From Benny’s journal December 15, 2009

Here came Monday and the saga continued. It looks like nothing can change the poor-man mentality that cannot see farther than the edge of their noses and only a few showed up to work at 8:00AM. My “Contractor" surprised me again with alterations to the building plan and changes to the duration of some of the processes that extended my schedule by a few weeks.

OK, if this is the case and we need to catch up, why can’t the community work on Saturdays? So, I received another lesson in Ghana‘s culture. “On Saturdays we go to funerals “.

I am trying to accept the reality and l leave to the higher powers the fate of this school. We all understand that as soon as the rain starts, usually in mid-January, the construction will slow down as the farmers return to their fields.

If work continues at this pace we will start the floor concrete casting in mid January and hopefully will start the roof sometime in the first half of February. We just extended our visas to three more months, they expire March 14^th.

On Thursday I met with the draftsman regarding the building drawings. Actually the draftsman is employed by the Regional Education Office, and does the drawing as a side job. In fact he does not do the drawing himself. He has two apprentices, and it is all done in his official office, during working hours and he pockets the fee.

Some well-connected people in Ho promised me a meeting with the Regional Education Director to discuss Airfield School issues. Since this did not happened, and I realized that my draftsman is in the same building as the Regional Education Director, I decided to meet him the old fashion way, the Israeli way. I knocked at the door and walked into his office. We had a very nice and open discussion about the Airfield school staffing, education level and the need for a food program. When I told the Director that I am meeting the Parliament Member on Sunday, he promised to collaborate with him on the issues. We agreed that he will come to visit us, on site, next Thursday, the 17^th.

I do hope that with the intervention of the Education Director, the Mayor and the Parliament Member we will be able to make a change in the authority’s attitude towards this poor community.

During the second half of the week the community members outdid themselves and were able to do more than was expected. It looks like, as we have more progress, the people that show up are more enthusiastic to finish the job. Unfortunately not all of them participate.

Prosper, whom I mentioned before as one who left the community years ago and made a good life for himself in Ho, is the one that doesn’t give up, he keeps his promise to me and devote a lot of his time, energy and money to help his community.

All in all it was a good week.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Building Airfield School, Volunteer posts from Ghana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.