Leaving

Saturday morning, and my last in Ghana. All the TfaC employees went on their Christmas break yesterday, so it makes sense I guess that I'll be flying back to London tonight.

These last few months have been incredible - it's unbelievable that they've gone by so quickly. I remember stumbling nervously into the office when I first arrived, feeling a bit like I was going to be useless, a burden. Yesterday I walked away feeling like I was saying goodbye to friends I'd known for years.

A big element in making my time here so enjoyable has been the success of the InterACT! project and the enthusiasm for it within the TfaC team - from Patrick, the Director, right down to all the participants who've made videos for their UK counterparts. I knew very soon after arriving here that it would have been wrong for me to run workshops with young people here - they are and should always be run in local languages, by local people. So it was great that I was able to find a project that was relevant and useful - and so enjoyable to be part of.

My dominant feeling leaving Theatre for a Change today is of how much commitment and passion exists within the TfaC team. They are an unbelievable group of people - conscientious, kind, intelligent, generous to each other. In the main that could be applied to almost all Ghanaians that I've met in the last 4 months, but it especially true of the men and women wearing yellow t-shirts and leading workshops in communities all over Southern Ghana.

What's nice too is that the whole team has a brilliant capacity for being silly, making jokes, taking the piss out of each other in the fondest, friendliest way. No-one is evangelical about the challenges they face, no-one is aggressive about the ways of meeting those challenges. Everyone gets on with their work, in the main, with a big smile and an unfailing generosity towards each other. It's been an incredible pleasure to be part of.

I'm leaving on great terms, incredibly sad not to have the company of these wonderful people every day and with a real prospect of continuing my relationship with the company over the next few months: perhaps by extending the InterACT! project to Malawi and other theatres in the UK.

Whatever happens, I've gained an enormous amount here - both in terms of learning about interactive theatre and - more importantly - about the country, its people and how TfaC works with them. I've also made a lot of genuine, wonderful friends - and it is those people who I will miss the most.

Evaluating

I’m not very good at getting up in the morning, although 7:30am starts every day at TfaC have definitely helped to budge my obstinate body clock since I arrived in Ghana. Today, however, I sprang up at 6:30am, threw a bucket of water over myself in the name of a morning wash and walked the 18 steps that represent my journey to work every morning.

It wasn’t even a proper day at work: indeed yesterday wasn’t even a proper day of work, a public holiday to celebrate the nation’s farmers called, appropriately, Farmer’s Day. Today, was, however, one of the last things I’ll do for Theatre for a Change this time around: an evaluation workshop for all the participants who’d taken part in the InterACT! video link project.

One thing that I could safely say before we’d started evaluating InterACT! was that I was sure we’d chosen the right people for it. Collins, Nii, Forster, Amanda, Susan, Diana and Reggie are seven of the best ambassadors I can imagine for TfaC. Their commitment is incredible, their passion tangible, their enthusiasm infectious. They are also all really generous, funny, personable, modest and kind, qualities sometimes missing in UK theatre. Last week Nii, Collins and I went out for a drink at Wato Spot, near James Town, and I felt as if any cultural barriers that had ever been there had vanished in the midst of ridiculous chat about the world, relationships, football and each other.

Given the relative success of the project and the positive feedback from the UK participants, the evaluation was a pleasure, a chance to review what we’d gained from it (a reduced fear of cameras, for some; a real insight into another theatre world, for others) and – more importantly – how it’s going to run in the future. Our greatest achievement, then, is probably that the whole group immediately started talking about next year, about how they would run the project in Ghana and what they needed in order to do it.

I’ve already started making sure that the skills necessary to continue with this kind of project exist within the TfaC team. Last week I ran a 3 hour video editing training session for the office staff – Johnson, Linda, Amanor and Owusu – which made me feel like a nervous teacher in front of an excitable, silly but really intelligent class.

We’ve also done some assessment of the internet skills within the InterACT video-makers and have set up a bit of peer-training to ensure that, at the very least, everyone who participated is able to contact their respective UK link by email.

In fact, that aspect of the project – continued email contact between the partners – is the most crucial element for its continued success. We don’t need videos (though in this first phase of the project they have been invaluable in giving the participants a more personal connection to their link). We don’t need exchange visits, although of course that is a wonderful final goal for the project. We just need a really simple, inexpensive way to maintain and build the relationships that we’ve spent the last 5 weeks creating – and email, as the internet expands across Ghana, is the best and easiest way to achieve that.

After the training session I took everyone down to the beach, to one of my favourite spots in Ghana – Tawala Beach Bar, 3 minutes from my house and one of the friendliest places to drink Club Beer and eat Chicken and rice in the whole country. There we sat under thatch sunshades, drinking malta and coke, eating rice, banku and chicken, making jokes and chatting.

It’s hard to believe that in two weeks time I’ll leave all this – the sunshine, the beach, James Town - but most importantly the outstanding people that I’ve met while I’ve been here. I will be incredibly sad to go.

World AIDS Day 2007

Saturday 1st December: World AIDS Day in James Town. 70 young people aged from seven to twenty seven parade through the community, singing, banging drums, dancing. Every now and then they stop, spread out and form an impromptu acting space where, from nothing, a performance (and an audience) appears.

This video was made while walking, dancing and drumming with the guys from the James Town Community Theatre Centre as they took the message of HIV prevention back to the community from where their performances, their stories originate. The dusty streets and stifling heat was no match for their unbelievable enthusiasm, although, by the end, back at CTC drinking Malta and eating biscuits, there were two words on everyone's lips: "I'm tired".

Please be patient while the video loads.

Beach boys

Another Saturday afternoon, another dusty hot walk through the tiny streets of James Town, past the lighthouse and to CTC, where I meet Reggie, nervously pacing up and down. He’s a big guy, into his boxing, articulate when leading workshops, but he’s been surprisingly hesitant in front of the camera while taking part in the InterACT! video link project.

A couple of exceptions aside, we’ve now received the video postcards from the UK practitioners taking part in InterACT! and it’s time to start making the second videos from the TfaC facilitators. Reggie is first up – we’d spent a couple of hours in an internet café the day before watching his video from Jacqui Rice at Company of Angels and he’d spent the evening planning what he wants his next video to her to look like.

It’s part of the development of the project that I want the facilitators taking part in it to take more ownership in the making of their videos this time around. The first time I was making a lot of suggestions, guiding them – both to help the participants but also to ensure that each video we made showed a different side of Theatre for a Change. This time I want everyone to think about what they’re going to say, where we’re going to shoot the video, how it’s going to fit together. We’ve talked about storyboarding, about drawing on themes brought up in the video response sent from the UK, about developing and expanding the conversation.

Reggie is keen to feature some of TfaC’s youngest members in his video – the ‘Group of Hope’, so called because their age, 8-12, means they are unlikely to have started doing those things that might put them at risk of sexually transmitted diseases and are thus at an ideal stage to start talking about those issues. We visit Steven’s workshop, although Steven, for some reason hasn’t turned up yet, and Reggie leads some warm ups and interviews some of the kids in their native Ga language.

After a bit, we venture down to the beach next to the fisher folks’ village: pure white sand where tiny half naked kids play in amongst the piles of rubbish and the breaking waves. I’ve never been down this far – have always felt a little intimidated walking into the village as it feels separate from James Town somewhere, private almost, although none of the doors are shut in the little shacks where the incredibly hard-up fishermen and their families live.

Reggie settles himself on a massive fishing net and does his piece, hesitantly, to the camera, troubled by the shouts of kids throwing themselves from the little pier into the water and by a sudden difficulty with the English language that only materialises when the camera is on. He’s still charming though, and silly too – he whips off his shirt right at the start and, as soon as the camera beeps, pretends that we’ve stumbled across him sunbathing and apologises profusely.

The sun is still incredibly strong; it’s one of the hottest days I’ve experienced here so far. We finish with Reggie and I give him some cash to help with his travel for the project – a tiny amount but really important for someone who chose to give up his other, paying job to concentrate on Theatre for a Change. We finish the last bit of video and I stumble off to meet the next two facilitators.

Forster and Amanda, younger, more articulate and bouncier than Reggie, have a detailed plan for their video postcard which involves shots of them leaving their homes, standing in the middle of James Town, walking down streets, asides to the camera during their workshop and lots more. We end up shooting over 35 sections of their piece but only once or twice do they stumble on their words or look blank. In fact their challenge is more to know when to stop talking – they speak across each other, repeat and expand on what the other has said, are constantly itching to add new ideas. The result is mildly chaotic and endearingly entertaining.

On Monday and Tuesday I’m due to meet up with Nii and Collins to shoot their video postcards. When we met last week to watch the videos sent to them from the UK, Nii remarked upon how watching the video from Gabby at the Young Vic made him realise that there were people doing the same thing as him – or close enough – all over the world, and how comforting that was. It made me really happy to hear that, because it’s what this project is all about – finding common ground and sharing ideas within situations and contexts that in many ways are radically different.

Forster and Amanda’s second video to Hampstead Theatre’s Debra Glazer is online now at the InterACT! Project blog. Reggie’s will be up by Monday evening, Nii and Collins by Tuesday night.

Back in Accra

Monday morning. My first meeting in the office after a couple of weeks out on the road making videos for the InterACT! project and visiting some schools and placements in the Ashanti region of Ghana with the people who run the house where I live in Accra, Volunteer Abroad.

It was good to be back at TfaC's tidy offices upstairs off a little balcony in Labadi. Owusu, Johnson and Amanor (Linda is away in Togo) are funny, enthusiastic and occaisonally very silly. They are all so committed to their jobs too: all had worked over the weekend; Amanor stopped off at an in-service training session on his way to a wedding on Saturday.

You often hear stories in Ghana about corruption, about NGO money wasted, projects not working. I think most of them are exaggerated but even if they're not I've only seen positive things at TfaC in terms of they way its staff are so committed to the cause, so determined, so passionate. They're also, importantly, really fun; able to take and make a joke; and kind too.

The Monday morning meeting at TfaC is a chance for the team to come together, compare notes and discuss the week ahead. Amanor, Owusu and Eric all report back from their weekend visits.

We discuss the mobilisation of participants for the Amasaman project and the need to ensure that we don't just mobilise a load of young people who are already in school, who already aware of HIV/AIDS, of how to avoid teenage pregnancy. It's easy to find those kids - they're enthusiastic, willing to come to workshops regularly, but they're not the focus of this project: we'd much rather be working with those young people who have low levels of literacy, rarely attend school and are most at risk from the dangers posed by unsafe sex.

The rest of my week will be spent catching up with Nii, Collins, Diana, Forster, Amanda, Reggie and Susan and creating their response to the video postcards sent by the UK participants in the InterACT! project. It's been a real thrill to receive the videos made by the Uk participants - all of which are wonderful and thoughtful. I know that the facilitators here are really excited about seeing them and replying.

Video reflection

It's the Saturday after an incredibly busy week in Accra, most of it spent travelling, making videos, editing and uploading them for the Interact Project. It has been a real learning process: I hadn't done any video editing before coming to Ghana and have finally worked out my way around the software and the challenges of uploading to YouTube on a very slow and erratic internet connection.



I've been struck all week by how natural and confident most of the practitioners have been recording the videos, how happy they are in their work and how driven they are by the needs of the community in which they live and work. Things at Theatre for a Change aren't perfect, of course - nothing ever is - but what drives the work and gives it its heart is the commitment of the people who run it. I asked Johnson earlier this week whether he'd ever like to work in the UK or America, he said he'd prefer to do projects in Darfur or Sudan.

For some of the practitioners recording their videos was a real challenge, especially Reggie who suddenly became unexpectedly nervous when faced with the camera. His most natural, fluent moment came when talking about the way he had lost his job because he wasn't willing to give up on his commitments at the Community Theatre Centre - one of the most touching segments that we shot during the week.

I'm just about to set off for a few days away in and around Kumasi and am back in Accra on Friday. I really hope that all the practitioners in the UK find time in their busy schedules to record their videos on time - being away makes it difficult to make sure messages are getting through and that people are happy with what they have to do. I'm delighted that we've got such high profile theatres involved and such talented, interesting practitioners. We're all really excited to see their videos next week.

Interacting

A quick note to say that the second of the two projects that I'm running while I'm in Ghana has gone online today.

The Interact Link Project - www.interactproject.blogspot.com - is a video exchange project linking practitioners working for Theatre for a Change with practitioners working for some of the most exciting theatre companies in the UK. I'm still waiting for final confirmation from some of the UK practitioners, but am hopeful that the final list will have representatives from the Almeida Theatre, Company of Angels, Hampstead Theatre, Pilot Theatre, the Roundhouse and the Young Vic.

I have wonderful group of practitioners lined up to do the links from Ghana. It was only today that I realised that pretty much all of them have come through the Theatre for a Change ranks from the very beginning - either as founder practitioner or as young people in the Community Theatre in James Town.

Please do check out the Interact Project Blog for more information - I would like it to become a real focal point for the work of Theatre for a Change so do please pass it on to people who might be interested.



My other project - 100 Voices - is also going well, with over 65 interviews completed and more than 4,500 words transcribed (with lots more to go). The massive majority of those words are positive, with many young people citing real and substantial changes in their lives as a result of TfaC's work.

It has also been really heartening - as I think I've mentioned before - to hear so many passionate, well informed teachers talking about the impact of the work. One woman who teaches tailoring to young girls who have not had a formal education told us that the Interactive performance that she'd just seen was brilliant - but that it was most important to ensure that parents and teachers were spreading the right messages because "you come, you go ... we are always here". A difficult thing to argue with - and one of the reasons that TfaC targets all sections of the community with their performances and training.

I spent the weekend at the James Town Community Theatre and then, on Sunday, at Amasaman, where the new project has been going from strength to strength. What's great for me going there is that, because there are so many local languages represented in the room, the majority of the workshop took place in English. This means I get a much deeper insight into the world of the young participants and I learnt a lot about how having sex raises your status in your 'gang' at school, how people respond to HIV/AIDS messages and what the participants think are the main problems in their communities.

Almost without exception, the young people in Amasaman are passionate, clued up, responsible and generous with each other. Nii - who is also recording links for the Interact Project - is a gentle, encouraging workshop leader. I have no doubt that he will help produce some outstanding facilitators who will leave the group to set up their own throughout the area.

One sidenote - it was in Amasaman this weekend that I saw my first cobra of my trip - a long flash of brown and a startled look in its eyes when we discovered it sunning itself in the corner of the yard outside the workshop venue. Don't get many of them in Islington ...

Culture shock

A strange and unusual and wonderful day in James Town with the visit of 20 young people from Base 33, a youth project in Witney, Oxfordshire. The group, visiting Ghana for 10 days, had met Patrick, Owusu and Eric from Theatre for a Change in the UK and now wanted to come and see TfaC in action.

They arrived at the Community Theatre Centre in the baking early afternoon sun, attached to tiny cheeky kids from across James Town who had joined them en route. They were early; our team of performers were late. Johnson improvised and - particularly as he was leading his first ever workshop with a group of young people from the UK - did incredibly well to keep everyone involved and participating.

By the time we'd learnt names, sung a Ga song, been taught 'Happy and you know it' by the UK group and talked a little about TfaC's work in HIV/AIDS prevention, the performers had arrived. They are all from the 'advanced group', made up of some of the facilitators and long-standing members of the community theatre.

I was curious about the performance: how well the CTC guys would be able to perform using English rather than Ga, how well the UK young people would respond to the themes and ideas. I was apprehensive as to whether any of them would be confident to step up and use 'touch tag' to join in the piece after it had been performed the first time round.

I needn't have worried - the young people were an attentive audience, the performers were generally pretty clear and kept the piece (about a girl infected with HIV and the way those closest to her stigmitise her) flowing really well. And then, after initial shyness, two of the UK girls stepped onto the stage and replaced 'Tracy', the protagonist, suggesting different ways that she could have dealt with the situation she found herself in.

What was most heartening for me was the response afterwards of the UK young people: not only did they ask lots of thoughtful, insightful questions but they responded to the issues raised in a very personal way, relating the messages and lessons learned back to their own lives rather than seeing them as relevant only to James Town or Ghana - or, for that matter, Africa.

At the end of the piece I interviewed three of the girls and they spoke about how having HIV shouldn't change your personal relationships: "you can't just drop your friends because they have a disease, it doesn't make them a different person" - a lesson that young people in Ghana take from TfaC's performances too.

It was inspiring watching the TfaC guys welcome the young people from the UK and put on such a confident, relevant performance. And it was inspiring seeing how positively the young people reacted - and how clearly interested they were in the issues.

On a personal note, it felt a little as if my work in the UK had collided unexpectedly with my work here. It was fascinating, and heartening, to see how well they combined.

One Hundred Voices

Up at 6am today to travel to Ada, in the south east of Ghana, and start working on the first of the two projects I am running for the rest of my time here.

One Hundred Voices will record and document the experiences of one hundred people associated with, involved in and affected by Theatre for a Change's work in Ghana. This includes young people, teachers, youth workers, practitioners and lots of others. By the end of the project we'll have produced a short video documentary voiced entirely by the hundred participants, as well as a comprehensive database of their interviews - both in video and text.

As part of the process I'm going to be running some training sessions for TfaC staff on how to use video editing software so that in the future they can use clips from the database to create new videos for specific purposes: funding applications, publicity or documentation. It's great for me because it means I get to meet and interview people in all areas of TfaC's work with a real purpose - and see the effects of the workshops and performances that they run.



The district of Ada is home to one of Theatre for a Change's partner Teacher Training Colleges where, for the last couple of years, trainee teachers have been taking part in InterAct workshops and setting up their own focus groups in local schools. It's a beautiful part of the country - right by the sea; lush and green with dark red soil. And it's home to some charming, friendly rural schools - three of which I visited today to talk to last year's focus group participants.

What surprised me most about the interviews was how comfortable the kids - mostly aged 8 - 14 - were in talking to the camera. Quite a few of them said that InterAct had really benefited them in terms of confidence and they nearly all happily chatted away about the changes that the programme had helped them make: more balanced relationships with the opposite sex, more knowledge about HIV/AIDS, more respect for their families. I asked them what their favourite parts of the workshops were and quite a few sung the songs they'd learnt: Olee-o!; I Came Here to Dance; A-tin-a-tin and more.

Funnily enough the teachers that we interviewed were less comfortable in front of the camera, less succinct, less natural. All, however, spoke powerfully in praise of the project. Some of them no longer had InterAct trainee teachers in their schools and were keen to have them back again.

What was overwhelming, though totally unsurprising, was the welcome that we got from all the schools and people we met, as warm as the sun which beat down on us for most of the time we were walking from school to school. Kids came running out of classes to see the strange Obruni, teachers calling them back, swishing at them with their sticks. At one stage a head-teacher threw me into the class of about 70 kids that she was teaching with the order: "teach them".



At the end of the day, despite a torrential rainstorm and a massive argument between Amanor and a tro-tro driver in the middle of a muddy road, I felt that I'd seen a really different side to TfaC's work. The hazy green countryside, the tiny crowded schools, the massive smiles and cheeky grins, the willingness of people to talk about issues that were sometimes pretty personal - by the end of the day it felt like we'd learnt a lot more than 12 interviews could possibly represent. Hopefully we can capture a little of the atmosphere and the welcome when we finally put One Hundred Voices together.

Weekend away

I've just got back from a long and very wonderful weekend in Takoradi - about 6 hours drive west of Accra - on the coast. We stayed at a great little place called Green Turtle Lodge, right on the beach. Lots of good food, playing in the sea and walking to secret beaches.



My plan is to spend the next few days in Accra putting the finishing touches on plans for the two projects I want to run for the rest of my time in Ghana. One is an online film documenting the impact that Theatre for a Change has on the people connected with it. The second is a video project linking practitioners in Ghana with practitioners working with young people in the UK.

More on both to follow soon.

To the lighthouse

A big storm last night and more rain today, which interrupted one of the Theatre for a Change group’s amazing outdoor performance this afternoon. The overnight rain initially makes things much cooler, but then the sun comes out and the air becomes dank and heavy. Everything smells more after a rain storm – of fish, fruit, mud, drains, trees and a thousand other things.

As I left the house I started sneezing uncontrollably – a bad sign because James Town, where I was headed, is one of the dustiest, saltiest places around. Sometimes just sitting in the Community Theatre Centre makes my eyes water and my nose tickle. I took some clarityn, blew my nose noisily and hopped onto a rusty tro-tro headed toward Tema Station.

At Tema I stumbled smiling through a thousand people selling water, tomatoes, plantain chips, socks, cooking utensils, oranges, soap dishes, sugar cane. I could have got another tro-tro to James Town but they’re rebuilding the road and the traffic is so bad that it’s quicker to walk.

It takes me ten minutes to get to the outskirts of James Town and this morning at least fifteen people said good morning to me as I wandered in. A girl, no more than eleven years old, with hundreds of sachets of water balanced on a tray on my head. An old man in traditional clothes and no front teeth. A group of twelve women dressed for a funeral crammed into the back of an open topped van. One asked me for money, for my name, my phone number; the others roared with laughter and slapped her hard on her back.

The road in James Town is currently a rubble strip waiting for new tarmac. Instead of cars there are hundreds of kids, like flocks of birds, chasing footballs, nattering away while they wee into open drains - masters of multi-tasking. There are women carrying vegetables, workmen digging holes, teenagers on bikes. The community has temporary ownership of a road once dominated by the noise and fumes of buses and taxis. It will not feel like the same place when they come back again.

As I walked into James Town today, past the forts where slaves were once kept, past the pale blue lighthouse, hundreds of kids stared at me, grabbed my hands, shouted “howareyou!” again and again. Some asked for money or a drink, others – the older ones – strolled beside me, wanting to know where I’m from and whether I know Chelsea and Michael Essien.

At the Community Theatre it was performance day and I walked with Enoch and Esther to a market road in the centre of James Town. The performers, wearing nervous expressions and yellow TfaC t-shirts, started to sing and dance in a circle – drawing an audience of curious kids and their wary parents. Two men nearby were practicing their boxing, with one glove between them. An old woman fried fish nearby.





During the confident, entertaining performance – a story about teenage pregnancy - I started to wonder how people would react if this happened in London. The overwhelming response today was positive: kids giggled, teenagers stared, the grown ups watched attentively. Every time a cart needed to come past we all had to press ourselves against the side of the road: once it went by the play started again. Then just as the piece finished the dark clouds came back. There was no time to replay the piece, to discuss the issues or start a ‘touch-tag’ session where the audience are invited to participate onstage. Fat, hot raindrops sent everyone scrambling for cover.

And so once again we stood, waiting for the rain to pass, for the sun to come back, for the familiar smell of mud and drains, trees and fruit. We waited for the music to start again in the tiny bars, for the streets to fill again – today with people, tomorrow with a mass of moving metal and grinding engines.

As the clouds started to disappear I walked back down the half finished road. I walked past soggy funeral parties, abandoned football games and improbably huge puddles. Back past the forts and back past the lighthouse, where I saw three tiny bums shitting by the sea front, their owners staring at the horizon, chatting contentedly.

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Dropping out

A stressful week for the Theatre for a Change staff: Johnson in particular has been working incredibly long hours as he works with budgets, end of the month accounting, projects with teachers and young people and the development of a funding proposal for a big new project in Somanya and Accra.

Angela Russ, a former Concern Country Director in Ghana, has been working with the team for the last few weeks, helping prepare the application for the new project looking at gender, HIV/AIDS and the rights of young people.

A large part of Angela’s research so far has focussed on access to education, particularly for girls and young women. On Monday we spent a large part of the day planning the new project. We talk a lot about education: about the value that families put their children’s schooling, how school is now free for all students (but you still have to buy your desk, your chair, your books before you’re allowed in), how boys are still more likely to go to school – and how girls are more likely to drop out.

Dropping out of education – which means a loss of future employment possibilities, of self-esteem, of access to healthcare advice – means young people are also at a higher risk of contracting HIV. Some girls might take up with ‘sugar-daddies’ (a theme echoed in many of the performances devised at the James Town Community Theatre), some might become prostitutes.

Also significant is a lack of stigma associated with underage sex. ‘Puberty Rites’ traditionally take place for girls around the age of 18 and mark the passage of a girl into a sexually mature adult – able to marry and have sex. Increasingly, and particularly in poor communities, puberty rites are taking place at younger and younger ages. This can be because it’s cheaper to have the rites performed for all the daughters in a family at once. In other cases parents consider it ‘safer’ to have the rites performed earlier: in some communities a teenage girl who gets pregnant before the rites have taken place is liable to be ostracised from her community, so it’s better to do it earlier ‘just in case’. The effect of this, of course, is to legitimise underage sex and so make the chance of unwanted teenage pregnancy – and of HIV transmission – all the greater.

As part of the research for the funding proposal Amanor and I spend a lot of Wednesday at various ministries, trying to find obscure departments with at least five names, digging around for information on enrolment numbers, visiting the Domestic Violence unit of the local police for figures on crime against children.

Later on I go to interview three chiefs – heads of the ‘villages’ which make up parts of James Town. Of course, things never turn out quite as you expect – I end up meeting one chief and one chief’s wife at their house in the middle of James Town. The wife scolds me for not bringing money and schnapps (as is the custom when meeting a chief, but I’ve been told it’ll be ok not to) and for not visiting his elders first – which is the respectful thing to do.

The chief, resplendent in small white shorts, is not impressed and doesn’t answer any of my questions; his wife talks for ages about James Town and how it needs help from ‘outside’, about her time in London in the 1990s and about how she’ll help us set up a proper chief's meeting – with schnapps and elders and, hopefully, some answers to my flimsy little sheet of questions.

Distance learning

A busy week and lots of travelling. There are road improvements happening all around Accra which means, in the long term, that getting around will be much easier. In the short term it means grinding traffic jams, difficult bumpy temporary roads and long travelling times.

Inevitably then, when workshops in relatively far off places don't quite go to plan it's more frustrating for the workshop leaders who've sat in a rickety tro-tro for hours to get there.

Amasaman, which I mentioned earlier on this blog, is about 40/50km away from central Accra. It takes at least an hour to get there. Johnson, Nii and I made the journey on Thursday, starting out at 8am, for a day of workshops designed to select the participants for the forthcoming project there.

The man responsible for recruiting the potential participants in Amasaman is a man who likes to nod a lot. I'd been worried earlier in the week when, asked whether we'd have the right number of participants (40), from the correct five communities taking part in the project, at the right times, he had looked a little blank, stared ahead and nodded.

When we arrived he was still nodding, even more vigorously, with an even blanker expression on his face. When no-one turned up at 11am, he nodded some more. By 1pm we had 5 people, one of whom was too young anyway, and the nodding had finally stopped.

This isn't a normal situation for TfaC facilitators to find themselves in, but it's not unheard of either. Ensuring the work is in the hands of local stakeholders is an integral part of the company's ethos and it means that sometimes things don't happen as smoothly as they might if imposed from a heavily centralised organisation.



The diversity of the work also means that Theatre for a Change covers a much wider range of communities than they could otherwise. Unlike some forum theatre groups, TfaC don't just arrive in a community and perform, they become integral parts of each community, creating groups of local people, facilitated by local people, which then perform for people in the local area.

It's not an easy thing to do and there are inevitable hiccups on the way. Training people to train others to facilitate groups is a bit like pouring water from one bucket to another - there's always likely to be some spillage, some part of theory that doesn't reach its target.

At the same time, however, the exploratory nature of the practice gives those who are trained the opportunity to add in their own skills, experiences, local knowledge - which means that their methods are better suited to the communities in which they are working. It's a balancing act - a key part of which is the regular reviews which happen within workshops, in meetings and in the office.

Back in Amasaman and it's amazing how calmly Johnson and Nii deal with a difficult situation. They are both annoyed and frustrated, but it's difficult to tell. They are polite, professional, clear about how to resurrect the situation - planning new selection workshops for the weekend, talking to other local people who might be able to help find the young people who'll become the nucleus of the project.

All then that's left to do is clamber aboard another groaning tro-tro and head back through the dust and traffic to Accra.

Day off

Today is my first full day off since arriving in Ghana. Theatre for a Change's work is diverse and widespread and it's difficult to cover it all, even when you use weekends.

For example, I'm yet to see any of the company's College work, in which trainee teachers take part in Interactive Theatre workshops and form their own focus groups of young people. This is perhaps unsurprising given the fact that the colleges are located long distances from the TfaC office in Labadi: the work that I have seen so far has been concentrated in the southern districts of Accra itself - and particularly in James Town.



I spent most of Saturday and Sunday at the Community Theatre Centre in James Town, watching a group of new facilitators take their groups for the first time. The CTC is a dark, dusty, difficult place to run workshops - it's impossible to sit on the floor or to spread out much: the gradual renovation of the building means that the groups have been crammed into one end of the old recycling centre that they used to use in its entirety.

There are other challenges for the new facilitators (all of whom have come through the ranks at CTC). Steven gamely battles for the attention of his new group: the 8 -12 year olds who tumble into the workshop, surgically attached to younger siblings and more interested in the two boxing bags in one corner and the strange Obroni (me) in the other.

Esther, meanwhile, has a different kind of problem. Her group are older, more focused, keen to create new theatre. But their theme is teenage pregnancy and only one girl has turned up.

On Sunday Johnson and I ran a workshop for all the facilitators: looking at basic facilitation skills (from eye contact to time keeping to dealing with distractions - of which there are many), ways of developing character and plot, organising performances. The response is really positive and the group are generous in their use of English when I'm sure they'd be more comfortable speaking in Ga or Twi.




The facilitators have a huge amount of responsibility. They must recruit 20 young people for their groups, plan and run workshops every week and develop interactive theatre pieces that are then performed in the local community. Most of them are under 24, all of them get a small allowance of less than $20 a month - which helps if they've refused other work in order to lead groups at CTC.

Two of the youngest facilitators - Foster and Amanda - are also two of the most talented. Foster, who I watched on Saturday, has an easy and natural leadership style, even when managing a group of young people older than him. I'm really keen to continue to work with him and also to include him in a new project I'm planning which links Theatre for a Change practitioners with theatre artists in the UK.

This Saturday there are more workshops to watch - it''ll be interesting to see how our training session impacts on the less confident facilitators and their groups. And on Sunday some of the groups will be performing for the first time this term: taking their pieces into the local community, performing them and then inviting the audience to take the place of the protagonists and change the story for the better.

These performances will be the first of over 30 that CTC members will participate in over the next few months, mostly at weekends. This may well mean I don't get another day off for a while ...

Stepping into Action: Amasaman Project Launch

Johnson Kefome on the Amasaman Project Launch:



Wednesday morning, 7am: I find myself standing bleary-eyed outside the Community Theatre Centre in James Town, about to get on a beaten up tro-tro with 13 considerably more awake looking Theatre for a Change staff members and CTC members. We are waiting to drive to a town called Amasaman - about an hour's drive away from Accra - where we will be launching a new project, called 'Stepping into Action'.

Before I arrived in Ghana, a high profile member of the local community saw TfaC's work featured on Ghanaian TV and invited the company to come and run a project in her community. The launch event is for stakeholders from the local community and is designed to gather support from well placed and influential local people, who are crucial to ensuring the project's success.

The meeting starts slowly and I start to wonder whether anyone will turn up. 10 minutes later and the small room is heaving with people - at least 40, most of them women, some of whom bring babies and small children.



Over the next 3 months Stepping into Action will recruit (or 'mobilise') 20 young people aged 18-24 and train them in using Interactive Theatre. They focus on teenage pregnancy and what the company calls 'behaviour change': shorthand for a process inherent to Interactive Theatre which allows young people to make positive choices about the way they approach certain situations in their lives.

In January, 10 of the participants will pair up to run 5 of their own 'focus groups', helping to train another 100 local young people. The other 10 will continue to work as a group, performing forum theatre pieces across Amasaman. It's an approach which reflects TfaC's desire to pass their method on to as many people as possible in the quickest way possible, creating a wide network of Interactive Theatre practitioners and participants.



The launch consists in the main of 2 sections: speeches and discussion about the way Theatre for a Change will approach the project and a performance by members of the Community Theatre Centre in James Town. This is, of course, the highlight - I'm really surprised by the talent of the young performers and the way they connect with the audience.

Naddei's story
The performance is about a 15 year old girl called Naddei whose parents are too poor to continue to pay her school fees. She meets an older man who, pretending to know her mother, convinces her to let him help her out - she must sleep with him in return. She becomes pregnant and is eventually kicked out by her domineering father.

After the performance, Nii - a wonderful, likeable facilitator - asks the by now very vocal audience for their reaction to Naddei's story. He explains that the performance has presented us with a problem (a 'model') and we must now try and find solutions to it (an 'anti-model'). Someone suggests that the mother talks to Naddei's teacher about the school fees. Another would like both parents to confront the man who raped (or 'defiled') Naddei.

Both courses of action are played out and the audience are this time invited to step into the action, using a technique called 'touch tag' to take the place of the performer playing Naddei. Suddenly Naddei becomes more forceful, or more honest, or better equipped to find a way out of the situation in which she has found herself.

It's only a demonstration so we don't go into nearly as much depth as we could, but it is still fascinating. The women watching are enthusiastic, vocal, opinionated and ready to stand up and play out the roles. I'm fascinated about seeing a less confident, less prepared audience deal with the same situation.

On the way back in a bumpy old tro-tro, Johnson, one of the TfaC Senior Programme Officers, is delighted by the meeting. One thing in particular pleases him: in the midst of a discussion about the need for parents to better support their children some of the mothers present said they wanted to start up their own performance group. Now all he needs to do is find a way to run it ...


VIDEO
After the meeting I interviewed Johnson about the project, the meeting and the next step for the Stepping into Action project in Amasaman. Please click on the video at the top of this page to see the interview and clips from the project.

Accra

"Eh Obroni!" shouts a man hanging from a rusty minibus in Accra's Tema Station. "Hey Obroni, why no money?".

'Obroni' means 'white man' and I'm the only one around. Is he referring to my clothes? My haircut? The fact I haven't shaved yet? Is it because I'm walking a bit lost through the pickpocketing centre of Ghana? Or does he know that I'm about to get on one of many other rusty minibuses - 'Tro-Tros' - and head to James Town, Accra's poorest district?

I don't stop to ask. I'm already late for my first visit to the Community Theatre Centre, have already missed one bus and (as I suspect) am about to get lost for the second time. The new tro-tro takes me miles away from where I want to be and, when I find out, everyone on board laughs ... but in a friendly way.



A week into my time in Ghana and it feels, predictably perhaps, like I've been here for months. I've learnt to avoid the gaping drains on either side of every road, I've become used to drinking cool water out of a plastic packet. I've eaten more plaintain in the last seven days than I've encountered in my whole life and I've very nearly - very very nearly - mastered the Ghanaian handshake - a limp squeeze followed by a powerful snap of the index fingers.

And I've started to discover the work of Theatre for a Change - started here in 2003 by Patrick Young and now expanding into other countries in Africa.

As with any new job, it's been difficult to make a mark straight away: I've been impatient to get involved in everything but have arrived at a time when everyone is busy. There are projects everywhere: teacher training initiatives in colleges in and around Accra, a new community theatre project in Amasaman - a district in the North West of the capital. And a new term at the Community Theatre Centre in James Town, where I spent virtually my entire weekend.

In the last few days I've started to get a real insight into the company and how it works. I hope that this blog will be a record of my time here and my thoughts as the work develops and, more importantly, as a personal overview of TfaC's methodology and projects across Accra and beyond.

I also hope to set up a couple of projects while I'm in Accra - looking perhaps to create links between the facilitators and young people working here and theatre makers in London and the UK.

Suggestions, feedback, questions and ideas are all really welcome.

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