Report on a visit to Ghana (PART 2)
Steve Pearce
Mission Education Secretary (Children)
October 2003
Akyem Oda
We met Bishop Impraim, bishop of the new diocese of Akyem Oda. It has 10 circuits, the one we are meeting in (Superintendent Robert Eshun) has 18 societies and 2 ministers, it is rural, and some of the societies are inaccessible by car. The main sources of income are cocoa, poultry, diamonds, citrus fruits and pineapples.
Low agricultural prices mean that many farmers here have given up trying to sell their produce and are simply growing what they need to live. It is important that farmers help and motivate one another. Many children are not in school because they are working or selling, those children who do well and finish junior secondary schooling may be disappointed when they find their family cannot afford to pay for higher secondary schooling and run away to the city.
There are Liberian refugee camps in the diocese and Methodist projects have been set up to help. Giving is a very strong theme in the Methodist Church in Ghana, with a gentle strength, Bishop Impraim makes it clear that, ‘Here the church is preaching into poverty and must avoid unrealistic expectations – can you expect the poor not to steal? Not to overthrow their government? The Good news is that God loves you, whatever. Just give from your heart, whatever you want.’
After talking with the Bishop and Superintendent (and learning that bishops always wear purple shirts and superintendents always wear green shirts), we took our bags to the family homes where we were to spend the night and then went to the Sunday School teacher-training event in the next village. Thirty or more volunteers had come for the weekend to be introduced to the new curriculum materials prepared by the connexional staff and join in some training. I remembered a conversation with a woman in Accra who had told me how she had to give up teaching in Sunday School because she didn’t have enough time available for the training commitment, but resisted drawing comparisons with the UK.
Hymns were sung enthusiastically in Twi, led by a Cantor, few people having hymnbooks. We introduced ourselves and received some direct comments and questions, ‘What are you going to do about these trade injustices?’ ‘It’s like the slave trade!’ ‘Are you with the US on this?’
Here as in several other places Winnie received an especially warm welcome and was quickly swallowed up in a crowd of Ghanaians.
I stayed that night in a house with a grandmother and her four grandchildren. The frogs were the loudest I had ever heard and in the morning we were up early playing with pots of bubble mixture I had brought, but I left before breakfast, it was to be a busy day again.
The bishop took us to a citrus farm at Oda Nkwanta. It was a church farm, about 30 societies own farms and advice and support is offered by the diocese to this and all farmers. One church member had been given the job of managing the farm and he receives part of its income. About 60 other members give a little time each month for nothing to do the work and make the farm a success for the church – its income pays part of their church’s levy to the diocese. Maize and cassava is grown in between the hundred or so orange trees here.
Sarah told us about her Cocoa farm, she earns about £240 a year from the beans and pays her labourers £1 a day. She doesn’t think it a good job, her family can live on this only for about 3 months of the year and it’s hard work especially since she has to walk 4 miles to the farm. Sarah thinks citrus and palm oil are the best crops at the moment but changing crop is far too expensive. If the price keeps falling as it is she will give up and take to buying and selling things on the street.
We visited a cocoa farm at Akim Adjoubue, starting in the cocoa storage shed in the centre of the village, where beans are weighed and despatched. The facility is run by a manager on behalf of the government, which buys all the beans, sets the price and pays the farmers. The price currently paid is not keeping pace with inflation and the world cocoa price is falling again. We walked a mile or so to one of the cocoa farms; they are owned by women or men, sometimes the women own a farm simply because they have bought some land and done the hard graft to turn it into productive land.
The children are pictured here with young cocoa plants, but no one is really sure if it is worth planting them or if the children are going to be able to earn a living from their land as their parents used to. Ironically this poor village is in a diamond area, you can find them on the ground or dig for them. The tiny ones we were shown seemed to be sold for about a pound or two each.
Takoradi
We went to Sunday morning service at the Dunwell Methodist Church in Takoradi. (Named after one of the early British Methodist missionaries).
We learnt the Methodist young people’s greeting: ‘We are’. …(handshake)…. ‘One.’
The service was Morning Prayer from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as Mr Wesley would have done it, complete with robed choir and pointed psalms. At the offertory, however, the music group took over from the organ and African songs began. We all danced forward in a procession to place our offertory in the box, and danced back to our places, still men on one side and women on the other, identifiably in groups of the Women’s Fellowship, Christ’s Little Band, students from the girls’ college, etc.
We introduced ourselves and sang ‘We are marching in the light of God’. Later we met some of the older students in the Sunday School aged around 14 they asked questions like, ‘What do you think of all this expired food that Europe exports to Ghana?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we had one world currency?’ What are you doing about these injustices?’ ‘ Are you all working together on it?’ ‘Are you taking action not just talking?’
At a Sunday School in large, old premises in the twin town, Sekondi, several hundred 3-15 year olds were enthusiastically singing and learning. We joined in and taught them some of our songs.
We recognised many of their songs, most were from the US and some such as ‘Father Abraham’ had familiar actions but completely new words.
The North - Tamale
Journeying north we reflected on the differences as the landscape changed to open scrub and grassland; roads here are poor and distances large.
In the South the government is encouraging farmers to diversify into cassava (produced as food and for its starch content) and palm oil. In the North the move is into sorghum (a cash crop grown for Guinness, who use it in the brewing process instead of barley and in their popular soft drink, ‘Malt’) and cotton.
It is clear that money and resources are concentrated in the south of the country, and both the government and the church are finding redistribution difficult if not impossible. In another ironic twist we passed through Obwasi, and the richest gold mine in the world.
In Tamale I stayed in a room owned by Samuel and joined him and his family for meals and fascinating conversations. Tamale is 100 miles from the northern border of Ghana, 450 miles north of Accra. The journey to the capital is by bus for most people, 6 hours to Kumasi and then 5 hours from there to Accra. During recent civil unrest in the last year or two a curfew was introduced from six in the evening till four in the morning, but it had recently been relaxed and didn’t start until midnight. Samuel’s son was on his way home from Accra by bus, a breakdown was delaying his journey and if he did not arrive well before midnight he would have to wait at the bus station until the curfew finished at four o’clock.
Samuel has been involved in agriculture all his working life, currently employed by the Ghana Cotton Board. When he retires at the age of 60 next year he will move back to the area where he grew up and to the house and land he inherited from his parents, where he will farm to keep himself and his wife. He pointed out that farmers are basically in the hands of the weather and the market. There is nothing to be done about the weather, but there are things that can be done about the market. A single farmer alone can do little about storing or processing, he or she can only harvest when the crop is ready and sell as much as you can at whatever the market price is. If, however, there were storage facilities, you could keep the surplus or wait until the price rises, if there were good transport links, you could go to another market or even another country, if there were processing facilities, you could add value to your crop.
There are other influences at work in the market place. Samuel has locally produced rice lying uneaten in his house, ‘Because,’ he says, ‘my family won’t eat it. The local rice is brown, the American imported rice is polished and white, we are trained to the white.’
I stayed in the sort of ‘house’ occupied by many people in Ghana’s towns and villages, there was one room fronted by a tiny storeroom and covered porch, in a row of six similar dwellings. There was a tap in the street and a shower and toilet in a separate hut at the end of the row. There was water every two or three days for about 12 hours.