Think of the Starving Children in Africa!

Among the many classic clichéd phrases I will be able to use with greater authority is this little doozy. Never mind that I do actually hate wastefulness, I will particularly enjoy giving my nephews a hard time with this one. (I’m such an old grouch already.)

The kids here, on the other hand, love waste. Among the gifts made at ‘placky bottles ‘r’ us’ are cars on strings, full percussion sets and mini sets. Recently a kid near us has taken to using an old toothpaste tube as a car. Another kind hung around all day at the barber’s, managed to avoid being beaten while collecting all the fuzzy hair left on the ground. He then found some sticky material from I don’t want to think where then stuck the skuzzy shavings on to his face in a beard. He then wandered around the village with a gnarled stick saying that he was an old bloke and that the young ones know nothing.

Being confronted with your own waste is quite a sobering experience. There’s no binnies picking up your black bin bags round here. We compost. Which I like. I enjoy the production of good soil. It’s also good for our plants. We plant the seed. Nature grows the seed. We eat the seed. Wow, peace and love man. But I’m not David Bellamy and neither are you (or maybe you are, in which case why aren't you on the telly these days?) so I can’t believe you’re in the least bit interested. Our other rubbish we burn. That is if the kids don’t scavenge the sparkliest bits of detritus first.

In the absence of Barbie, the little girls like to make dolls out of old husks of maize. With all the care in the world, they will comb the stringy bits like hair and carry the thing round on their backs. That is until the husks start decaying and a putrid smell puts them off.

My little mate Kwasi Atta was nearly moved to tears recently as I’d been collecting bottle tops (what he calls “kinters”) for him and presented them in an old Nescafe jar. By his own reckoning, he is now a rich and powerful man. Certainly Kwame, the cute kid with the wonky eye, thinks so.

Our Day Out

We take the students out of the village every year for ‘educational purposes’ and cos basically its a laugh. In the past, we’ve given the students their first bewildering sight of the sea and taken them to hospitals to see organs in jars and this year we decided to go to Lake Bosumtwi near Kumasi.

The plan was to gather outside the Anglican Church at the unGodly hour of 4am. That's still the dead of night, when the air is thick with dew and mosquitoes. I sat there waiting for the kids to arrive thinking that this is no way to earn a crust when out of the murk came an old woman bent by age and presumably insomnia. Her frail old frame looked ghostly as she emerged from the vapours and headed toward the gong at the top of the hill. The gong is beaten to tell people the time, just when they probably least want to know it. To me, it acts as a reminder to roll over and brace myself for the loudspeaker dude who comes on the tannoy later on. The gong is basically a rusty old car wheel, minus tyre etc, strung up from a tree. It takes a fair old clack for it to make any noise but this old bird whipped out something like a spanner and ‘CLANG’ she whacked it for all the village to hear the birth pangs of a new day. She then comes back at half hour intervals to clang Humjibre awake. So there are definitely worse gigs than mine.

As usual, we set off a bit late but made good time to get there by 9am. Bosumtwi is a beautiful place, completely round and with high forested hills encircling it. Apparently its still filling slowly and consequently displacing the villages that huddle on the narrow shore. The lake is important to the Ashanti people for various reasons( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosumtwi_crater the belief that when a member of the tribe dies, Bosumtwi is where the people return on their way to meet their ancestors. One of the taboos is that the fisherman have to paddle on flat boats that look remarkably like surfboards. It looked a bit tricky to be fair.

To my knowledge, a universal African trait is the involuntary snorts and whinnies that are made to express surprise. In Ghana these vary from ‘esee’ for something that’s a mild turn up for the books to ‘aiieee’ for something that really turns your head. As the bus came over the lip of the hill and we caught our first glimpse of the lake the noises inside the bus would make a hyrax blush. The kids had a top time at the shore too playing games and trying to swim. I was in the water kicking people off the ‘teacher’ dinghy for some hours myself until I felt a sucking on my foot that turned out to be a leach. Slimy creatures that suck your blood tend to put me off swimming, for some reason.

We sang songs and played games on the bus home and lingered in Kumasi so the kids wouldn’t get back in time to do their chores that day. When we eventually rocked up to the village we were about to park when a cry to take the bus on a spin was heard. So we toured the village with the kids singing their hearts out and bragging loudly of their trip to ‘heaven’.

P.S. No snakes, sweets or chickens were stolen during the course of this excursion.

Pearly Gates Application Form

When people tell me that we have done well to come out to Africa and work for peanuts to help the people of a small village in the bush I answer that we’re privileged to be able to come and do this work. I am constantly humbled by the generosity and kind spiritedness of the people of this village. I will be forever grateful that I have had the opportunity to spend this year in Humjibre. How many people can say that they take their dog to the rainforest for a walk?

But, in answer to the question of what do I actually do here, I will list a few things for those who might be interested. We recently opened a brand new library building with 1,400 books which can comfortably seat 50. And it has been packed every night so far. Adjacent to the library is the classroom where I and a couple of local teachers teach an after school programme for Secondary School students. We also opened a computer centre with 10 computers and a fully trained member of the community oversees this. Then we do health projects like outreach and conduct surveys that lead to interventions such as deworming and bednet distribution/ retreatment. We also have set up cocoa cooperatives which are really bearing fruit for farmers now. Plus we have facilitated other livelihood diversification programmes. We also teach a free-to-all programme of Sciences, Math’s and English for students. Then we also help bright and responsible students get to further their education by providing scholarships. I’m proud of the organization and, though it is small, it is perfectly formed.

So there you go St Peter, do we get in?