Go Ghana Cycle Challenge: Kwahu-Tafo village

 Saturday 8^thOctober

This morning we explore the village and see how our sponsors’ money is being spent. Our route throughout the week has taken us through small towns and villages, where life is basic.  Adobe huts provide shelter but little else that we take for granted in our own homes – including electricity and plumbing.  Even the settlement villages around Lake Volta that were purpose built in the 1960s, when the river was dammed to form the lake and generate hydro electric power, created only concrete replicas of the villagers’ former adobe dwellings, with no basic facilities.  This is a fertile area.  Crops grow well and small animals thrive, I spend much time cooing over baby lambs, kids and piglets as we travel around. No-one starves, but it seems that pretty much everyone lives at a subsistence level.  And despite the obvious dedication, enthusiasm and inspiration of the young head teacher at the SDA Junior High School we visit, I leave unconvinced that education alone will solve Africa’s problems.

 

Gladys, Belinda, and Christopher, the school children who accompany us on our tour of the village may have been handpicked as the brightest and the best, and they prove attentive and informative.  Gladys also insists on carrying my bag the entire day, and takes my hand to lead me down the steep slope to the Butuase Waterfall.  She is very kind and from a hardworking family.  Her father farms and her mother sells the produce from a stall, while the children help with household chores before and after school.  I didn’t see their house, but am told it is one of the 30% in the village with piped water.  Gladys had also been to the city, as her grandfather lives in Accra and her eldest brother now works there. She would like to work in a bank when she finishes her education. Will she succeed?  Education and health are priorities for Friends of Tafo, so let’s hope so.

We cycled to raise money for clean water.  This will not be piped into homes, but must be collected from wells around the village.  The first well is finished and I had a go at pumping water – it was very easy and the water is filtered ground water that is safe to drink.  But the villagers still have to collect water for their daily use – around 10 buckets a day for a family.  We are helping to raise standards, but it is a slow process and the day when everyone has piped water and flushing toilets seems far, far away in a village where some still wash clothes and themselves in the river.  And our own enforced use of bucket water was a salutary lesson in life without western sanitation.

Despite the hardship, there is joy today too.  Tim, KM and I address the congregation of Seventh Day Adventists who sit proudly welcoming in their church best clothes. The High School football team – regional finalists last year – proved too tough a match for our scratch team of middle-aged cyclists who did well to hold the score at 2:1.  And we finally got to hear the Royal College of Music choir, and join in with their rehearsal, a definite high point of our time Tafo, followed by the presentation of our commemorative handwoven sashes and handcrafted medals.