fail.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to explain a bit more about the state of the business development groups. Having been organized by educated and sensible MBAs, the program suffered from two critical faults: structure and common sense. I had gathered already in my two-going-on-three weeks in Ghana that structure was utterly lacking in most parts of Ghanaian culture. For example, the groups had originally been divided into three well-defined groups with a specific mandate and an action plan for executing that mandate. As time progressed, however, it became apparent that not everyone on each team was particularly in love with their particular industry. Two members from the bakery team left for the bead team, and members of both the bead team and batik team decided they didn’t like any of the available industries and wanted to strike out of their own. To be fair, many participants already had long backgrounds in other occupations that they were more comfortable with. However, in the interest of succeeding it might have behooved them to risk learning new skills.

Although the original project had been divided into three industries, all three operated under a single brand, The Almond Tree. This, I think, was probably the best contribution of the CC team and the one most likely to do good. Although it was still very much a theory at that point, the idea of a brand was the only thing the disparate members of the project could agree on and the only thing keeping them together.

This was the approximate state of things when Lee and I joined their ranks. Over the next few weeks we accomplish what felt like very little but in retrospect I’d like to think we helped give The Almond Tree members a cup-half-full start.

Among our small but varied accomplishments was the completion of a small boutique on WAAF’s grounds. A small unused shed was cleaned up and turned into a showroom for the bead and batik wares. It was also the first thing to get the official The Almond Tree branding, black letters on white with a red ribbon. Innocuous enough to us mass consumers, but imagine the sense of pride in ownership felt by those involved. The closest they’d ever been to that sort of consumer professionalism were scratchy MTV Ghana signals. When, a few weeks later, we had finally managed to acquire the first roll of labels for the batik group’s handiwork, the excitement was palpable. The same for the bead group when they got card tags. During that time we had one or two open house events on WAAF grounds. Although it’s hard to generate much noise in a lonely corner of Accra’s administrative sector, it was a start. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the bakery group were less showy but more organized and serious about their endeavor. Learning how to operate a bakery is difficult and time-consuming, as is finding and managing the capital to start one, but they were progressing one step at a time and, more importantly, supporting each other through out. They were three of the more inspirational people I met in Ghana. Unlike most of the Ghanaians I met, they didn’t appear to hold so many delusions about their prospects as a bakery or for life in general. They seemed to understand, if only unconsciously, that the learning a new trade or the arrival of a micro-loan would not miraculously solve their worldly problems. It was thus that I found myself sharing with them what few of the real skills I have: teaching English. Although I was at first loathe to be relegated to the occupation I was pointedly trying to avoid, I quickly reversed course after realizing that (duh) it wasn’t about me.

During the absence of a CC lead member, Lee and I were also charged with one of the more problematic aspects of The Almond Tree project: money. Money is a problem for any new business, but much more so for people who have only ever known informal business. That is to say, even the most discerning members of the group had trouble making the conscious distinction between “their” money and the “business’s” money. To that end, they had been paid “wages” for a few months leading up to the distribution of micro-loans. The hope was that over time this sort of business vs. personal think would become a natural part of their lives. In practice, however, this plan was a half-success at best. Group members had grown accustomed to their weekly stipends without upholding the consummate responsibilities it would typically take to earn them (i.e. keeping regular business hours with oversight). Thus we were fostering a culture of free money more than everything else. The CC members could not simultaneously be mentors as well as business managers, and the unfortunate result was that they had to act like nagging parents on bad days and were generally ineffectual on good days. On this point, I really think that what the whole project needed was a dedicated long-term coordinator. Someone to hold the business money, force people to make good on their commitments, pay wages, and etc. Janet, the replacement from CC, was acting as this sort of counsel, but in the end the money was left to each participant. I can only imagine how well this system worked in the end.

Which isn’t to say they didn’t try. Realistically, at some point every volunteer goes home and thus CC was trying to teach the group to manage their own businesses. Bookkeeping was priority number one to this end. It would also put into concrete terms the differences between personal and business money. We quickly ran into roadblocks, however, because very few people in the group had adequate writing skills of remedial math skills. Furthermore, as the groups splintered people without skills didn’t trust those with them to keep fair records and those with skills didn’t want to be held back by their slower comrades. In the end it boiled down to a “give me my money” mentality that distressed me for its inevitable failure. I always used to read statistics about education and such in developing nations and wonder “how much does an education really matter”, and here I found all the proof I needed. I had taken for granted that merely by having grown up in a culture deeply associated with enterprise and banking I had at least a basic sense of business acumen. That fatal assumption of common sense I alluded to earlier came back to bite us in the proverbial bottom.

I cannot tell you how many times group members waved their hands dismissively at our pleas to focus harder on this or that business task followed by the tired mantra to just “let the money come.” Let the money come and all the ills of the world would dissipate. MTV Ghana had left its mark after all.

For better or worse, the distribution of micro-loans was delayed past the point that Lee or I were around, so I never did get to see what happened. Loans were for a few hundred dollars each, or the equivalent of several months income for each person in the group. I can imagine relatively easily how each person might have used or misused their loans and realistically I think only about half of the members are likely to be able to repay in the future. The bakery had wisely pooled their money to invest together. In the end, bead group members had opted to split in everything but name, keeping only The Almond Tree brand in common. The fate of the batik group was still a gray area. As far as a pilot project goes, however, plenty was learned and if half the members can repay their loans then that might actually be considered a success.

Well I think I’ve managed to outline just about everything that was going wrong without paying due heed to what went right. To be sure, I arrived there and still reflect with a very educated and disciplined sense of what should have happened, without giving much creed to what The Almond Tree members were capable of. This was my on-going frustration with Ghana: the sharp disconnect between what I wanted to accomplish with people and what those people I wanted from me. The most stark example thus far, money, is indicative of all other differences: I wanted to share skills for making money and they just wanted money straight off. This was, to me, as short-sighted as giving a man a fish, but to someone living on a few dollars a day extra money for any reason (or lack thereof) is motivation enough.

Beyond the obvious money-making aspect of the business ventures, merely getting all those people to come out and rally around The Almond Tree banner was a genuine success in and of itself. Having AIDS in Ghana carries real cultural stigma, and I’m not talking about the veiled discomfort one might find in North America. I’m talking about very clear and very unsympathetic social ostracism. Merely showing up at WAAF every day was a social risk for these people, let alone going around town touting their “I have AIDS – buy my product” brand. The Almond Tree was, as I said, a great idea. Just in the wrong country. I thought their products would have a much better time in small grass-roots boutiques of the developed world than competing with a million other souvenir vendors on the streets of Accra.

And especially for the women in The Almond Tree, the situation was especially tragic. I never pointedly asked, for obvious reasons, how any particular person had acquired AIDS, but the general narrative is as follows. One day the husband of a household falls ill, and no treatment seems to work. The family’s savings are spent in a vain attempt to save the man, and in the end the family is left with no money and without its primary earner. The woman is now forced to take the reins as both housekeeper and breadwinner, only to find out shortly after her husband’s death that he died of AIDS and it’s very likely she has it too. Incapacitated by even the most mild illness, this woman is now unable to uphold any of her many responsibilities. With no education, no experience, no money and now no health, how is she possibly expected to cope? And yet a few of them did and still do, and moreover with a happiness and love for life. For someone like myself who is so easily frustrated with even the smallest hitches in life, such an ability to survive and prosper is unfathomable. They have my utmost respect.

So long as I’m on the topic, to this last point I’ve recently read a castigating appraisal of AIDS-related aide throughout the world over the last decade. While proponents of AIDS-related aide have done a remarkable job of raising funds they have been much less effective in dispensing them. Take, for example, the fact that the average North American is scared witless of AIDS and knows very well what measures to take to avoid it (bible belt excluded). All very well and good, but the average North American is less likely to acquire AIDS than any other continental counter part. Meanwhile, a dearth of education in Africa, a much less media-spectacular prize, has led to widespread discrimination, mis-education, social ostracism, and a host of other problems. Discomfort and unwillingness to tackle questionable cultural norms, such as a tendency to have several simultaneous sexual partners, has exacerbated the problem unnecessarily. Imagine that a North American typical has partners in “chains”, one after another, while in Africa its common to have “circles”, or several partners at once. You can imagine for yourself how the disease propagates itself exponentially in circles as opposed to chains. But early reformers lacked the cajonnes to address these sensitive cultural topics, preferring to scare suburban kids who were, statistically, at significantly less risk, and thus causing much worse long term problems that are only now coming to the fore.

Tangential ponderings aside, the last I heard from The Almond Tree was via a letter from my dear friend Ayimbo. He had been one of the dissenters who ditched the original projects in favor of starting a chicken farm. I actually, in spite of my best judgment, had accompanied him to a chicken farm in an effort to learn the general tricks of the trade so he could get started on the right foot (remember that small box on customs forms that asks you if you’ve been to any agricultural centers during your stay abroad…?). Well it turns out that he eventually ditched chickens in favor of cattle. Goats to be precise. Where he got the money for goats I can’t be sure, but with many praises to the many names of God he wished me well and I likewise hoped him the very best in his new enterprise.

In conclusion, I suppose that I did get a pretty good view into the scheme of things, though not the one I expected. I was forced to rein in my expectations on some things but was completely surprised by others. I don’t know much more about public health than I did before going to Ghana, but I sure do have a better understanding of the repercussions of having to live with the disease in a foreign culture. What Ghana needs is better education more than anything else, and a shift in cultural norms. Not the sort of thing that a 24-year-old can accomplish in 8 weeks, but it’s a start. If the government can make a currency change into a sexy advertisement campaign, I don’t see any reason they can’t at least put those powers towards safe sex and monogamy. And littering. But that’s another story.