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Ho-me Sweet Ho-me
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Ho,
Ghana
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Sunday, Jul 03, 2005 13:12
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Entry 2 of 5 | show all | print this entry |
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It was an "interesting" trip to Ho, taking about 2-3 hours if I remember correctly. We stopped at one place, a village just before a large bridge over a river (estuary of Lake Volta? I'm not sure), where we were mobbed by villagers and offered a variety of items - I think we took them up on the yams, although some of the other offerings were too obscure to be trusted! The most suspect part of this place however, was their toilet facilities... At first glance hidden beyond a small hill behind the village, on closer inspection, the hill could have passed for modern art, a bona fide scrapyard and seemingly the site of all of the waste produce in Ghana, which was joyfully guarded by vast numbers of vultures, and thus the inevitable flies. I don't think I need to go on.
Anyway, our house in Ho was in Mawuli Estate and was an impressive building from the outside. However, on the inside, there was a evident lack of furniture! The hot showers were actually magic though.
The first few days we sussed out the local bars and eateries, none of which seemed very lively or indeed popular. During the days, the people were out in force - we went food shopping for mass supplies in the markets. The fruit was surreal, the mangoes and pineapples were just amazing. Before our cooks arrived we suffered the horror of a few meals consisting of mashed potatoe and egg, but once they did they served up some treats, including fufu - not dissimilar to uncooked bread dough, served with an extremely suss fish stew - and my personal favourite, plantain.
 
We worked in pairs, each pair being assigned to a different school in the town. Myself and Paddy were at Mawuli Primary School, about a 20 minute walk away from the house. We turned up on Monday morning in time for assembly, which we later found to be reasonably humane at our school, compared to that at Matt and Tom's school up the road, in which the head teacher called pupils forward for seemingly no reason and thrashed them with the cane.
 
 
As our school was quite small, we scheduled as many PE lessons as we could with each class, but we were usually free in the afternoons so we ended up helping out at the other schools which were more like high schools. In fact, our appearance at the aforementioned school overjoyed some classes whose lessons seemed to otherwise consist of random canings.
 
It was weird how the children just couldn't understand some concepts that we take for granted, like however many times you tried to explain it to them, they remained completely bemused at our requests to make a circle. Every single time they all had to bunch together and hold hands, and then be forced to take x amount of steps backwards, until they inevitably revisited shapelessness a minute later. It was pretty much chaos until the teachers decided to wander over and shake their canes at the kids.
 
During the morning lessons we scouted the best kids and invited them back for trials for the school team at the end of the day. Although we categorically insisted to the headmaster that we could only cope with 25 or so, kids just turned up out of the blue, dotted all over the pitch joining in as they saw fit... as did goats and dogs for that matter so it didn't even reach organized chaos. Despite that, we managed to pick our best team and stage several practice matches against our second XI before the crunch match against Matt and Tom's primary school kids. It was either quite random or an equisite piece of skill that we managed to successfully scout the team's best players and end up with the previous term's first choice eleven, so we were quite proud of that, having only seen them play fleetingly.
 
After school we'd sometimes go down to the local green for a kickabout, and one sweltering afternoon this rapidly turned into England vs Ghana, Ghana outnumbering us about 10 to one, and outmuscling us by about 100 to one, all of us wilting in the heat and ripping our legs to pieces on the dirt pitch. It was a complete free for all, noone knew who was on each other's team, but literally half the town rocked up for a game, it was amazing!
A particularly memorable evening was spent playing poker for matchsticks and Ghanaian chocolate, which disintegrates like cocoa powder when touched, and frankly wasn't worth winning. This was followed by countless arguments about the life and times of Yeovil Town as Matt actually never shut up about them!
Where I stayed:
Madventurer House
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