Ghana Chronicles: Pt.5

Village life.  D. Atsu gets us to the village on time.  Which is really whenever the fark we get there.  So it’s around 11am on our second Saturday in Africa that we push the taxi as far as we can and then start portaging our gear through the deeper sand as jumping kids point the way to David Branigan’s house.  David is the Peace Corpsman for this region, and he’s the main reason we’re here.  It’s Branigan who contacted Peckham and applied for this area – Songorniya – to participate in the bike workshops program. 
Songorniya consists of four villages along a roughly 6k stretch of dirt road, which itself sits a few klicks towards the sea; bellow the highway town of Sege.  The four communities have two seasonally based means of income:  farming and salt.  The farming is a mix of produce, livestock and poultry.  The salt comes from a large lagoon that sits just behind two of the villages.  In the dry season, after the crops have been harvested, the communities shift attention to salt ponds along the lagoon’s banks. 
When David originally applied, the VBP policy for first-time villages was to only run one workshop – 20 people in an 8-hour session.  The response David got in Songorniya when they were accepted for one workshop was so great he asked for more days.  VBP agreed to expand the program over four days, with three basic workshops (60 people) and a final ‘Advanced Class’ that would cater to the more mechanically inclined participants. The workshops have been confirmed for the end of the following week.  With or without the new shipment from Boston, George and Sammy have enough bikes on hand to run the three-day basic program and enough tools for the Advanced workshop.  Before we left Accra, they agreed to commit to the dates we hoped for so that we could stay on somewhat of a schedule.
Branigan’s been here almost three years and has made an obvious impact on the residents here.  They call him ‘Akofi’, which loosely means first son of the community. He greets us quietly, a compact man built like a rock climber, barefoot and bare-chested, tending to a small vegetable plot.  His house will be our quarters for the coming weeks; we respectfully enter a clean and utilitarian space.  Unlike most of the village structures, the Peace Corps house is concrete with a tin roof and a compost toilet.  The community built it specifically for aid volunteers and kindly caters to a more western sensibility about housing.  There is a gas camp stove on a table with some shelves for supplies.  A large surge protector and step-down rig allows David to run a small CD/Radio and when he needs to, a computer and printer.  A small bookshelf occupies a corner with some hand drums.  There is a bedroom, which David has graciously given up to us.  We fold our bulky duffels and gear bags into the chamber as neatly as we can.  Once we’re stowed, David shows us the two cisterns outside where we’ll pull our water, the wash stall with bucket for bathing and the compost crapper.  There is also a storeroom where we put the bikes.  The whole joint is basically the size of a NYC one-bedroom pad. 
We mount up the rigs and pedal around to the other villages, greeting elders in the two communities where the bulk of our work will be done.  We also meet the four people whose lives’ we’ll be following for a few days before they participate in the workshops.  Having made introductions and gotten – sorta – the lay of the land, we return to the house.  David has done most of his work with a local youth drama troop, and some of its members congregate at his place every evening.   These kids will become our assistants over the next weeks, helping us get around and get by.  Branigan has a PC confab to attend elsewhere in Ghana and so we will be in the hands of this group of teens for a week while he is gone.  Before he leaves the next day, there will be much to do.   David has two meetings to participate in, one with the Water and Sanitation Committee and one with the drama troop.  The WatSan group is the organization that formally applied for the bikes, and so they are now responsible for organizing a suitable facility to store the bikes, run the workshops, to provide some food and drink, etc.   We end the evening in excited conversation, anticipating that the game is finally afoot.

Comments

[Tom Branigan]

I am enjoying your account so far. David is my son and I visited him last November. Your descriptions of life in Ghana are just as I remember it. Life is difficult there and the bikes will ease the difficulty. I applaud your work.

One comment - As you will note above, our name is spelled 'Branigan'.

[bafc23]

Thanks for reading Mr. B! - The spelling of your family name has been corrected in Pt.5 and will be correct in future posts.