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.

.

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 ...