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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