I spent the past week in the North of Ghana. By bus it took fourteen hours to travel from Accra to Tamale, the distance of Ottawa to Toronto. The bus and road were in surprisingly good condition, yet the traffic, construction, cow crossings, police checkpoints, and countless personal delays (Bathroom breaks/ Passenger goes missing at lunch stop only to discover he was napping under a nearby tree/ Bus company forces us to downsize from our sixty passenger bus to a fourty-five capacity passenger bus, only to realize that we had fifty-three passengers!) turned a scenic afternoon drive into an early morning marathon. For the entertainment of some passengers, the torment of others, the driver blared Nigerian cinema and Christian rock on a broken frequency for the entire trip. Agniesza, a Polish VSO who I was traveling with, and I were struck with moments of indignation and amazement when the radio would lose signal, loop for fifteen minutes of deafening static, and yet no one would say a word.
In the North I met with staff members of Action Aid, IBIS West Africa, and VSO Ghana. My project is looking at NGO accountability, and the purpose of each meeting is to gauge the perception of NGOs in Ghana as well as to look at the accountability structures of each organization. I also met with 6 local partner NGOs to ask them how accountable they felt their “donor NGO” was to them. The NGOs were fun to meet with and I am so impressed by the quality of people working within the civil society sector.
From Tamale it was 3 hours further North to Bolgatanga. Hot and dry, Bolga is the largest urban centre in the North lying less than an hour away from Burkina Faso. The culture, dress, and food change as you reach the upper half of Ghana. In the more Muslim areas, goat meat replaces fried chicken, bicycles and scooters replace cars, and clay mosques are equally as prominent as churches.
Markets and bus stations are the epicenter of action in Bolga. Women wrapped in traditional sarongs selling loafs of bread, packets of water, and meat pies, all in a basin that balance atop their head, while men wash their tros tros and hawk toothpaste and perfumes. The buses have been in service for decades, and the new ones depreciate at an astounding rate due to lack of maintenance. The roof racks, rusted and jagged, carry straw sacks filled with charcoal, bundles of firewood, and cases of yams. Bus windows are a main vehicle of commerce as you can purchase anything from Nigerian comic books, circa 1960, to any variety of food or household supply. On the streets there is litter everywhere, and a gust of wind forces you to play “dodge the plastic bag”. The smell of burning garbage around town is constant, and the parks and beaches are overloaded with waste. Children forage through dumps for anything of value, and value is defined far differently here. Plastic bags grouped together and surrounded by elastic bands become a soccer ball able to withstand the unforgiving terrain, and plastic bottles cut in half are used to wash clothing and store groundnuts.
Bawku
The danger associated with Bawku seems to be quite exaggerated from my impression. Action Aid drove me from Bolga to Bawku to meet with one of their local partners. Bawku has been the scene of a tribal conflict over Chieftaincy over the past number of years. It’s the only area in Ghana that has any sort of unrest and of late the conflict has had a minor resurgence. However, outside of a few more checkpoints when entering Bawku, and a small Ghanaian military presence within the town, nothing appears out of the ordinary. The drive to Bawku was particularly beautiful with traditional mud huts with thatched roofs lining the road most of the way.
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