When Jackie [Solway] asked me to write a few words about my time in Ghana, I was immediately filled with a sense of heaviness. How does anyone succinctly describe eight months of their life? Especially when those eight months took place in a country that constantly forced me to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew.
Ghana was a daily challenge. Everything we had heard about Ghana was true and then contradicted. Someone told me the other day that one of the hardest parts about having a baby is that just when you develop a routine, get used to things, it changes. That is sort of how I felt about Ghana. You could never predict what was going to happen and it seemed like just when you developed a routine and started to feel comfortable it changed. In part it was due to the fact that we moved so much, however I think that Ghana really is unpredictable. When I was there it frustrated me to no end, but when I came home I found traffic lights, and buses that ran on time, and our bland courteousness all boring.
My placement was one of the best parts of the trip. I remember thinking a lot about what we had studied in school the year before (THEORY), and feeling like it was all starting to make sense and fall into place. My organization was especially interesting. I was working for a local mid-size NGO in its reproductive health unit. The unit was being funded by Save the Children UK and was to facilitate capacity building to smaller NGOs throughout the middle belt of Ghana. The smaller NGOs were small, they were usually made up of three or four people and had been started by one person who saw a need in his or her community. Getting to know these organizations was my favourite part. One of them created an organization of traditional healers and midwives in its area, providing them with training and resources. Another one worked with the hospital and community to address the issue of HIV/AIDS. It ran workshops, created work groups and even had a residential place for people living with AIDS where they could receive nutritious meals, medication and the opportunity to make crafts, thereby earning an income for their families.
What really fascinated me though, was the flow of resources and money from the big international NGO to the smaller local organization. This was development at work. All the buzzwords, good intentions and formulae for success were played out right before my eyes. I found it pretty jading. It really made me question the whole notion of “development”. I felt like there was so much energy put into talking about what people were going to do and writing reports about what happened and on and on and on… it was hard for me to see that anything was actually being done, that people were actually being helped, that resources were being efficiently sent to the people who needed them the most. I saw the whole thing as a huge industry, interested only in regenerating itself. My final paper was pretty much one big criticism.
If I went back to Ghana I don’t know that I would have the same point of view or attitude. I don’t necessarily think that I am older or wiser now, but maybe not so judgmental. There was a lot for me to learn from that organization and sometimes I think that I was so caught up in myself and my education and what I thought development should look like, that I missed out on an amazing learning experience. In hindsight I think that development really is organizations and that there is a certain amount of protocol and paper work that has to be done in order to keep the organizations going. I wish that I knew more about organizational behaviour and management because I think that it would have made me look at what was going on differently. I still think that it is important critically analyze and question, I just should have done it after I got off my high horse.
My placement was amazing and I definitely learned a lot from it. If I could do it all over again, I would. Being away from the whole experience has given me some perspective and maybe even a bit of clarity, but it took a long time to get to this point. As I said before, Ghana was challenging. It was challenging because it threw all of my beliefs and judgments back into my face. It was an extremely humbling experience and one that I will always be grateful to.