Friday 6 November 2015

Cycling and Chieftancy

On the way to our office, there is a hill. To be perfectly honest, hill is an overstatement. It is an incline with a corner at the top which prevents you seeing what is further along the road. This incline, as small as it may seem, causes us some problems. Even the fittest among us, tired on a Friday morning from a week of hard work, struggle up it sometimes. When your bike tyres are a bit flat, sometimes you might even need to get off and walk. But we all make it to work every day. We overcome this obstacle, just as we overcome obstacles in implementing our services.

Sometimes, the barriers can be quite obvious. For example, when we were conducting community research, I headed out with my work partner Abdullah only to encounter families who do not speak English, when neither of us can speak enough Buli to effectively communicate... a slight issue, I would say. But we find ways to work around these obstacles (in this case, one lady who spoke English accompanied us to the next three houses because she knew we would have trouble communicating). We pump up the tyres and make it over the crest of the hill.

Occasionally, an obstacle can open new doors. A few weeks ago, we were summoned to meet the Paramount Chief of Sandema. His messenger said that the Chief wanted us to go into the local schools and run ICT lessons. This sent us all into a bit of a panic. How can we find time to do this in our already overfull schedule? Would this be sustainable? Is this within our project boundaries? Would International Service be happy with us to use our time in this manner?

We came to the conclusion that we would not be able to appease the Chief, but this posed its own challenge. You cannot just say no to the Chief. It is difficult to explain how influential and important this gentleman is to UK readers, but everything we do is done by his grace. If he took a dislike to us, it would seriously impact on our work. So we had to find a positive way to contribute to the community to please the Chief, whilst keeping to our project brief.

Fortunately, we already had an inclusive ICT workshop for children designed, which has to date held three sessions each of which has been hugely successful with between 30 and 40 children attending. (Check out the last blog post for a bit more information). We made the decision to offer a teacher training in ICT, in order to have maximum impact in the community. By teaching teachers, we would be influencing all of their students and future students in a much more beneficial and effective way than individually intervening at each school.

Meeting the Chief was an experience that I will not be quick to forget. After the formalities, including being made to wait to demonstrate the Chief’s importance, the Chief was able to explain exactly what he wanted us to do. He had recently toured some of the schools in Sandema, and claimed that they had laptops packed away in boxes rather than in use because no-one knew how to turn them on. This brought home the reality to us that effective aid is not just in donating items, but in training people. This technology was useless without people who knew how to use it. The Chief was impressed with our description of the inclusive ICT workshops, (he stated that we must have been telepathic to have already planned his wishes) and greatly facilitated the organisation of the teacher training day by arranging a meeting for us with the director of the Ghana Education Service in Sandema, immediately!

So something that we saw as an obstacle actually brought us to an incredibly positive day, which took place yesterday. 15 teachers attended, who were introduced to computers, key skills in using Word, Excel, the internet and e-mails, and we discussed ways of integrating ICT into other subjects. On the back of this, and the continuing success of the inclusive ICT workshops, the volunteers are really pleased with the positive impact we have already had. With seven weeks gone, we are well on our way up the hill, but it will require all of our energy, teamwork, and problem solving skills to reach the crest and appreciate the full view of LIFE in Sandema.

Lydia

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