Cath's attempt at a World Tour.

Another busy week down in Sagnarigu with 2 appearances on 2 different radio stations to raise awareness about various Human Rights issues. We have our second awareness raising event in our communities next week so like to do as much promotion as possible. Furthermore, as International Service is a human rights-based charity focussing on women, children and people with disabilities, it is a development area that is central to our purpose here. So far, we have covered areas like culture vs human rights, children’s rights (e.g. education, labour and protection), mental health rights and the right to justice.   This Friday was the end of week 6 of 10 for this cohort. In keeping with tradition, both groups currently in Ghana, met in Bolgatanga for our mid-term event to discuss our progress so far, share ideas and just generally see how everyone was doing. It was great to see everyone, and we got to have our cultural visit to nearby Tongo Hills as a reward for the afternoon. As usu...

Our main event this week was visiting our communities Nwagu, Limo and Gupanarigu to deliver an event raising awareness about Sexual Health and Reproduction (to tie in with the International day on 12/02). The volunteers worked hard together to plan roleplays on consent, family planning, menstrual health and protecting against STIs. They performed these in Dagbani as this is the main and sometimes only language in our communities. However, using drama as a medium to educate meant everyone could get involved. We would perform a good example and a bad example then invite the audience to participate with questions. In relation to consent, this meant a scene where the wife was making dinner and the husband came in, demanded sex and took her away even though she asked not to. This was followed by a scene where the husband asks again but the wife is busy and declines which he accepts and supports. A mixture of culture and religion means it is acceptable for a husband (if that is how he choo...

This has been our busiest and most successful week so far. It started with a lot of planning in the office and we just kept up the momentum until we could all have a much-deserved rest this weekend. After much preparation and rehearsal, on Wednesday afternoon, we headed into town and got dropped off near a wall that seemed no more special than any other wall in Tamale. Our suspicions began to rise but soon we were greeted by a man in a Star Wars T-shirt who it turned out had no idea what Star Wars was. We followed him down a few side streets and entered a corner house with a mirrored door into a tiny reception room with a neighbouring curtained off 10ft square room complete with creaky stage. Our UK volunteer, in-country volunteer, in-country team leader and project partner began to receive “star” treatment and got their makeup done (the make-up was too dark for Ben so he got a hair tousle and a wet wipe). Then they took to the stage to talk about ICS, PAGSUNG and female empowerment....

This week we visited the 3 communities that we will be focussing our project on. PAGSUNG has over 1,500 members spread out over the Northern region of Ghana. We are the 3 rd ICS cohort to work with PAGSUNG and each one works with 3 new communities. The main focus of each group is to train the women on how to make high quality shea butter (this will improve their profits), raising awareness in the communities about important issues such as sexual health and human rights and training select women to be peer educators, so they can train the women in their community, overall making the projects more sustainable. On Tuesday, we all came to the office for 8am to be on the mini-bus for 8.30am. However, as this country runs on GMT (Ghana Man Time), the bus arrived at 9.15 am and we set off after having to run back to the office as we forgot some things. It took about 45 minutes to reach the first one, Nwagu, which involved 30 minutes of driving through the orange dust roads after leavi...