Sorry I haven’t blogged much recently, but I’ve actually been fairly busy. I spent last week in working in ISODEC’s office in Bolgatanga (usually referred to as Bolga) and at the weekend I finally got around to visiting my friends Sally and Demetrio in Tumu, near the Burkina Faso Border in the Upper West Region (confusingly the Northern Region, where I live, isn’t the most northerly region in Ghana, Bolga is also north of Tamale and is in the Upper East Region).

Firstly work, I’ve been trying to finish the database for the “Ambassador’s Girl’s Scholarship Program” (AGSP), which is a USAID program that gives grants to needy girls in the poorest districts so that they can attend primary and junior school. ISODEC runs the program in northern Ghana and have asked me to create a database so that they can manage and report on the project more effectively. I enjoy working in Bolga, partly because databases and programming is what I enjoy doing and partly because they seem fairly excited by what I’m doing and are also eager to learn. Hopefully I’ll give some training up there too and maybe a bit of system admin type stuff. I seem to spend most of my time in Tamale writing stuff that I suspect no-one will read and battling viruses.

The other good thing about Bolga is that I see a lot more of other volunteers. In fact last week I stayed in a VSO house with a volunteer called Sarah (I’ve a link to her blog) and it was great to have some one to chat to when I got home from work. As well as being good company what was even nicer was that she enjoys cooking and isn’t busy because the senior schools are closed at the moment so she cooked for me most nights.

While in bolga we had an interesting haggling situation with a taxi driver:
Us: “How much to Kombusico?”
Driver: “Three Ghana cedi”
Us: “That’s too much, two and a half?”
Driver: “No, I can’t go that low – two is as low as I’m willing to go”
Us: “Er, ok two then”
I’m not sure whether VSO needs to send more maths or English teachers, but evidence from earlier in the evening suggests the simple arithmetic is a skill lacking in parts of northern Ghana.

The senior school situation is worth a mention. Most children board in the senior secondary schools, sometimes attending schools a fair distance from where they live. The government supplies each school with a budget to feed the pupils, but, unfortunately, for the last few years there’s been problems with the release of funds from the “school feeding programme” each year and as a result the schools in the three northern regions can’t reopen after the spring break as they haven’t got any means of feeding the students. This means that most of the volunteers in the education sector don’t have much to do until the situation is resolved.

Something that really strikes me travelling around northern Ghana is how empty it is. The buses rattle through mile after mile of stunted savannah trees and grassland, the flat countryside visible for miles with just the occasional collection of mud huts huddled by the side of the road, sometime with a communications mast bristling satellite dishes and mobile phone repeaters towering incongruously over the ancient scene.

Tumu is a tiny town which I quite liked. It reminds me a bit of Salaga, and Helen from Salaga happened to be there at the same time. Sally and Helen arrived in Ghana with me and are both teachers; Demetrio is an ICT VSO volunteer who’s been in Ghana a bit longer. Having transported cheese to Tumu from Bolga (it arrived just a little bit melted after the 4 hour bus ride) we had pizza for tea on Friday night and on Saturday morning I was introduced to the delights of pitoo, the locally brewed beer drunk from dried gourds split in two called calabashes. It tasted a bit like malty cider. All in all I had a great time.

Ten things I don’t miss from my old London life:

1.  Greyness: Grey suits, grey weather, grey houses, grey people
2.  Unnecessary aggressiveness and rudeness
3.  Commuting, especially the tube
4.  Overcrowded, overpriced, soulless bars
5.  Noisy, assertive drunks on the tube or in the street
6.  The “Daily Mail” and other narrow minded bigots
7.  Big Brother and “reality” TV generally
8.  Roads choked with traffic, where the drivers sit alone watching the rain through monotonous windscreen wipers waiting for the car in front to finally move
9.  Miserable, insidious, depressing drizzle
10.  Cold, dark, sunless, winter days

I think I was robbed yesterday. I can’t actually prove that I didn’t lose my wallet due to my own stupidity, but I’m extremely suspicious. Yesterday I went into town to pay my water bill, which in itself could be considered robbery given how rarely water actually comes out of my taps, and rather than cycling I got a lift into town from some work colleagues. Having finished my business and got some money from the ATM I climbed into the back of a shared taxi, rapidly followed by a local. This guy sat between me and the final occupant and proceeded to spill his money in front of me. Being a helpful chap I bent down to give it back to him, but he still bent forward over me, apparently searching for more coins beneath the driver’s seat. He then paid the driver and quickly got out. Looking back I was surprised at his clumsiness, I actually thought for a moment that he had deliberately thrown the coins but dismissed it, and he did seem a bit eager to leave the taxi before I did. When I got out I discovered my wallet was missing. I checked the back seat to no avail. My suspicion (improvable) is that the dropped coins were a distraction while he removed my wallet from my pocket.

It’s a bit disappointing to have lost my wallet, my old Hong Kong Id card has gone along with my RAC and labour party membership cards, some money and a few other bits and pieces. I suspect the ID and membership cards wouldn’t have been terribly useful here in Ghana but a shame anyway. The money and my credit and ATM cards is more of a loss. But slightly more of a shame is to feel that I may have been robbed. I’m used to the idea of my being stupid, and know that I can be absent minded, but I don’t think I was yesterday. Even sadder is the slight disillusionment. I mean, I knew crime happens in Ghana. At least two of my VSO colleagues have been burgled, another had her bicycle stolen and various people have lost purses or wallets, but so far I’ve been in a nice bubble. I’m still convinced that overall Ghanaian’s are amongst the most honest and friendliest people going, but I’ve made more aware that there are a few who may be less so.

As a result I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the bank here or on the phone to my bank in the UK cancelling cards and arranging for new ones to be issued. Ironically my UK ones had stopped working anyway due to bureaucratic mistakes by them so hopefully the positive outcome of this will be that I’ll be able to access my UK money again. Annoyingly I doubt that I’ll get any cards at all until the week after next so will be forced to go into the bank to withdraw cash.

There’ve been a couple of electrical storms in the last few days, and when the electricity is in the air very little seems to be in the cables. But the sheer amount of electricity that is in the air is awesome. Often the storm starts in the distance, with the occasional flash in the clouds near the horizon. Slowly the flashes spread until almost continuously there’s a glow of lightning somewhere on the horizon. Gradually, over an hour or two, the flashes grow bigger, and are joined by what starts as low rumbles but grows into great rolling explosions of noise. Just before the rain starts a huge, swirling, wind starts rattling the trees and gates and throwing leaves dancing into the air accompanied by the unmistakable smell of rain. Finally the rain starts, often in huge torrents, sometimes (on Friday for example) travelling almost horizontally. All the time the thunder and lightning are providing a spectacular display. The last two storms have been accompanied by lengthy power cuts which heightens the sense of theatre, as a guttering candle seems sadly insignificant next to the glory in the skies.

I’ve been here more than six months now. In fact as I write it’s been 214* days since I arrived in Ghana. I’m writing this in the office due to a general lethargy that has overtaken me. I’ve got bits to do, but it’s really hard to motivate myself as there is absolutely no sense of urgency here (at least not until a deadline hurtles past, and I’ve not been given any deadlines) and most of the office are out at a workshop.

Since I’ve passed the halfway point I thought I’d list my achievements here in Ghana so far:

•  Created spreadsheets for the ARHR project to track information about their LNGO partners
•  Given training on folder structures and created a shared folder structure
• Set up an automatic backup of the main shared area to another computer
• Created the first version of the AGSP database
• Created the first version of the spreadsheet for tracking the disaster relief stuff
• Provided (some) IT help to other vols
• Organised the ICT forum
• Written documents on using the internet, viruses and problem solving
• Done “Ad-hoc” training (answering questions, solving problems) to increase general confidence around computer
• Provided self learning material
• Avoided serious illness so far
• Coped with a new culture and conditions
• Made friends amongst the volunteers (and to a lesser extent Ghanaians)
• Experienced aspects of Ghanaian culture
• Seen some of the country
• Learnt a bit about international development issues
• Learnt a bit more about myself
• Blogged

It seems a bit more when I write it down than it feels like. Sometimes it feels like most of my time is spent surfing the net, chatting or doing other unproductive stuff. I realise that one of the ways to fail here would be to pile in expecting everyone to jump and eagerly give you time to learn, and that slowly, slowly building up confidence and understanding is much more likely to achieve things, but it’s an extremely dull and frustrating lesson to learn sometimes.

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*I haven’t been counting, I used Excel to calculate it: =int(now() - date(2007,9,16))

I’ve just finished “Globalisation and its discontents” by Joseph Stiglitz and my major regret is that I didn’t read this excellent book when it was published 5 years ago. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist who was one of Clinton’s chief economic advisors and then went on to be a senior vice-president at the World Bank. He draws on his experiences at the highest level of economic policy making to write a clear, articulate, balanced and devastating attack on the “Washington Consensus” approach to international development. The IMF comes under particular attack, but the WTO and American Treasury are hardly unscathed by his criticism.

In “Discontents” Stiglitz concentrates on the international response to two main events, the Asian crisis of 1997/98 and the transition of the former Soviet block countries to market capitalism in the 1990s. In both cases he argues (convincingly) that countries which largely ignored IMF advice (e.g. Malaysia and Poland) suffered much less than those that followed it. He claims that the IMF’s ideological fixation with inflation blinds it to other issues. He points out that while the IMF’s official reason for being is to prevent economic crises in fact its policies often make these worse. It’s response to the Asian crisis caused a major downturn in the world economy which in turn helped create the conditions for the Russian crisis in 1998/99. He argues that these institutions blindly believe in the magic of free markets even when there is the absence of the institutions vital to its functioning, such a functioning legal system or bankruptcy laws. A “one size fits all” response to problems ignores local conditions; South East Asia with its high level of private saving and balanced budgets is given the same medicine as deeply indebted, profligate South America.

Stiglitz suggests that the world’s financial bodies in the form of the IMF and World Bank have become too aligned with the interests of the financial sector, being more concerned with protecting Wall Streets creditors than the poor in the countries that are forced to pay back irresponsibly made loans, or indeed with the growth or stability of those countries. Rapid liberalisation of developing countries’ banking systems enables speculators on Wall Street to make fortunes, sometimes betting on the near certainty of an IMF bail out, while businesses in those countries are devastated by the crippling interest rates that the IMF insist on being raised.

The hypocrisy of a paranoiacly secretive organisation with little direct accountability preaching transparency and democracy to countries that it then bullies into ignoring the wishes of their people to implement policies rejected by developed countries is laid bare. Of already wealthy countries insisting that fledgling industries are devastated by being opened to competition in the name of free trade while demanding that their own agriculture is massively protected. The collapse in cotton prices caused by the massive subsidies the American cotton industry receives has devastated African countries that depended on being able to trade their cotton on a fair market, costing them more than the US aid they receive.

Stiglitz firmly believes that globalisation has been and can be a force for good, but that it needs to be focused on the needs of the poorest, ensuring that countries can grow consistently in a socially stable and democratic way, with the world’s institutions accountable to those whose lives they affect intervening in the interests of the global community rather than small elites.

Firstly, an apology; in my last post I described Mum and Ellen’s phone calls as occasional. They are far from occasional, both phone me every week regular as clockwork. Their calls are eagerly anticipated and greatly enjoyed. Contact from home has tailed off a little this year and any sense of being remembered, whether a phone call, text, email or even a “wave” on Facebook is hugely appreciated. The women in my life seem much better at keeping in touch than the men, and it’s sometimes surprising who does make contact and who doesn’t.

I’ve had my first (minor) road accident and my first bout of illness. Both were extremely mild and remind me of how fortunate I am. The illness was a simple affliction of mild diarrhoea for a few days, which serves me right for eating my own cooking, and it didn’t stop me from going to work. It did leave me somewhat washed out by the end of last week though, since it coincided with my IT forum. Compared to what some volunteers have suffered it hardly counts and all contributes towards the slimmer Tim.

Motorbikes and electricity are two of the things I’m most scared of here. The standard of wiring here is lamentable, in a country that seems to have only one design for living room furniture there are at least three different types of electrical socket, and they all spark whenever something is plugged in. So far I haven’t actually been sent flying across the room in cloud of blue smoke, but it’s a matter of time I suspect.

As for the motorbikes, apparently they’re largely unregulated and untrained, with a cavalier attitude to safety. Ghana is a strongly religious country, with an attitude of “leave it to God” and “its in God’s will”. This seems to result in a belief that faith is more important than care on the roads. Stickers with religious texts obscure the windscreens of cars and lorries and it isn’t unknown for Tro-Tro trips to start with a prayer. The lack of resources means that most vehicles are overloaded and under-maintained and often simply inappropriately used. I’ve seen motorbikes with bicycles strapped to the back, the handlebars constituting a major threat of impalement to the pedestrians, and I regularly see motorbikes and push bikes carrying sheet metal, making them effectively six foot wide. I also saw a bike with the cyclist completely invisible behind a large sheaf of firewood taller than him, while he unsuccessfully tried to peer round. Motorbikes are quite willing to leave the road and swerve onto the pedestrian area in order to pass a slow moving vehicle, expecting people to get out of their way. In fact motorbikes are quite willing to weave in and out of pedestrians if it’s easier. Don’t even think about night time, almost no cyclist have any lights at all and many motorbikes don’t bother with headlights, believing that switching them on reduces the life of the battery. Combined with dark clothes and dark skin this makes many of the road’s users almost invisible at night.

Whilst I haven’t actually witnessed a serious accident yet I’ve seen plenty of evidence. As well as plenty of broken glass and plastic shards by the side of the road, travelling between Tamale and Accra you see burnt out Tro-Tros by the side of the road as well as upturned lorries. In February there was a nasty crash near my house, when I came home after going to a football match the crumpled remains of two vans were on either side of the road, a Ghana Telecom van lay on its side having destroyed one of the new street lights and an orange van on the other side of the road was firmly lodged in the storm drain. I strongly suspect that not everyone walked away from the scene.

My little accident was a lot milder. I was cycling to my friends Rik and Dinny (Dutch VSOs in Tamale) and was clipped by a motorbike while crossing a roundabout. I was tipped on to the road and the contents of my basket were scattered, but apart from a tiny graze on my knee neither my bike nor I were hurt. In fact I think the motorcyclist was more shaken than me, he even followed me to make absolutely sure I was alright.
 

I’ve attended quite a few VSO meetings over the last four or five weeks. In fact I’ve attended more than I’ve actually been invited to. To be totally honest I’ve even resorted to organising my own. I’ve attended regional volunteers meetings for two different regions, a review of the VSO Ghana’s new HIV/AIDS workplace policy, an education sector review and a meeting of the ICT volunteers in Ghana. The last is the one I’m proudest of because it was my idea and I organised it. On Thursday I managed to get six out of VSO’s eight pet geeks together to in one place to exchange experiences and ideas. Most VSO meetings are a bit like dental checkups, necessary occasionally but dull at best and sometimes painful. The best thing about them is usually the chance to meet up with fellow volunteers who you may not have seen for a while and catch up with gossip. Saying that I still feel my ICT forum was a great success, we were able to exchange ideas and experiences and agree on some actions.When I’m not attending VSO meetings I try to get on with my life and job. Life here continues at its own particular pace. I seem to be getting busier, although northern Ghana will take a long time to catch up with London’s financial institutions for frenetic activity. My social life seems to switch between catatonic and manic, with stretches of up to a week at a time without a sensible face to face conversation, just the occasional phone call from Mum and Ellen and text messages from other vols, to strings of evenings and weekends spent with other volunteers. I’m just coming out of one of the manic phases, Easter in Accra, the previous weekend partying in Navrongo (near the Burkina Faso border) plus house guests here in Tamale and various VSO meetings. I now face a stretch alone, possibly a chance to concentrate and focus on writing and thinking about what I do next. In practise it’ll probably be spent reading, drinking and fielding unexpected visits from other volunteers.

The weather at the moment is mostly hot and sunny interspersed with weekly rainstorms. When it rains here it does with real commitment. Not half-hearted drizzle but thick columns of water gushing from some great taps in the sky. Most people here, locals and volunteers alike, are really pleased to see the rain. The cool offers relief from the heat and current humidity, and there is more green visible. Personally I’m about a bit of a grouch about this, the overcast grey skies that precede and follow the rain depress me, reminding me of damp November afternoons in London, and green is highly overrated as a colour, desiccated browns and yellows are much easier to cope with. I want clear blue skies and dry heat, I wasn’t made to suffer English winters.

I will admit to gawping, to standing goggle eyed and slack jawed in amazement, I may even have let out a few feeble squeaks of pleasure as I looked upon the opulence of the Accra Mall. Like a small child at Christmas unable to decide what to open first I rushed from luxury outlet to luxury outlet through air conditioned, marbled corridors. And when I entered “Shop-Right” I nearly wept, the vast emporium of western decadence containing unheard of delights such as pork sausages and bacon. Row upon row of neatly stacked shelves bulging with the contents of many fevered dreams (OK, my dreams are tamer and more food based than some people’s). As for the food court - milkshakes, burgers, pizza, and fish & chips - I could have spent the whole of Easter just in there, although I might have gained some pounds and lost quite a few Cedis.Easter in Babylon (or Accra as the locals refer to it) was a time of indulgence for me. A cheese and wine supper was followed by a proper fried breakfast (though sadly not even “Shop-Right” stocks black pudding). I had a meal in a decent Chinese restaurant, a milkshake as well as meat feast pizza with extra cheese. I even read the latest “Economist” and stocked up on books, buying a couple and borrowing some too. I now have enough books to keep me going for a few weeks, and to leave me better informed about international development (”Globalisation and its Discontents”, “The Bottom Billion” and “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”) and the outlaw Jessie James, as well as a couple of works of fiction.

After spending most of the last six months in northern Ghana Accra was a revelation, the bustle, traffic and general level of sophistication nearly overwhelming me. Travelling down on the night bus for the first time was an experience too, the driver didn’t reduce the volume of the radio for the whole trip and we were subjected to an Easter sermon broadcast in Twee at 3am, the preacher sounding either hysterical or possessed, screaming his message in a language I couldn’t understand except for the occasional “Jesus” or scrap of English. Despite this (and plastic covered seats) it wasn’t a bad trip, I even managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep in various short bursts. We arrived in Accra around 6am on Thursday morning after a 13 hour trip. My biggest dilemma was which pair of socks to wear - if I wore my socks with “Wednesday” on they would be wrong for part of the trip, but so would my “Thursday” socks. I rejected the option of changing them at midnight as impractical so settled on extending Wednesday until my arrival in Accra, meaning I could wear clean socks on Thursday.

As well as a weekend of gluttony it was also a chance to catch up with quite a few volunteer friends I hadn’t seen for a while (and one of the Salaga crew who I had seen but was worth seeing again). It was fun to grumble, gripe, discuss, debate and gossip with a really good bunch of people.

I left Accra reluctantly, but happy and as compensation one of the movies the bus showed was the first Nigerian Kung Fu/Bollywood fusion I’ve ever seen. All the characteristics of the standard Nigerian movie, but with poorly choreographed fight scenes and a strange dream sequence in which two of the main (Nigerian) characters dressed in Indian clothes and sang and danced Bollywood style.

The most charitable thing that can be said about my dancing is that it’s enthusiastic. A more honest appraisal would describe it as arrhythmic spasms that constitute a risk to myself and anyone within 3 metres.  Last Saturday night saw me posing such a risk to a number of my fellow volunteers who had gathered in Navrongo to celebrate St Patrick’s day with a smallish Irish contingent based there. Volunteers from across the north of Ghana were partying, including representatives of the Peace Corps and an Irish Catholic charity as well as VSOs and Ghanaians who worked in the local Catholic school.

I was in the area anyway as I’d been working in Bolga presenting an initial version of a database I’m working on that should allow ISODEC to track about 1000 school children (mostly girls) who receive aid to encourage them to attend school. I’m fairly pleased with it and it seemed to go down well.

It was really great to go up to Bolga and Navrongo as there is quite a contingent of VSOs in the Upper East region so I was able to catch up, share our experiences and generally gossip. I also got to meet some of the new vols.