By jamfanous
April 1st: Discuss any updates with your volunteer work/research, any challenges you have faced, and any accomplishments you are particularly proud of. Have there been any current international or domestic issue that have affected your volunteer work/research, has your work become more relevant or has it been overshadowed? What kind of impact do you think you are making on the local community and do you think that impact will have a lasting affect?
The Waste Management Project has made a lot of progress in the past weeks, we are hoping to have the project fully completed by the end of April.
This past month has been all about making connections with the community.
Firstly, in order to start a project in Ni Boii Town you must send a ‘letter of intent’ to various individuals in the community including: the chief/ traditional leader, metro education and health offices, metro assembly, the Community Directed Development Association as well as school administrators. It’s all a simple formality for everyone in community to be aware of our work and to give them the opportunity to object or ask any questions.
Then, with the help of one of the teachers at St. Anthony, Faustina, we set up an assembly with the students at the school purely to introduce ourselves. Side-note: Faustina has helped us out the most since we began work with St. Anthony’s: she has introduced us to everyone at the school (the head mistress, fellow teachers, etc), she organized the assembly we had last week and runs the CDDA students club at the school. On the day of the assembly, the kids were extremely well behaved and gathered around us under a few trees at the school (the school doesn’t have a large enough facility to hold all the students). All the teachers were so great, they introduced us, explained why we were there as well as told the kids to be patient with our accents when we spoke. Once I started talking they all instantly laughed, most of them have never seen a white person or have heard an America accent so obviously we made them all a little giddy. Regardless, the assembly went extremely well, we talked about our project, told the students how they could help, and educated them a little about composting and recycling. We established a weekly “Environmental Science’ class to teach the kids about recycling, up-cycling and various other environmental activities that might be useful.
Concerning all the logistics of our project, we are still in the process of making those connections. We have plans in the next week to meet with several organizations that might be willing to pick up sachets and other plastics from the school. It has certainly been a challenge finding organizations willing to pick up plastics from the school; most of the up-cycling organizations have individuals bring them directly to the factory. We have found several nurseries in the area and hope to find one willing to donate some flowers and/or fruiting trees this week. Aside from those two issues, we have most of the work done. I hope that within the next three weeks we can get all those things together and be ready to bring the materials over to St. Anthony’s School.
The biggest challenging thus far is working in a less efficient environment. It is certainly difficult coming from a very scheduled western society to a more relaxed slower paced culture. While here, I have done my best not to compare Ghana and America however when it comes to working with several different organizations to get this project done it has been very difficult to schedule or arrange meetings. Sometimes it takes up to a week to nail down a meeting time, whereas in the US determining a meeting time with an organization normally wont take more than an hour or a few emails. Unfortunately, since the electricity is not reliable people do not depend on email thus most communication is through phone calls or visits. Nevertheless, we have had a lot of positive energy from the people we have worked with so it has made up for the frustration.
Overall, we really hope that our Waste Management Project will be carried over when we leave Ghana. The underlining theme of this project was sustainability and we hope we can motivate the students and teachers enough for them continue and grow from our project. Not only would we like to see the school have a better waste management system but also have the students and teachers carry over the practice to their communities. In fact, we now have a reprehensive from Women For Africa, shadowing us while we conduct our project, in hopes to learn from us and carry the practice over to different communities.