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 ...