Our principal patron, Keir Starmer MP, dropped in last week on the stall we were running at the Camden Christmas Market. As you can see, Martha taught him how to play oware, and we were joined by other well-wishers. What a good way to start Christmas.
Last year, The Ghana Government awarded Mampong District around £2,000 in a competition for the best grant application. 121 Districts entered and Mampong came seventh. Its application was for funding 100 Zongo latrines in Mampong Town, ie enough latrines for 1,000 people. Zongos are immigrants friom northern Ghana or Burkino Faso, who come south because climate change means it is too difficult to sustain life in their homes.
The District’s application described the extreme poverty in which the Zongos live, with 10 or 20 people sharing a single room, and most of them begging for food or living off produce from very small smallholdings.
Nicholas has been carrying out ‘beneficiaries identification’ among the Mampong Zongos, which must be difficult because they will all be desperate to get a latrine. Meanwhile, he’s sent us these photos of the part of Mampong where they live.
Join us for our annual summer party in central London on Saturday 22 July from 4pm to 7pm. The Ghanaian community in London is going to cook us all a Ghanaian meal, and there will be music and decorations and raffle prizes.
It will be held in The Tenants’ Hall, Underneath Tresham, Lambs Conduit Passage, London WC1R 4RE. This is just off Red Lion Square.
Tickets on the door are £16 or available from Eventbrite.
We’ve just finished one of our biggest ever projects – the construction of a clinic (our third) on the northern road to Aframso. The Chiefs of Ankamadua and Amoaman villages allocated land at the borders of each one’s territory, so half the building was situated on each side. People from both villages carried out the unskilled work, while the women provided food for the workers.
The clinic is staffed by a midwife, medical assistant/staff nurse, two nurses and two community health nurses.
Where there is no medical care, people can suffer considerably, dying quickly of snake bite, for example. Women experiencing a difficult childbirth are often taken by motor bike to their nearest clinic, sometimes dying on arrival. During the course of the project Nicholas Aboagye, who supervised the work, drove one woman to the clinic, who gave birth in the back of his car.
It’s no wonder, then, that everyone was so happy to have a clinic near to hand. A big opening ceremony was organised, as you can see from the photos.
Some years ago we bought a cornmill for the village of Adutwam on condition they eventually paid us back with interest. The idea was a sort of collective microcredit. The women of Adutwam already had microcredit loans from us so the village was familiar with the concept.
Adutwam have never once defaulted on their payments, and also started saving surplus profits in the bank. Recently they decided to use their savings to buy a second cornmill – and here it is in the photo. This only goes to show what an intelligent and well-managed village Adutwam is.
What’s everyone talking about in the villages? Well my guess would be that it’s the grand durber that Brengo village held a few days ago to celebrate their new household latrines plus a new borehole, overhead tank and water fetching point. All these were sponsored by the Christadelphians, to whom the Brengo community and Ashanti Development are incredibly grateful.
Brengo already had one borehole, but it didn’t supply nearly enough water for everyone’s needs and there was a constant queue of buckets beside it, waiting for it to refill. The villagers knew that borehole water was much safer to drink than stream water, and would get up in the middle of the night to move their buckets up the queue and make sure they didn’t lose their places.
Now, there’s plenty of water, and it’s easy to collect from the overhead tanks. No wonder that the Guest of Honour at the durber was Martha (in the photos, she’s got a ginger-coloured dress and a white headdress), along with the MP, and District Directors. People came from as far away as Kumasi to join in the celebrations.
… as Bob Dylan would say.
The rains are not far off now, so in Ashanti they’re trying to fast track latrine projects. Here are some photos of Ohemaa-Dida village (Dida means we eat here, we sleep here – not sure about Ohemaa), where they’re busy digging, and constructing masonry slabs and moulding mud bricks for the buildings.
We were asked to bring latrines to Ohemaa-Dida by the Queen Mother, who believed it would help her village gain good health. Sadly, she died before we’d raised the money. She’d have been so pleased to see it all happening.
Nkubeta is the last village in a line of ten, and it’s lucky enough to be sponsored for latrines and hygiene training by Softwire Ltd, London-based producer of bespoke software systems. This is Softwire’s second sponsored village. They are making a real difference.
Nkubeta tell us that they came to the area from Denkira during the Ashanti Wars. They said that the Queen Mother of Petransa agreed to let them settle and told them to go into the forest and chose their own land. They did this, and came upon two coconut trees that were joined at the top. They decided to settle beside the trees and called their village Nkubeta, or ‘twin coconut trees.’
Our three successful boreholes at Dagati, JY and Ankumadua have now been joined by a fourth, at Esereso. Here are some photos.
The photographs show the opening of our latest building – a centre for the disabled of Nsuta and District. The main donors, a Swiss charity called BasAid, sent representatives to the ceremony and were very impressed by the whole project. So little is provided for the disabled in Ghana that we feel this is one of the most worthwhile things we’ve done.
