Getting Down to Work and Touring Accra

Yesterday was our first day meeting with Femi Adeleye, IFES General Secretary for Partnership and Collaboration and our host in Ghana. His office is conveniently located in the guest house where we are staying, so it was very easy to wake up, eat breakfast, and meet in his office. (Considering how insane Accra traffic is, this proximity is a huge blessing.)
The focus of our meeting was to discuss Femi’s position, which is new to IFES, and how we can be of the greatest assistance during the next three weeks. Through our conversation with him, we honed in on two key projects:

1. Provide recommendations on best practices in building sustainable support through examining other organizations as well as national movements within IFES.
   




2. 
   
   Provide recommendations on how IFES can develop an internal web page for sharing best-practices, templates, and other documents to support external outreach and partnership-building.

It was a highly productive meeting and we are excited to have set expectations and deliverables!

In addition, we are going to work with Affy, Femi’s wife, on a project she is doing with HIV/AIDS education in Ghana. We had lunch with Affy and Bernice, the HIV/AIDS educator with GHAFES (Ghana Fellowship of Evangelical Students) and learned that it is difficult to do HIV/AIDS education in Ghana because the government refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem. Of the African countries, Ghana has one of the lowest percentages of people with HIV/AIDS, but in order to maintain this track, more education needs to be done.

We had dinner in the home of T.B. Dankwa, one of the first IFES Regional Directors in Africa, and met the current General Secretary for GHAFES. It was a pleasant evening with a traditional Ghanaian dinner of jollof rice, baked chicken, beef in a spicy tomato sauce, fried plantains, and salad (which we couldn’t eat since it consisted of uncooked vegetables . . . how we long for salad!) We talked about the challenges and opportunities that GHAFES and IFES have faced during the years as well as the changes they are currently experiencing. One key difficulty is that when GHAFES first started at the University of Ghana there were only a handful of Christian organizations on campus and 10-20K students. Now there are 40 Christian organizations and 40,000 students. There is a lot of competition for the involvement and financial commitment of students. GHAFES has seen a plateau in the number of student members and local contributors – despite the growth in the student population. This is something they are trying to figure out.

(Back: T.B., Femi, Sam, Emmanuel, and Virginia (T.B.'s wife)

Front: Kemi, Affy, Dave, Loralynne)

Today we met with the nine GHAFES team members located in Accra. We started with a nice devotional service led by Dave Ivaska, our mission mentor and member of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff in Chicago (He has been instrumental in helping plan our trip and came to Ghana with us for the first week to make introductions). They asked us to share our testimonial about our faith and what we are planning to do in Ghana. It was really moving to tell them about our experiences and see how interested they are in why we have decided to make this trip to Ghana.

After the devotional, Emmanuel, the GHAFES General Secretary, gave us a tour around Accra. Our first stop was a fabric/clothing store so we could get Ghanaian attire. Loralynne found a traditional dress in an orange material, Sam found a shirt with the map of Ghana and the words “Yes We Can”, and we bought black/white materials to have a dress and shirt made so we can attend a funeral. (Funerals are huge public celebrations/all day parties in Ghana and we would like to attend one before we leave to have this cultural experience.) We then went shopping along the street and were quickly surrounded by persistent salesmen selling everything from African masks to limes. We ultimately had to buy a bracelet with the Ghana flag and Sam’s name because the salesman wouldn’t let us close the door to the car without buying it.

We ate lunch at a traditional Ghana restaurant. Sam had fufu (paste made from ground plantain and cassava) with chicken in a peanut soup, and Loralynne had waayke (black bean and rice mixture) with chicken. It was really good!

We then experienced the traffic of downtown Accra. Thankfully, Emmanuel was driving, because it took serious guts to cut into traffic and at times drive on the shoulder of the roads in order to get around the city. We will never complain about Chicago streets and traffic again! Most of the roads aren’t wide enough for two cars to pass, so drivers essentially play “chicken” all the time. There are very few traffic lights, so you have to yield to the bigger vehicle. Oh, and we were stopped by a herd of cattle casually crossing the road! (Not renting a car = good idea.)

We drove by the Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, visited Independence Square where all of the big national events are held, saw the red sand beach, and toured the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to independence from England in 1957 and was elected the first president of the country. He was ultimately overthrown by the military and kicked out of the country, but then brought back posthumously to be buried in his home country. The memorial (see picture below) is designed to look like a tree trunk that was cut off (like his presidency and dream for a united Africa). The statue shows Nkrumah pointing forward to encourage progress. The statues in the fountain are of trumpeters used by tribes to announce when a great leader is coming as well as his death, and they are kneeling to show respect.

Independence Square

Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park

Trumpeters

In honor of Obama's visit to Accra, there are billboards everywhere with pictures of President Obamas and President John Atta Mills, President of Ghana, and the word "Akwaaba" which means "Welcome" in Twi. There are more pictures of Obama in Accra than we saw in Chicago during his Presidential campaign!

It was a very insightful day and we greatly appreciate that Emmanuel took the time to show us around Accra and share his culture with us!

**One special note: if you’re following this, we’d love to hear your thoughts and questions. Please feel free to type a comment on the blog. We hope this can become more of a dialog than a monologue!