Midsummer Retreat

All the JFs together again at Mole National Park:
This past weekend all the Ghana JFs and most of the LTOV made the trip to Damongo to have our midsummer retreat. Overall the retreat was a success, as I heard the Ontario EWB retreat was as well. Seeing everyone pour out of the dusty little tro-tro (dangerous out of date van that sits 3 times as many people as its supposed to) warmed my heart. All those people who have been kicking around Ghana like me for the past 7 weeks, tanned vibrant and full of smiles, gave me hope that maybe some outward change had happened in me too.
Since I am in Damongo, I was organizing some of the logistics, and let me say, organizing stuff here is way different than back in Canada. Here, its everyone’s business, and even if you have a local helping you, the next person you meet scorns you because they could have done a better job or gotten you a better connection or deal. And having been through the experience, people do genuinely want to help you, but they also want to help their friend or cousin who is a driver or who makes food that they can hook up with a bunch of ‘Cabrunis’ (foreigners). People make promises or assure you that things will happen, but without a whole lot of nagging, things don’t just happen here. It also isn’t in the general Ghanaian nature to plan more than a few days in advance or adhere to strict timelines. But, in the process I made a friend and learned a lot, so what more can you ask for? (Above: At the Mahama Guest House where we were holding our conference)
The first day was spent updating each other on our placements, the second day was a fun day at Mole National Park, and the last day was strategizing next steps for the rest of the summer. Unfortunately after all that planning and anticipation, I was sick for about half of the activities, but I did have some very valuable conversations with people, and gained a little bit of insight on what I can be doing with the remainder of my time.
Some fun tidbits, we all (despite the fact it makes some of us sick still) were devouring and loving the Ghanaian food, and laughing each other as we were speaking with a Ghanaian twang to our English (which sometimes results in grammatical blunders). For example, when you are looking for the name of something: ‘one minute, we are just finishing our, this thing.’ And, the words:

-Plenty (its used in place of ‘a lot’. i.e., There are plenty of stars in the sky tonight, there are plenty of flies)
-Small small (do you want pepe? Small small.)
-Oh, sorry (as in, you trip and your co-worker says ‘oh sorry’, because you are a fool who can’t pick up your feet, but they make it sound nice)
-Ahaann (sound of excited understanding)
-Pick (as in, ‘I am going to pick him on my bike’, or ‘I am going to pick some bananas from town’) -how is it? oh, fine.

Mole was fun. It was amazing to go and trump around in the bush with wild animals around with a guide having a rifle strapped to his back. Here are some sweet elephant shots! There was also a pool there…pretty sketchy and dangerous as it was super murky, unsupervised and very deep, but even the lifeguard in me was way too eager to jump into that buggy murky chloriney mess because I miss swimming so much!

Leaving for the Tro-Tro to Mole, where we sang many fun camp songs and oldies!

Cop, reminds me of the wax patterns you see on cloth here

Dung Beettles working away rolling poo

Our Fearless Guide leading us through the bush

Me and Bevan, anotherJF, with an elephant skull!

An elephant up close and personal

me and an elephant up on a hill, they were strange, climbing very high. they reminded me of dinosaurs

trekking along...2 hours in the heat is hard

Warthogs, aka "Pumba and his wife spooning"

Swimming fun at the Mole Hotel

It was really amazing to spend time with the 5 longterm volunteers who were able to make it out. They are such wonderful, passionate and inspiring women (they all happened to be women). With great advice and support as we poor JFs struggle to figure out how to have impact in our remaining month and a half, when it usually takes at least the first 3 to 4 months of a long-term placement to get your feet on the ground. The whole overseas program in Ghana is slowly restructuring, so that JFs are beginning to contribute more to the work of longterm volunteers, helping to focus our short time that we spend here. Due to unfortunate circumstances, I happen to be a relic of the past system, of ‘go work in this office and see what could be improved…go!’, which is super hard let me tell you, but as frustrating as it is, a great learning experience.