Goodbye Accra - Hello Village!

Last day in the Ghanaian capital city of Accra.
The past four months are still a surreal experience, with incredible amounts of learning and discovering coming in bundles. Crowds of people, hailing trotros, being overwhelmingly a minority, learning a new language, volunteering in an NGO (SISS) and an economic development company (DAI)... Much of which was shared here in this blog.
Though still making sense of how all of this will be applied in the next few years is a continuous process, Ghana has left a great first impression. Mixed feelings are part of any long-term cultural experience, and believe me, ten calls of oburoni a day get old after a few months. However, the value of this gap year, as my group mate Cam put it, is a blank check from Princeton University.
Accra has given me a clear understanding of what development deficiencies are, and a much better perspective of how well structured Brazil is. The city and its friendly people provided exclusive opportunities, such as learning to play a traditional drum and making friends in public transport.

I would like to thank all who have taken the time to read parts of this adventure - this is only the halfway mark. People from over thirty countries have visited, and I am very happy to provide not only a glimpse to the world of what Ghana is, but also to develop an understanding of what I am living here.

Though internet access in the village will be much rarer, I promise to do my best to keep up the once a week posting pattern.

The village is about an hour away from Kumasi, the most important city in the Ashanti region of Ghana. The Ashantis were once a mighty empire, stretching to the Ivory Coast and Benin, in an area larger than the present-day country. After clashes with the British Empire, towards the end of the transatlantic slave trade, their size was reduced.
The Ashanti people, however, remain the proud majority of the Ghanaian populace. I look forward to learning more about their customs and traditions; comparing the kpanlogo drumming techniques I have learned from Ga's and Ewe's, witnessing the art of Kente weaving, and even carrying buckets of water on my head.

It's now time to leave the city. We're off to explore the bush.

Volunteering  in Accra was a very fortunate combination: first working with the grassroots at SISS, teaching residents from slums, and then in the USAID-funded, food security project AFRICA LEAD. The opposing approaches (much to the same goal - development) have led to a questioning of motives, and a deeper sense of identity and what fuels me.
There is a sense of goal-achieving that could not be obtained before a hands-on experience. As I recently read in an excellent book on social entrepreneurship, How To Change The World, by David Bornstein (great content, not-so-much title), institutions that work towards socioeconomic development rarely get scrutinized for effectiveness. It is as if the motives cancel-out the need for delivering competitive results, when it should be the absolute opposite: an amplification of commitment to excellency, for the sheer importance of the work.

It is with this mindset that I will approach the second-half of the program. Living in an African village, teaching children in local schools, all that sounds wonderful. But it goes to no avail if there is not a private-sector-like urgency for results, in this case, from myself.

Embarking in a new journey,

Kwame