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".

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