the search continues...

Well, what a week it was. Dave and I came to Tamale partly to volunteer for 'Guinea Worm Week', an annual project co-ordinated by the Peace Corps office which sends a bunch of Peace Corps Volunteers, Dutch volunteers from a northern Ghana program, and Ghanaian health students out to a few dozen remote and endemic villages to help boost awareness of correct filtering procedures to avoid getting guinea worm. The worm eggs lurk in stagnant water and incubates in the body for about a year before bursting out, Alien-style, through the flesh (usually the leg or foot) to spread more eggs into the water.

We heard about it through a PC volunteer we met on the south coast and got in touch with the co-ordinator to see if they wanted more people. About 75 of us got a day's training and were then sent out in pairs to various village to stay with the resident guinea worm volunteer. It's called 'extension work' - basically having some outsiders turn up is supposed to provide a bit of a morale boost to the local volunteers, and help to check if anyone's filters need replacing, run information sessions and just generally educate or re-emphasise the need to follow the correct filtering procedure.

We thought all the villages would be pretty basic and it would probably be pretty intense but... although we were probably the least prepared of all the volunteers (not being long-term here in Ghana or with any volunteering experience), fate intervened in true African style to send us to what was probably the most remote and poor village in the whole program. Dobiso (or Dorbiso - but the spelling is kind of irrelevant as they don't get mail there and it's unlikely to be on any maps) has 54 households and about 200 residents living in mud huts with thatched roofs, surrounded by bush and groundnut and yam farms and 1 mile from the river, their only source of water. There are other villages scattered around, mostly in a similarly state although a few have bores for water. It's a good 20 miles from the nearest real town where you can buy filtered water or get public transport. A few very lucky people have bicycles to make the trip - including John, the village's resident guinea worm volunteer and our host in Dobiso.

It was kinda rough. Rewarding and amazing etc but very very trying, despite the very humbling generousity we were shown.

It wasn't so much the fact that we'd been dropped off with an inadequate supply of safe water and then our own filter broke; that we were totally isolated; that we had to sleep outside on a grass matt on the ground, or that the toilet was a pit full of writhing, humming maggots. It wasn't that the food was bland and oily and meaty. Bucket showers, dirty clothes, flies and mosquitoes are not a problem for either of us.

Nope, it was the psychological aspect of it that was really tough. Firstly, there was the overarching sense of being privileged guests, treated like royalty by people who have almost nothing except their farms and probably earn in a year what I have spent on one lavish meal. It's extremely rude to refuse this hospitality though, and most of our offers to help out with day to day tasks were just met with amusement. What they really wanted from us was something else - to observe these exotic pale-skinned creatures who rocked up in an NGO 4WD. Having white people in town was a BIG deal for most of these people - so big that our every move was watched, for five long days. We opened a book; they giggled and chattered and looked at it. We wrote something down; they wanted to know what we were writing. We were even watched as we crawled under our mosquito net at night to sleep. Dave had the worst of it because being the man, he got all the attention - plus, he managed to pick up the complicated Kratchi greetings more quickly than me. We could have basic conversations with some of the villagers who'd learnt English, and in Africa you become surprisingly good at establishing rapport without words - so you know who your friends are at least - but it's still kind of limited in a situation like that.

We spent a lot of time in the hottest part of the day just hanging out with the villagers under the mango tree shelling peanuts and agoushi (they're a bit like pumpkin seeds, made into a fairly tasty stew which is served with boiled yam) and playing cards. Dave learnt 'spa' - a psychotic kind of game that the men sit around playing and yelling over all afternoon while the women fetch the water, pound the fufu, farm the yams and groundnuts, look after the children, light the fires, etc etc etc. Despite the obvious unfairness of the situation for the women, most of them were actually pretty fiesty and outgoing - it was a shame that virtually none of them could speak English, but I still really appreciated their spiritedness and great sense of humour. One day I saw a toddler scrabbling around in the dirt (which seemed a perfectly reasonable thing at the time, although looking at my photos now I'm already thinking 'jeez those poor kids are PLAYING IN THE DIRT, how awful!!!') and the kid managed to upend a large empty water bowl onto himself so he was trapped underneath and started crying. His mum heard and then saw him, and then saw me wondering if I should run over and rescue him, and we both laughed our heads off. They're not exactly neurotic about their kids, because there is always someone around to keep an eye out. The women were also well into dancing when the music came on at night (sadly no drums in this village, just the tape player), and we danced too, although I think they were so amused/shocked by our crappy rhythm that after a while they told us to sit down!

The village chief and his linguist (theoretically you speak to the linguist rather than talking to the chief directly, but he's basically the chief's best mate) also seemed very kind and gentle men, but it was clear that the younger men - John in particular - were the real 'big men' in the village; the old men were sweet and dignified but did they have a bicycle or a tape player? No, they just had some homebrew gin and maybe a tiny radio.

As the week wore on, John became the real difficulty for Dave and I. Although he was perfectly hospitable - too hospitable in fact, getting the women to cook us elaborate meals (like fufu, which requires strenuous pounding with a giant pestle and mortar to produce something that is significantly less pleasant than the yam it's made from) and fetch us water to bathe with, it became obvious that he was just doing it to big-up his status in the village, and ultimately to procure things from us.

Doing this kind of thing in Africa you never actually 'work' a whole day - we only did guinea worm stuff in the early morning and late afternoon when it was cool, as it often involved walking to some of the satellite villages. But John could rarely get going before 9am, even though he was up at 5am blasting his treasured stereo (the only one in the village) and all he had to do was check his traps before we left. So we were walking in the sun a lot. On our second-last day we walked to a village four miles away to run an info session, and while it was cool and overcast on the way there, we did the return trip in the hot midday sun. John swaggered along flirting with some adolescent girls from another village who were carrying bowls of dried fish on their heads - after an hour and a half we had run out of water and I was verging on heat exhaustion and had to sit under a tree. John was entirely unsympathetic: the pretty girls slowed down a bit but they had to keep going, so John had to keep going, so Dave and I had to keep going too.

I'd given him the benefit of the doubt up till that point, but it had become obvious that he just wanted us to help him out - he would act offended if we didn't eat all the massive meals (goat stew and fufu for breakfast anyone?) but that's just the standard practice there. He wasn't that interested in going with us to check filters etc - he really just wanted us to take photos of him posing at 'farming' (in reality the women do most of the farming) and 'fishing' (again I didn't know him to actually fish the whole week).

On Friday our own water supply ran out and we were having filter problems, but we had been told we would be picked up at about midday to begin the trip back to Tamale. We sat down and read for a while - the first time we had a real break from the constant interaction - as kids gathered around and peered at us and John's son Ebenezer, who inherited his dad's swagger and man about town attitude, decided it was time to start the time-honoured Ghanaian kids' practice of yelling at the white people: 'Obruni!... Obruni!... Obruni!...' By about 4pm it became obvious we weren't going to be collected that day at all. We were getting a bit tetchy. Even Dave had a super-rare moment of exasperation. The tension with John had become slightly alarming - he seemed to be disappointed that we hadn't yet given him any substantial gifts (having been expressly told back in Tamale not to give money to our host), although we had brought some small gifts and also arranged to leave various items behind for him, like our mosquito net, and I gave some of my clothes and a book to John's sister Gladys, who had toiled away at our food and water.

Anyway to cut it short, a vehicle did turn up about 7pm at night when we had truly given up hope of being collected until the next day. It was Adam, the Peace Corps guy who co-ordinates the whole guinea worm program, and three Ghanains: Emmanuel the district co-ordinator, a driver and a woman called Amelia from the GW office - one of the funky types with a 'fro and slinky trousers (most women of means here prefer straightening and skirts). Another impromptu meeting was held, praise was handed around for the guinea worm prevention efforts (despite my misgivings about John he has done a pretty good job with education, at least in his own village), translations were made, food was served for us and the new guests, and then John started DJ-ing and everyone danced and it was fine. Amelia had changed into a super-short skirt and heels and did some funky moves and the little kids started copying... one of the village women got Dave to dance with her... the kids were all shakin' their booty... it was all good. We had to get up at 5am to hit the road and a lot of the villagers got up especially to say goodbye to us. We were relieved to be away from Dobiso and particularly the tension with John, but sad to say goodbye to most of the others.

We didn't want to get their hopes up but what we're hoping to do now is help get a bore for the village. Apparently World Vision had been looking at giving a nearby village a SECOND bore, although Dobiso has none. We pondered during the week the logistics of this - you can't just hand the money to someone, because even if you give it direct to the contractors they'll almost certainly just 'chop' it. But happily, Adam was pretty positive about the prospects if we get in touch with World Vision and some other Christian group that has its own bore-drilling equipment, and liaise with Emmanuel... so, fingers crossed. It's also complicated because it's apparently good to encourage the people in the village to build relations with their local district authority - as futile as it might seem, that will potentially improve their long-term prospects. So yeah, it alleviates our rich white guilt, but at least it will make life a bit easier for the women there and probably improve the overall level of health.