This is a really long post

Hey guys, sorry that I’ve been MIA for so long, once again. I’ve been extremely busy. Towards the end of January I put on a workshop for teachers in Akosombo. Then in February, before Valentine’s Day, I put on 3 HIV/AIDS workshops with a V-day theme in Koforidua. The 3^rd week in February I attended a training review conference in Accra (the capital) where we planned the pre-service training for the next group of volunteers coming to Ghana. The next week, I stayed in Accra and worked with a committee to re-evaluate all of the training and resource materials given to health and water sanitation volunteers. Since I had an important meeting in Accra at the beginning of the following week, I decided to spend a long weekend at the beach with a group of friends. March 6^th was Ghana’s Independence Day, so there were big celebrations all over Ghana. In Accra there was a huge celebration at Independence Square (a huge monument to Ghana’s Independence). Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957, and was the 1^st Sub-Saharan country in Africa to do so. Next year will be the 50^th anniversary of Ghana’s independence, and heads of state from all over the world will be here. This year the celebration was still pretty big, though. We briefly attended the crowded celebration in Accra, which had huge bands and military personnel in full regalia and stuff like that. Something that I thought was a little bizarre was that they have school children, in their uniforms, march around military style, like soldiers, all very precise and kinda creepy. We only stayed at the official celebration for a little while, then we went to some nearby villages and saw the celebrations there. The school children in the villages marched too, but weren’t very good at it, and had problems with timing and coordination, and were actually very cute. Not at all like the creepy kids in the capital who looked like a miniature army. Well hey, nothing says democracy like marching, I mean, err, education.

So I had my big meeting last week, and a few others, and am now back at my site, in Koforidua. I spent my entire day cleaning my house and washing my clothes. I had been gone for a while, and the amount of dust/dirt in my house was unbelievable! It’s all but impossible to have a dust and/or dirt free house for more than a day. By the next day, it’s already getting dusty and dirty again because there’s so much dust and dirt in the air, and there’s no AC, so you have to keep the windows open (all covered with mosquito netting, of course). It also takes me an eternity to wash my clothes, since it all has to be done by hand. And considering all the dust and dirt, your clothes get really dirty really quickly. But now my house is clean (more or less), and my clothes are clean (more or less), so I’m taking time to update you special people on the happenings in my life.

The teacher’s workshop in Akosombo in January went very well. I was really surprised by how little the teachers knew about HIV/AIDS. I mean, these people are teachers, they’re supposed to be educated, right? Guess not. But they were very interested in the topics and very receptive. I taught them, first of all, how to protect themselves from HIV. The UN estimates that over 1 million students lose their teachers to AIDS every year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, which affects the quality of the education system. Without quality education, there can be no development, and without development, Africa has no escape from poverty, so 1^st I taught the teachers what HIV/AIDS is, how it’s transmitted, and how to protect themselves. Then I taught them how to teach their students about HIV/AIDS and tailor the messages to different age groups. We also talked about girl empowerment and the importance of keeping girls in school. Many families in Africa only send boys to school, and keep the girls home to do housework. But studies have shown that a girl who finishes grammar school is 4 to 5 times less likely to contract HIV than a girl who drops out. And Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN, and a Ghanaian, once said that “girl power is Africa’s own vaccine against HIV.” So I encouraged the teachers to encourage their female students. Sugar daddies are a real problem here too; a girl will have sex with an older man in exchange for money for school fees which her family won’t give her, sometimes for as little as around 50 cents. It’s really tragic, but the workshop went really well and many of the teachers asked me to come speak at their schools, which I’ll try to do as soon as I have the time.

The workshop was held in a beautiful open-air church on a mountainside in Akosombo, over looking Lake Volta. Akosombo is the site of the hydro-electric dam which is Ghana’s main source of electricity. Because of an extended drought, the water levels in Lake Volta (the world’s largest artificial lake) are extremely low and the dam is not producing enough electricity to satisfy demand. One of the other reasons I haven’t updated my blog in so long is that even in the capital city, Accra, the electricity goes out on a daily basis, usually for at least several hours. Power cuts here are humorously called “lights out,” and are part of everyone’s life here. After the workshop in Akosombo, we went to see the dam, which was pretty impressive, especially considering it was built over 40 years ago in the middle-of-nowhere in Africa.

The next major even I undertook (in addition to the talks on HIV/AIDS I give at schools and churches several times a week) was the V-Day HIV/AIDS workshop. I wanted to do a workshop for apprentices, young people who are learning a trade, are usually uneducated, and very poor, and so they are especially vulnerable. HIV/AIDS education in Africa is now trying to focus on behavioral change communication, so that we don’t just educate people about HIV/AIDS, but also help people understand that they are at risk and convince them to change their behavior in order to protect themselves. Part of this is to tailor presentations to specific audiences. So we did 2 workshops for female apprentices, mostly seamstresses and hairdressers, and 1 workshop for male apprentices, mostly carpenters and mechanics. For the female apprentices, the presenters were all females, and for the male apprentices, the presenters were almost all males. I trained individuals at my NGO to give the presentations, which were all in the local language, Twi. We talked about HIV transmission, prevention, testing and counseling, as well as stigmatization and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS, and some HIV positive individuals gave presentations and told their stories. We also talked a bit about pressures associated with V-Day and how to make good decisions. Overall, the workshops went really well. There were some challenges, of course, and some surprising issues which I wasn’t expecting. Some of the people who attended claimed that HIV is spread by juju magic, or curses, and I found it surprisingly difficult to convince them otherwise. Although, in the end, with the help of my colleagues, I think they were convinced. It’s still remarkable though, that people still believe in voodoo and juju.

In Ghana, everyone is religious. Everyone is Christian, Muslim, or holds traditional beliefs, i.e. paganism. The south is mostly Christian, the middle of the country is a mix, and the north mostly Muslim, with traditional beliefs held mainly in secluded, sacred, traditional areas. Ghanaians do not understand the ideas of agnosticism and atheism. They literally can’t conceive that there are people who don’t believe in any god. Religion is a huge part of everyone’s life here. Every Ghanaian goes to church, the mosque, or the shrines, every single week, usually for services lasting 3 or 4 or more hours, and they love it. (I guess it’s their only form of entertainment, in a way). And there’s a great deal of religious tolerance, there is little religious discrimination. Almost all shops and stores all over the country are given religious names: Jesus Saves Barber Shop, God is Watching Motor Repairs, There is Only Allah Tailoring, and so on. But the really bizarre part is that Christians and Muslims alike still believe in curses. A few weeks ago, in a crowded market in Accra, someone claimed that a woman was turned into a chicken, and a huge crowd gathered around the chicken, the man who claimed he saw it, and the man he claimed had cursed the woman. In less than an hour, 1000s of people were screaming and yelling and arguing over the issue. Eventually, the police took over the situation and both men and the chicken were taken to the police headquarters to sort the mess out. The next day, the headline on the front page of the most widely circulated newspaper in Ghana was “Woman Turned Into Chicken.” I brought the subject up to my university-educated, church-going, god-fearing Ghanaian colleagues. And their response? “I know, can you believe it? In this day and age, in 2006, people are still being turned into chickens! They should send that man to jail! I hope the chicken gets turned back to a woman eventually…” Oy vey.

As a final note, I’ll be attending a conference on HIV/AIDS in Accra next week, sponsored by the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. It should be good.