Cath's attempt at a World Tour.

This week was a quiet one in the office as we attended 2 goalball events and PAGSUNG/Youth Alive’s mid-term review. The other project in Ghana, which I have mentioned before, is REACT who had 2 groups, 1 in Tamale and the other in Sandema near Youth Alive. This was their last week in Ghana and featured two goalball events that their project was building up to: a regional competition and a national competition. PAGSUNG attended the nearby regional competition at Tamale Polytechnic University while Youth Alive supported the Sandema team. The regional matches were between the different goalball teams from the communities that they have been working with, the winner of the regional progressed to the national competition on Thursday. During their time here, REACT’s focus was ch allenging the disability stigma. “In Ghana, over 300,000 live with a severe visual impairment. They're often undervalued by those around them - and as a result, excluded by society. All because of a ...

Tuesday was our first awareness raising event for this cohort. We are working with 3 communities and have 15 volunteers so split the group into 3 groups of 5 and we all went into the communities to do an event linked with an international day. We felt the most relevant one during our time here was Day of the Families. Like in the UK, families do vary from home to home. However, I have found the nuclear family is most common here with a mother, father and multiple children. Furthermore, it is common for extended family like grandparents and aunts/uncles to live together or nearby. Tamale and the surrounding area is a majority Muslim region and they do practice  polygamy here, so it isn’t unusual to find a household with a husband and multiple wives. One of our volunteers lives in this kind of family unit in a complex that contains 27 members. http://www.un.org/en/events/familyday/index.shtml - “ Although families all over the world have transformed greatly over the past deca...

One of the things team leaders do at the beginning of cohorts is complete a team planning tool to outline the targets over the 10 weeks. The volunteers then use this to create a 10-week timetable allowing them to effectively manage their time while they are here. We are the 4 th  cohort (3 previous and a pilot cohort) to work with PAGSUNG and are going to be the last. The pilot cohort is the most difficult because you don’t have any contacts or previous data to work from which is what the REACT group are now (they are doing a great job though). Our project is split into the following areas: Needs assessments – volunteers design and deliver needs assessments with local schools, within our PAGSUNG centre and out in the communities to ensure the sessions they deliver are relevant to the people we work with. Any areas that are too ambitious for us, we compile in a report to be sent to local NGOs or International Service themselves. Raising Awareness sessions – we plan and deliv...

This week we visited the 3 communities we will be working with on this cohort – Pagazaa, Zobogu and Zakaliyili. Each of the communities has a group of PAGSUNG women who produce shea butter or shea soap to help generate income for their families. This is especially important in the dry season when there isn’t much farming to do. As you might be able to see from the below pictures, the land is quickly transforming into a greener and more viable farming landscape. The children are on spring break until Monday and then, those who can, will return to school while others will prepare the land with their communities, so they can harvest as much as they can in this ongoing yearly cycle. Working here requires you to be flexible and adaptable so there was a slight hiccup when we arrived in the first community as they weren’t aware of our arrival so hadn’t gathered. However, news quickly spread and as we drove the 2km to the next community to drop off the second group, they were already pl...