National Broadcast Law Stakeholders Workshop

on friday i took a little suitcase to work so i could leave at lunch for sogakope. i walked to the bus station from my office using a terrible little map my boss had drawn me on a small piece of paper and went the wrong way. i would have walked for hours in that direction if i hadnt run into a guy i recognised from some meeting at work on the street. his name is francis and he works for the ghana newsagency which is like a newswire or something. anyway he was very friendly and walked me to the bus station, which was in the complete opposite direction from the way i was going.

the bus was about three hours late arriving, which is pretty normal around here. nothing is ever on time and nobody really worries about it. everything always shows up, sometimes it just takes a really long time. it was a pretty interesting ride. i sat next to a monk/missionary from the ivory coast. i dont know the name of the religion he was a missionary for, but it was an indian one and he taught meditation and yoga. yogi something? i dunno. his name was mantra somehting something. he repeated it a few times but it was long and a few days ago so i forget it.

anyway, you wouldnt think that i would have much to talk about with a man from the ivory coast, dressed in long flowing robes, who practised some indian religion, but he had been posted in los angeles and chicago by his organisation for the past five years so and was just back visiting west africa for a month or so. he turned out to be a really cool guy. he taught me about how reincarnation works and what the mantra "ohm" means. he can never see his family anymore, can never marry, eat meat or do a lot of other things, but he was very down to earth somehow and not preachy at all.

when we stopped in the town of sogakope, the bus was rushed by like twenty people all selling bread. this is also quite normal in ghana. every stoplight, highway rest stop and town is full of dozens of people selling things to passing motorists. i said good bye to mantra and had to fight my way through the bread people off the bus and walk three kilometres back down the highway and another kilometre down a dirtroad to get to the hotel. everyone i saw was very friendly and very confused as to why i was walking. i guess most obrunis get driven places in sogakope.

the hotel was like a resort. it was right on the volta river and had a group of peacocks that roamed around the grounds. reeeally loud birds. the food was really good and the drinks were free for conference people. i had air conditioning, hot water, a tv and a bathroom to myself for the first time in a month which was pretty sweet. i was one of the only people to arrive on friday night so the resort was pretty empty and i had the whole place to myself.

saturday morning the conference started. it was pretty terrifying. i got in for breakfast at 7am and was the only white person and the youngest by over twenty years, which is what i expected i guess. but i still felt really out of place. the conference started with presentations about the need for a broadcasting law in ghana and a summary of previous cvonsulations with stakeholders. being a stakeholder is a pretty good life. the presentations were a bit boring but there was a lot of free food and drinks and the open forum parts of the conference were really interesting because people would get really passionate and argue about really ridiculous things.

in the afternoon i did group work. before we started the organiser of the whole workshop approached me and said that nana, my boss had promised that i would make lots of input, which i hadnt yet because it was so intimidating and there was lots of yelling. so i felt obligated to make some comments in our group. my group was pretty prestigious. on my right was the director for all of legal drafting in ghana, to my left was the director of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, and across from me was the director of the ministry of information. and then there was me the intern from the small human rights ngo. somehow i managed to build up the courage to say some stuff about canadian broadcast law and how similar principles should be used in ghana and the group agreed with me and included some of the things i said in our final recommendations. so i earned my keep to some extent and i think i staisfied the organiser.

today, sunday, the whole thing ended around two oclock everyone went to this little room to sign some forms for the conference organisers. i didnt really understnd what i was signing until they handed me an envelope and thanked me for coming. the envelope, everyone got one, was full of cash. i was being paid for coming to the conference. they called the money a "transportation fee" but it was the equivalent of about 100$ and transportation only cost me about 4$. so it was like a payoff for coming to the conference which apparently is common practice in ghana. i couldnt believe it. there were like 50 people at the conference and five thousand dolalrs in ghana is a lot of money. i was thinking that this money could definitely be put to better use. but i got a drive back to accra with a guy named peter who i got to know over the weekend and he said that it was very normal and that although there are some ethical issues around the practice it keeps workshops like these running. otherwise no one would come. its pretty sad.

today when i got home no one was around so i took a long walk through some neighborhoods i hadnt been through before. i went to the ocean near my house for the first time to see it for myself. everyone says its gross and not worth seeing btu i wanted to see the water anyway. i should have stayed away. it was kind of in a slum and the beach was literally covered in garbage and goats eating the garbage. it was basically the neighborhood dump. to make matters worse i saw about a dozen people squatting down the beach bareass naked. its a huge public toilet. so i decided to go home.

a video of Accra after the Black Stars beat the US

ghana beat the US yesterday to move on to the next round. after the game, and most of the evening and night, the whole city was in the streets. this is a link to a video i took of one of the main streets in Accra, Oxford Street, about two hours after the game.

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid
=4AFE0A795925E1F7

this is my first time using this website so i dont know if it will actually work. let me know if it does or doesnt.

big day, big weekend

you'd think that today is the biggest day in Ghanaian history the way some newspapers are reporting. Ghana plays the US this afternoon and the whole country is taking the afternoon off work. the excitement here is more than we can imagine for hockey playoffs or anything comparable. people are psyched. if Ghana wins today they will go onto the next round and the whole country will go crazy. i cant wait.

yesterday there was a major protest on the street near our building. a bunch of students, well hundreds of them, all dressed in red were protesting their lecturers being on strike. i think they wanted the government to pay the lecturers more so they would come back or something like that. anyway along with the hundreds of protesters, some of whom were lying in the middle of traffic, were dozens of policemen in riot gear, and on horses and with their usual ak-47s. for a while i was wondering how police deal with protests in this country and was starting to worry when the protesters started not moving when the police told them to. but things were peaceful and eventually they left. it was cool though, i felt like an international observer.

so i found out on tuesday that this weekend im going to Sogakope, which is town two hours east of accra, to a government workshop. my boss can't go so she is sending me in her place. the workshop is called the "broadcasting law stakeholders workshop" so i guess that i qualify as a stakeholder. we've been invited by the government to have some input into the new proposed broadcast legislation. MPs, media people and all sorts of civil society will be there. and i have to go by myself. ive been thinking about it in two very different ways.

on the one hand i get an all-expenses paid weekend at a fancy hotel, but on the other im going to be the only obruni there, the youngest person by 20 years and i am expected to make contributions to the discussions or else nana won;t be invited to anymore workshops. Nana also mentioned to the organiser that my father is in broadcasting law in Canada, so they expect me to be a semi-expert in canadian regulatory law, which im definitely not.

so this will be an interesting weekend.

weekend in kumasi

i was picked up at 5am on thursday morning by a driver named Ebenezer for a five hour drive to kumasi, ghana's second biggest city. we then picked up other interns (Chris from Scotland and Ruth from Ireland) before picking up Nana and starting the trip. you'd think that the roads between the two major cities in the country would be in decent shape but they werent. the trip wouldve taken two and a half hours on Canadian highways but took over five because of the large stretches of construction which were more like sections of unpaved potholed dirt roads that had been left to deteriorate for years. anyway it took a long time.

we got in around 1130 and checked into our rooms at the Civil service training centre which was the building housing the conference that we were attending. Nana was putting on a two-day workshop for the directors and higher-ups at the NCCE which is the government agency which educates the population on their constitutional rights. She was supposed to educate them on human rights in general with a focus on women's rights in Ghana. We, the interns, were there to learn and help Nana facilitate the workshop by taking notes on a flipchart of whatever was being said. we also organised group discussions to a certain extent.

anyway, the workshop was pretty incredible. Nana gave lectures but the crowd would jump in all the time and there would be long debates in the middle of each lecture. at least every ten minutes someone would make a joke and the entire crowd of like sixty high-level bureaucrats would burst into wild laughter that would last a minute or two. it was the most entertaining lecture ive ever been to.

the most interesting part about the whole thing,was that Nana was discussing some issues that these people had never openly talked about before, things like rape and spousal abuse. it was amazing to hear some of the comments being made by well-educated people about what constitutes rape. people were laughing and going nuts throughout the whole talk, like the things Nana was saying were hilarious and crazy.

at one point nana brought up an example of an infringment of a woman's right to mobility. in the northern part of Ghana, women are not allowed to cross a certain river on Tuesday or if they have their period. the law has to do with some ancient cutsom. the story goes that if the woman looks into the river when she is on a boat the boat will be attacked by crocodiles and everyone on board will die. that sort of thing sounds pretty ridiculous to us and it did to Nana and to about half the crowd. however, a lot of people in the crowd really truly believed it. the director of the whole NCCE at one point got up in front of all the crowd and said in a booming voice to nana, "if you do not believe it, then YOU cross the river on your period and see what happens to you!" at which point half of the crowd laughed because they knew it was crazy but the other half nodded as if they firmly believed she would kill everyone on borad. this country has a long way to go. so many human rights are infringed because of traditional beliefs.

so that was a crazy two days. when nana and the other interns left on friday for accra i stayed in kumasi and checked into a really cool little guesthouse where i spent the rest of the day watching soccer with the hotel guys and reading my book. anne and kristin arrived in Kumasi late friday night and we woke up early the next morning to go to the kejetia market.

the market was pretty indescribable. there are about 10000 people selling anything you could imagine in a space of 12 hectares, however much that is. overflowing is the best adjective ive heard to describe kejetia. i put some pictures up on the photos page which you can get through the link next to this entry that says my photos. here's an idea tho.

I also took like ten videos which I will share with people when I get home. The market was massive. we got kind of lost and just walked and walked for hours through tiny aisles, and along train tracks full of people yelling. we all bought Ghana headbands which had "black stars" written on them (the name of Ghana's world cup team) and so every ten seconds or so we would hear “ehhh Ghana!” or “hey you support the black stars?” It was the day of the game against Czech so people were very excited that obrunis were supporting the black stars and we were the only obrunis we saw all day. At one point people started cheering as we walked by and chanting some combination of black stars or Ghana or obruni for a looong time. Anne said it best when she said that it was like we were celebrities. Quite simply, people love obrunis who love Ghana. everyone was overjoyed to see us and wanted to give us high-fives. i gave out a lot of high-fives.

So at the market I bought some fabric to get a shirt made and I bought some second hand tshirts which were pretty cool. I also got a slingshot which works really well and – 6 fowler take note – a little Ghanaian hunting knife. Anne bought a truckload of fabric, she is admittedly addicted to the stuff.

After the market we went to find a place to watch the Ghana game. Some guy on the street named Rati or something like that, said that we should come with him to a ghanaian bar to watch, which we did. He took us to this little bar packed with Ghanaians where we were the only obrunis which was very cool. The drinks were really cheap and tv sucked but it didn’t matter because the atmosphere was so good. When Ghana scored, the entire bar erupted and people started jumping around and dancing screaming for like two minutes. The same thing happened for the second goal. I high-fived a large man wearing a toga. Ill never forget that.

After the game the whole bar and city burst into an amazing celebration. Every car was honking, everyone was yelling, and dancing in the streets. Taxis were swerving down the road in celebration. Anyway, it was madness and everyone was yelling at us again because of our bandanas. Little kids, old ladies and everyone else was equally excited. The whole country got an incredible boost which you could feel in the streets after the game. If Ghana beats the US on Thursday they will go through to the next round and I’m sure the party will be even crazier.

My fingers hurt. More in a few days

i fell down a manhole

when i finished writing my last post it was dark out and i had to catch a cab. i was at the german technical corporation building in Accra's "financial district", which is near where i work everyday but i had never seen it at night before. this city has no streetlights and so everything is dark at night except for the lights from buildings. the area was pretty much deserted on a saturday night at eight pm so no buildings had lights on (the sun sets in Ghana at around 6pm every night, because we're so close to the equator). It was like a blackout except for the occasional lights of a passing car. so i was at an intersection trying to flag down a cab when all of sudden i fall down a hole that i couldnt see because it was so dark. i managed to catch myself with my arms before i fell all the way into the sewer or whatever it was, but it was pretty close. there was a trotro full of people that saw me half-disappear and there was a gasp from its direction so im sure they wouldve helped me if i had gone all the way in. i can see the headlines "Obruni Falls in Hole, Tro Tro to the Rescue".
anyway so i pulled myself out of the hole and limped into a taxi and got home before realising that i was bleeding from my shin. considering i had fallen into an open sewer, the girls at home were pretty worried i was gonna get an infection because of the open wound so they disinfected me and wrapped me up in bandages and all that and ive been taking antibiotics. so i dont think im gonna lose my leg. its just a funny story that a lot of people can relate to for some reason. apparently people fall into holes a lot here. its the mixture of open sewers and no streetlights that does it i guess.

On Monday, Ghana played their first World Cup game against Italy. This is Ghana's first ever world cup appearance and everyone here had been excited for weeks leading up to Monday. A big group of us went to independence square to watch the game. Independence square is a massive soviet style meeting place that can hold up to 30000 people at a time. Some businessmen had set up huge screens and sound systems so that people could watch the game there. and it was crazy. there were maybe 1 or 2 thousand people watching and most of them were chanting and singing and dancing and yelling. the obruni population was high which kind of took away from the atmosphere but the Ghanaians were definitely making themselves heard. anyway the game wasnt great. ghana played well but they couldnt score and the final as 2-0 italy. people left pretty deflated but people are still hopeful for next game which is on saturday.

my boss is taking me to Kumasi, ghana's second biggest city tommorow and friday for a workshop on something or other which is cool because i get to travel for free. apparently kumasi has the biggest open market in west africa which is supposed to be terrifying and incredible at the same time. i think i might stay in kumasi for the weekend so ill write about it next week.

photos of ada foah

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44704250@N00/

i think that should be a link to pictures that my friend simon took at the beach last weekend. if it doesnt work then someone let me know in the comments.

my really strange job

i work for commonwealth human rights initiative which is an NGO thats based in india. we're part of the africa office, but mostly we just focus on Ghana as far as i can tell. we have two projects on the go. a police accoutnaility project and a right to information project which is what im hellping with. our organisation is trying to get the ghanaian government to pass freedom of information legislation so that anyone can go to the government and ask how their tax money is being spent, how the government power structure works and stuff like that. the legislation will cut down on corruption in the government and make it more transparent. because right now, the government is shrouded in a lot of secrecy and no one really knows what happens behind closed doors. anyway thats not the strange part.

my boss is a very nice, but very strong willed ghanaian lawyer named nana. she does a lot of very good work as far as i can tell and she is kind of a celebrity in ghana. her picture is always on the first few pages of the newspaper and shes always doing tv and radio interviews. anyway she's a pretty big deal here. so on tuesday she told me to wear my suit because we were going to a roundtable discussion with the international finance corporation which is a wing of the world bank. so i thought i was gonna go and sit at some meeting all night and just listen. its turns out however that when we pull up to the place its not a roundtable discussion. its actually a very fancy and outdoor party at the new headquarters of the ifc outside of accra. there was an open bar and speeches and stuff and lots of tv and newspaper people. basically the reaosn i went a long was so that Nana didnt have to talk to any of the finance people. basically the party was for the launch of the IFC's new leasing program in ghana (whatever that means) and i think we were there so they could say that they were engaging the human rights community. or something like that. so i met some very very rich people from all over africa. it was a pretty stark contrast from slummy accra. i thought it was kind of ridiculous because they spent a lot of money on the party which im sure could have been used for better purposes.

the strangest part of the night was the fact that the cameras spent a lot of time on nana, me and her husband who is defending the expresident's wife in court, so hes a bit of a celebrity too. the cameras had a huge floodlight that they followed around to take good pictures. nana said it was because i was white and they probably thought i was a donor. tony, nana's husband said it was probably because of nana. whatever it was, it was very strange because we would just be standing there talking and all of a sudden these massive lights would come on us and stay there for a minute or two. i dont have a tv so i dont know if we made the news.

so thats pretty much the craziest thing thats happened so far. i didnt have much to talk about with the african millionaires so i was a little out of my league. i was pretty happy to get out of there.

ada foah

i went to the most beautiful place ive ever been this weekend. i went with my two roomates, simon and reuben and two girls from the german embassy, pauline and antonia. we left early saturday morning on a tro-tro (basically a van thats been hollowed out and stuffed with as many seats as possible., maybe about 18 people) and drove two hours east towards togo. we got off in the town of adafoah and walked through the village to the other side to take a water taxi from a guy named eric. it was basically a big canoe that we kept having to bail out.

we go twenty minutes down the volta river towards its delta with the ocean and arrive at this massive empty beach on a peninsula. on one side of the beach is the volta river and on the othr side is the atlantic ocean. there is a line of about 10 huts on the beach. there are no roads or anything to this place so there are no tourists and its pretty deserted except for some fishing villages a few minutes away. we paid seventy thousand cedis for a hut for a night (less than ten bucks) which fit two people. the hut was really a hut in every sense of the word. it had a bed and mosquito net with no electricity, and it was right on the beach so the floor was just sand. absolutely incredible. they have hammocks set up between palm trees so if you want to sleep in them you can too.

they set up a bonfire for the guests at night and they had lots of beer and alcohol for cheap. i learned some german campfire games which were suprisingly fun. we stayed up late around the fire and woke up early to the most beautiful day id seen since ive been here. the waves in the ocean were massive and the undertow was pretty dangerous but we were careful and kept from getting killed. to get the salt off we'd walk across the beach to the river and relax in the calm water of the volta river. they have barracudas in the river but we didnt see any thankfully.

simon and i got a guy from the "hotel" to take us down the beach to show us around some of the villages. whole packs of kids would follwo us around and say hello, over and over again. they were hilarious. if we turned around and said hello back they would go screaming to their moms. we met the chief fisherman whose name was gerald i think. the villagers spoke ewe but had some english too. we also went to a voodoo man's house but didnt go in because we hadnt brought a gift. we saw his voodoo sand man outside his house which he used to curse people, kind of. it was very cool.

anyway it was amazing and the beach was perfection, or as close to perfection as ive ever been. i did the whole weekend for about fifty bucks or less.

so, basically, if you happen to be in ghana for the weekend, go to ada foah.