Toronto to Accra: A Graphic Novel

Day 1: On a dreary Sunday morning in Toronto, 18 scared and severely under-slept youth haphazardly threw (most of) their belongings into oversized backpacks and left the cramped quarters they nested in and learned to love over the past week. Their first steps out of the house marked the beginning of what was supposed to be a 1 day journey to Accra, Ghana…

Although public transit to the airport was awkward for 18 people plus 18 people-sized-bags, the first few hours of our journey went quite smoothly. However, things began to go wrong when we were informed by the airline that one of our party-members could not fly through the U.S., and alas, our party-size decreased by one as she was forced to take another route to Ghana. We were very sad to be separated! Nonetheless, we ventured forth, and from Toronto we flew via tiny aircraft complete with sassy flight attendant, pictured below, to Newark, New Jersey.

We had a few hours to kill in this airport, and the only notable things about it were that the food was expensive and it smelled like lard. We were feeling fairly relaxed, but as we enjoyed each other’s company and the airport’s overpriced food, we realized our flight was delayed… by more time than was allotted between our next connecting flight to Accra. This was a huge wrench in our journey, and after many phone calls, chats with customer service, a tense flight, and a long and dramatic sprint through the Washington-Dulles airport, we found out that we had missed our flight to Accra and instead had to spend the night in some city called Herndon, Virginia.

We consoled ourselves with flat renditions of Wonderwall and spinning poi in the airport and ended up gaining a few positive things from the unexpected delay: a fantastic shower and sleep at the Sheraton hotel, a free and delicious breakfast, and the realization of how much we actually wanted to go to Ghana!

Day 2: With a few hours to kill before our flight the next day, a few of us took a bonus trip to the National Air and Space Museum, which was rad!

The old planes and the spaceships were amazing! I really fell in love with a reconnaissance aircraft from the 60s called the Blackbird, which had a top speed of 3.3 mach or over 3600 km/h!

There were definitely cool sights to be seen (even in Herndon!), but we couldn’t wait to finally get back on track to Accra. Our group was split into three subgroups, and we all took flights to Frankfurt at different times in the evening. My flight was with four awesome friends and at 5 p.m., and after a fun 7 hour flight and a 5 hour time change, time and space morphed into one mysterious entity and we wound up in Germany the next day.

Day 3: We end up in Germany at 7 a.m. local time with grand plans to tour Frankfurt for the 7-hour layover. However, our available energy, motivation, and Marc-Andre’s missing Ipod worked together to keep us confined to the airport.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun though! Throughout our 7 long and tired hours in Frankfurt, we were highly amused by the airport smoking lounges (pictured above), mysterious signs (run left! run right! run anywhere as long as you’re running! pictured below), and sarcastic border-crossing guards who told us our passports weren’t valid. We also had great success and found Marc-Andre’s missing Ipod!

Finally, at 2:35 p.m., we boarded the plane to Accra. The flight was wildly luxurious, with unlimited free drinks, amazing food, and almost eerily nice flight attendants.

(Here is Bill double fisting some free alcohol at the request of one of the flight attendants.) The flight was long but exciting, we all knew that in a few hours our surroundings would drastically change, and the journey of our summer in Ghana would begin.

Finally, our plane touched down in Accra at 8 p.m. local time. When I stepped off, it was hot, humid, and very dark. We were hustled off the plane, down some stairs to the asphalt runway, hopped on a bus for a few seconds and made our way into the border crossing office.

It was then I realized where I was, and that our labors of transit over the last 3 days had finally come to fruition. I am in West Africa! True to the title of the blog, Tanya is in Ghana!

And that, my friends, is the story of my journey to this amazing and beautiful country. Unfortunately, time and electricity are not on my side, so I must end here for now and withhold all details of this great place. But stay tuned, I am settling into my new work and home today, so I will be posting soon about my first crazy week and my new digs soon!

 

Shoulders

Note: To achieve the full effect of this post, scroll to the bottom and hit play on the youtube video while you read. You can also imagine me and a bunch of rad peeps dancing around a kitchen to this for the full AUDIO VISUAL EXPERIENCE.

Being harassed to go to Monarch Tavern instead of blogging!

The title of this post is dedicated to the amazing song blasting through the kitchen of the EWB house right now as day 2 of pre-departure training is coming to an eventful end. After a long day of discussions about poverty, development, livelihoods, health and safety, we are kicking back with a few sips of beer (literally, we split two cans between six of us) and a lovely home cooked dinner.

My trek began on Sunday, when I hauled my overstuffed backpack and seemingly brick-laden side bag to the airport, kissed my mom goodbye, and hobbled into the daunting rotating doors of Edmonton International Airport. A plane, bus, subway, streetcar, and short walk later, I found myself at the house that’s bunked Junior Fellows, African Programs Staff, Social Change Fellows, and Presidents during training for the last few years. It’s a sliver of a house in Little Italy, Toronto, and it’s currently home to me and twenty-four other excited, confused, ecstatic and terrified Junior Fellows! It’s cramped, untidy, and ridiculously fun here!

The week began the evening we arrived, where we introduced ourselves and stated chosen superhero names and powers (mine is Wild Cat, and I can communicate with animals and command them to do my bidding, if you were wondering…) followed by a logistics overload and deep discussions about EWB values. I was able to snag a cozy room in the basement that has a floor covered 95% by mattresses and 4 incredible roommates.

Monday started bright and early with sessions on goals, expectations, hopes and fears, and In-Canada contribution. Overall, these first conversations left me feeling more confident and excited for my upcoming placement with a fruit processor in Ghana. Today brought more learning and anticipation as we explored a very practical side of our placements in health, safety, and agriculture sessions. As we heard stories about motorcycle collisions with pigs (which happened more than once to African Programs Staff) and discussed possible courses of action to take when your co-workers take you to a brothel, our imaginations were filled with vivid images of these scenarios happening to us in Africa, and I’m sure all of us were at some point thinking “Holy shit, this is going to be me in a few days.”

And here we are now, half basking in our new-found friendships and half frenziedly trying to reply to emails, update blogs, and do our required readings before eventually going to sleep in preparation for the long day starting at 8 a.m. tomorrow! No one likes the waking up in the morning, but today we bought bacon for the house, which will be a great incentive to get out of bed! I can’t wait to see what the rest of this week has in store for me, and also, importantly, for bacon, mmm!

 

So you’re one of those Africa people now?

Recently I’ve been asked a lot of questions about why I’m going to Ghana (including the beauty posed in the title of this post) and the answer I’ve been giving is “to work with Agricultural Value Chains with Engineers Without Borders”. This response, albeit true, doesn’t feel quite right when I say it. My sector and placement details do technically answer why I’m going to Ghana, but they don’t do justice to the deeper motivations and thought behind the Junior Fellowship program.

In an effort to explore this personally and with all of my faithful readers, I’m going to have a little Q&A with myself which will hopefully shed some light on motivations and reasoning, and also hopefully not make you question my sanity for having a full-fledged conversation with myself. To start this off, I will ask myself a question I don’t hear straight-up, but I do hear implied when people congratulate me for “giving up my summer” or “helping out”.

Are you going to Ghana to save people?

No! I am an undergraduate student with no medical experience, so my life-saving ability overseas will be the same as it is in Canada: virtually nil!

Okay, so you may not be saving lives directly, but aren’t you going so that you can drastically improve lives? Like by building a school so children can get an education? Or by building homes so that impoverished people have a place to live?

I will be doing none of the above. The changes I will be making, if any, will be small and probably won’t have huge effects on the quality of life in a community in the short-term. Also, I don’t have the skills to build any sort of reliable structure. Would you hire me to build a school here in Edmonton?

I guess not, I don’t trust you with power tools! So you’re going to be completely useless in Ghana?

Not completely, although sometimes it feels that way! What I can’t provide are technical skills to build, mend, heal, etc. What I can provide is an open and ready mind to absorb details about a complex system and provide feedback and suggestions to improve. I think that being a Junior Fellow is very similar to being a Junior Engineer– you can learn all you want about a field of engineering from books, but once you get to work in the field it’s an entirely different beast! As a Junior Fellow I’ll receive a crash course in the complicated field of long-term development work; you could call me a Junior Development Engineer!

Hmm, that job sounds less useful than a doctor, a carpenter, or a real engineer. (Burn!) Don’t you think that sending a skilled worker to Ghana would be a better use of money?

Again, sometimes I feel that it might be, but I generally don’t think it is. Providing these services to areas that really need large-scale systemic changes will allow the problem to remain neglected by the governments or institutions responsible. It shifts accountability from local institutions who should be invested in the consequences of poor health care, infrastructure, education,etc. to foreign agencies that really have no stake in the effectiveness of these systems.

I see what you’re saying. You think that intervening does more harm than good. Then what is it that you’re going to be doing, if not intervening?

Right, I think that in many cases direct intervention does do more harm than good. It’s more of a band-aid solution than a long term solution. Maybe we’re tooting our own horns, but us EWBers like to believe that we intervene in a way that’s smarter and doesn’t cause systems in place to depend on our continued support. It is intervention, but it’s intervening to instigate long-term systemic changes, not short-term quick fixes.

That’s kind of vague, but I’ll leave it there in the interest of not making you sum up EWB’s entire overseas strategy in a few sentences. I’m sure there’s a webpage for that! I think I see where you’re coming from though. Sounds like it’s going to be a tough job for you and for EWB! Are you ready?

I’m working on it! I’ve learned a lot in the past few weeks from talking to our current overseas volunteers, and also from learning about agriculture here in Canada! I mentioned in my last blog post that I would be visiting a farm in rural Alberta, and that happened last week. The visit combined with a few good talks about farming with Kevin (my rock star friend whose family owns the farm) and a couple of lectures from my agricultural economics class have definitely taught me a lot, but have also made me realize that agriculture is an incredibly complicated business. We can talk day and night about supply-demand curves, market fluctuations, net gains and losses from externalities and other economic mumbo-jumbo, but at the end of the day, the product is still FOOD, which every living creature on Earth needs to survive! Add to this fact that the industry is still treated very much like a business despite it’s global necessity, and you have a very tricky soup to stir!

So I think Tanya is done asking questions and this post has really rattled on long enough, so I think this is wrap-up time. Or rap up time?

Yo this blog post is done,

I sure hope y’all had fun

Reading As to my Qs

Because it really did amuse

But if you have another query

Then really don’t be leary,

Post your comment down below

I’ll answer like a MO FO

Or rather start a conversation

That’s a better explanation

For what these blog posts are about

So if you’re down, gimme a shout,

It’s been great without a doubt,

But for now homies, I’m out

word.

 

Ghana Bound Baby!

Hello my lovely friends and confidantes,

Excellent news: you have stumbled upon a region of the interwebs that will comprise the happenings, hopes, and hearsays of my Junior Fellowship in Ghana with Engineers Without Borders!

This blog will be rife with mystery, action, adventure, murder! Err, maybe not the last one (hopefully), but I will do my best to make this an interesting read and keep you updated about my work and life in Ghana! Speaking of which, here’s the scoop so far:

I’ll be working in Ghana (mapped right, if you were wondering!) with an exciting new-ish team called Agricultural Value Chains, or in the spirit of acronym-loving EWB, the AVC team! Given that I study electrical engineering (not the most practical discipline…), it’s obvious that I have a lot to learn before I leave, since I’ll be working with very smart and experienced farmers and entrepreneurs in the fields of agriculture and agribusiness (pun semi-intended). From afar, the team has us, the incoming JFs, working on small “sector assignments” that will give us some background information on farming as a practice and a business, as well as EWB’s approach to improving steps in this value chain. For example, this week I’ve been tasked with spending a day on a commercial farm in Alberta! I’m pretty excited about this challenge.

As for placement specifics, there is a great deal of mystery surrounding what I will be doing and where I will be working, since AVC operates all over Ghana– from the North to South, from small villages to the Ghanaian capital Accra (population 4 million!)– and also on a wide variety of projects! I will be sure to keep you all updated, so expect another post in the next few weeks when I will have more juicy details about my summer!

Until then, my friends, you will have to live your lives without my lovely posts, but bookmark this page and check it weekly, and you can follow me from the cold prairies to the hot and happening country of Ghana via this magical electronic diary.

Have a terrific week, and keep it real!