Blog entry 1 by Lydia
As the news informed me this morning, Ghana is a country
struggling with registering its population. There is no official or enforced
system of identity cards, no national structure for registering births or
deaths, many of the homes do not have addresses, all of which ultimately
contribute to problems with the voters’ register. A bumper sticker the other
day sums up this issue: vote early, vote once, vote peacefully. Although the
idea that you could vote more than once is alien to the political apathy that
has seeped into British culture, it is something our Ghanaian counterparts
seemed to joke off as a normal problem in their electoral system.
This national problem of registering the population has
local consequences for our LIFE project (Local Integration For Empowerment), as
we have no access to a register of people, and in particular children, living
with disabilities in the community. So our first plan of action has been to
undertake active field research to try and find those who are unknown to our
partner project, CBR (Community Based Rehabilitation) or the local DPOs
(Disabled People’s Organisations).
Before my arrival (I rocked up a bit late due to a coup in
Burkina Faso which redirected my voluntary work to this fantastic project here
in Ghana) the team has designed a questionnaire, and the plan was to go door to
door asking everyone these questions and hopefully reveal people living with
disabilities who were normally kept in their homes through a culture which
still judges disability as a stigmatisation, a shame that should be kept
private. At the end of the day, that attitude was prevalent in the UK even just
60 years ago, and is still being improved upon.
We first went to Wiaga, a neighbouring village where
previous cohorts had established a successful girls’ club which even runs
whilst volunteers are not here, the aim of all our projects is to establish
sustainability so this is fantastic for us. We began by meeting the local DPO,
who then were helpful in taking us to homes of people they knew who have
disabilities. However, this wasn’t the exact purpose of our research, but we
made the decision to prioritise not damaging the relationship with the DPO, who
were quite offended that we wanted to talk to people they were not aware of. I
remained with the DPO leaders, and as such was introduced to a variety of
families who often had an elderly disabled person within their midst, but I
didn’t meet any children with disabilities. That was only my personal
experience, but the group as a whole actually made contact with around ten CWDs
(children with disabilities) in the Wiaga community, which resulted in the
first girls’ club of this cohort featuring three people with disabilities
attending, but that will have its own blog post up soon!
We also undertook to survey Sandema, which our local
in-country volunteer Victoria divided into six communities for us to take as
pairs. We elected not to directly involve the DPO in our search of Sandema for
CWDs and PWDs, because of the way our results had been strongly influenced in
Wiaga. Each working pair, eg Abdullah and I, took one community, and also used
the opportunity to drop off a questionnaire to the local schools’ head-teachers.
The community I visited was called Fiisa, and it was incredibly
rural. I’m from Devon, but this was a whole other level. We cycled through
maize fields, along the edges of fields planted with low growing crops or rice
fields on paths that were the thickness of the bicycle tire. We crossed rivers
and waded through marshy sections where I was up to my knees in water, squelch
squelch mud. I was slightly worried about snakes in the long grass, but the
worst thing that bit me was an ant so no worries there!
This data collection has been two very laborious days out in
the heat, and we often came across language barriers where not accompanied by
Buli speakers (the local language), but it is a fantastic achievement to have
discovered people living in these communities with disabilities who we can now
hope to incorporate in our projects.
We are feeling energetic and hopeful about our work, and
looking forward to processing all this data to reveal our results!
