When I enrolled in the Trent in Ghana program in 2004, I was looking for an adventure, and to experience first hand the “developing world” which was the topic of my International development Studies courses. At the time, however, I had little idea of pursuing a career in the field. I saw IDS as an enriching complement to my anthropology major and was engaged and concerned by the social justice issues we discussed in class. However, if my courses had taught me anything it was that when it came to international development, nobody had “the answers” – so many well-intentioned initiatives seemed to end in failure, so many explanations of underdevelopment seemed to be disproved. I was convinced that global inequality was so deeply entrenched that there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. Never the less, I wanted to go to Ghana to learn what “development” actually looked like in the flesh.
I still remember the heavy feeling of the hot, humid night air hitting my skin as we stepped out on to the tarmac in Accra. I remember my first glimpse, picked out in the headlights of the van that had met us a the airport, of women walking down the road ahead of us with loads on their heads. I remember the utter confusion of the first bewildering trip to a market. I quickly realized I had stepped in to another world, a world in which I didn’t know how to do anything by myself – buy a sandwich, catch a bus, bathe with a single bucket of water. At first, I was tentative in everything I did. I counted on one of my fellow students to guess which tro-tro to take home from school, to negotiate the price of an orange, to make plans for a weekend trip. Gradually, however, I began to realize I was perfectly capable of navigating this new world if I could just remember to laugh when I made a complete fool out of myself. I grew comfortable in Accra.
By Christmas, I felt ready to throw myself in to the deep end and see what happened. As our stimulating courses at the University of Ghana drew to a close, I decided to push my personal boundaries by pursuing my second semester internship away from other members of the TIG group. The organization I selected, the Neighbour in Need Foundation (mysteriously abbreviated to “NENFOUND”), was listed in our TIG hand book as an organization which a Trent student had been with two years before. The handbook stated that “students who have interned with NENFOUND in the past have sometimes had the opportunity to run their own projects”, which sounded intriguing. That, and the fact that it was located in a small rural northern town called Walewale, two hours north of Tamale, was literally all the information I had. After several attempts to call the organization’s office on its unreliable phone line, all arrangements for the next three months of my life were made in a three-minute crackling telephone conversation with somebody named Malik. Just as much as when I first boarded the plane for Ghana, had no idea what I was getting myself in to.
Walewale was a true cultural immersion experience – I was one of only five non-Ghanaians in the sizable rural town. I lived in mud a hut of my own on a little compound owned by the organization, learned to make dinner with what I could find at the local market (every third day) in dry season and was welcomed warmly in to NENFOUND. After a week of hanging around their tiny closet of an office with its one ancient computer, getting to know the half a dozen regular staff and visiting a few project villages, it became clear that nobody knew what to do with me. The organization was mostly subsisting on a contract with the Northern Water and Sanitation Project to educate village members about how to care for their new bore-hole wells, and as I didn’t speak the local language of Mamprusi there was little I could do. Finally, my colleague Malik told me about a local bonesetter in a rural village called Logari near by, who was widely used as a preferred (and largely more successful) alternative to the tiny understaffed local hospital, and who needed better facilities to house his patients. A former Trent intern two years before, Rebecca Butler, had helped to organize the building of a few rooms, and Malik suggested perhaps I could do something to help.
I was inspired by my meeting with the bonesetter Gumrana (although we spoke no mutual language), and did end up throwing myself blindly in to trying to “do something”. With him and Malik I drew up a project plan, got quotes from a hardware store and developed a rough budget in consultation with local contractors. We had no funding source, so I started asking anyone I could think of for money – various departments at the district government offices, every contact I had in Accra and Tamale, my family and friends in Canada. In the end, we were able to cobble together about $3000 (the bulk of it raised by my younger sister at her Toronto high school!) and after weeks of running around the town with Malik purchasing supplies, managing a tiny bank account, tracking down unreliable contractors and begging the deputy district chief for just one more truck-load of water (our scarcest resource, it turned out) to mix the mud and concrete, the project was finished and two solid new mud buildings with bright tin roofs stood in the village of Loagri when I left for the last time.
This unusual first haphazard initiation in to project management, and my relationships with my Ghanaian colleagues and an inspiring traditional healer were enriching and rewarding, but what has stayed with me the most four years later has been the perspective of “development” from a tiny, well-meaning, vastly under-resourced local grassroots organization. I had believed that “international development” was a hopeless cause, but now I saw what a group of dedicated individuals, working at the local level to help their own neighbours, could do. These individuals truly understood local needs, and were often brilliant at predicting whether large-scale development projects would be successful in their community or not, because they had a grasp of local context which larger scale development planners simply didn’t. Moreover, they were uniquely accountable to their “beneficiaries” as they saw them daily in social situations! However, I also came to understand the huge structural barriers such individuals and organizations face. My colleagues had minimal education (high school, at the most), had no wealthy or powerful connections, had a single computer which barely turned on – so producing an impressive and successful funding proposal to submit anywhere was next to impossible.
I left Ghana with an increased feeling of optimism regarding the concept of development, and a sense of purpose that wouldn’t let me walk away from the field of international development after all. I excelled in my final year of university in Canada because I had a new, deepened perspective to bring to each of my courses and essays, a new set of issues I was passionate about. After graduation, the Trent in Ghana experience on my resume helped me to earn a competitive CIDA-funded internship in India with World Literacy of Canada, which eventually led to a job as their overseas program manager at the Toronto office. After three years with World Literacy of Canada I have now returned to university to pursue my Masters. I am particularly interested in inequalities in education in developing countries and how these reproduce social stratification – an interest which has grown gradually out of my reflections on my experience in Ghana with NENFOUND as well as my professional experiences since then. I hope I may even have the opportunity to return to Ghana once more to conduct research for my Masters thesis – I can’t wait to go back!