The Resting Place

I live and work in the village of Humjibre in the Western Region district of Ghana. Geographically speaking the village is located in the humid semi tropical south west, bordering Cote d’Ivoire. Humjibre translates as ‘the resting place’, so named because travelers from the north used to stop here to sup from a reliable and still-sacred spring. The village is set in lush green surroundings and due to the importance of the spring there are large swathes of ‘pristine’ rainforest on the hills overlooking it. The main cash crop is cocoa, but maize, groundnuts, palm oil, tomatoes, oranges and plaintain are also in abundance. The people are as odd as any other remote African village, but then they think this of the ‘obruni’ (white man) also.

I live with my ‘concubine’ Ilona, aka the hungry I, the never sufficiently praised I, the bean-counting I, etc etc. We have a fan, a radio which can occasionally pick up the world service, a chess board, a water tank, two guitars and a deep pit toilet. It’s not luxurious, but its home.

We work for an organization called Ghana Health and Education Initiative (http://www.ghei.org/). I oversee a library, computer centre, supplemental English programme and vocational training centre. The resourceful I is in charge of health education projects such as outreach events, peer education, World Aids Day celebrations, and administering Band Aids to my blistered fingers. The organization is one that would that would cheer up most development pessimists, including ourselves, and is run by an urbane, intelligent, ABBA fanatic Ghanaian who generally goes by his ‘slave name’ of Clement Donkor (alternatively, he is called ‘Assembly’ by the villagers due to his former political career and Yao Gyapong by his family, because, well that’s kinda his real name, which is a long story). We are confronted by problems shared by NGOs across the ‘south’, i.e. power shortages, political apathy and corruption, chickens disturbing your meetings, local indifference, technological isolation and lack of pens. In the next year, we hope to build a new and bigger library, expand the computer centre and extend the health education projects to local villages. In the medium term, the ambition is to turn management of the project over to the Ghanaians that are working with us. Or at least, that was the original aim, but Clement now has this crazy idea that we should turn the place into an eco tourism venture, but then, he’d be bored without access to a regular stream of foreigners with their strange ways.