Humanize the Earth!

transportation hell

In the last 30 hours or so, I’ve taken 3 trips here in Ghana and two of them were hell.
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Yesterday afternoon, Sampson and I left a shop around 5:30 to walk to Kaneshie market for the bus ride to Kasoa where I’m staying. As I mentioned the other day, it’s only 20-30 minutes from Kaneshie on a good day. I got to my hotel at 9pm. Sampson still had a ways to go to get home to the camp, another 10 minutes on a good day, but he had to pay extra and finally made it.

The bulk of our trip was waiting at Kaneshie. The line for the bus to the camp was very long and no busses were in sight so Sampson thought we could wait for a Kasoa bus and he’d find a bus from there to the camp. The line for the Kasoa bus is on a service road to the main road, not in a station so when the first bus came, after about 10-15 minutes of waiting, mostly people from the line got on, plus a few others that pushed their way in from the other side. We thought we’d be on the next bus, based on the length of the line.

Then it got dark.

Then we waited some more.

Then people in front of us in line left to try to get on other busses.

Sometimes Kasoa busses appeared to not take the service road, but just stop by the main road instead so people pushed and fought to get on. We mostly stayed in line.

At one point we thought we had a bus stopping behind us a little ways so we ran to get on, but it didn’t happen. The line never re-formed. Didn’t seem to matter anyway as busses didn’t stop where the line was.

Eventually we got a bus to the Barrier (a place where the police generally stop everyone for a safety check or something).

When we got out there were a ton of people waiting for a Kasoa bus so the whole scene repeated in miniature.

Then a huge open truck stopped and we all got on! Was night to ride in the open air. :-) I sure was tired when I got to the hotel.
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This morning it was a breeze to get from Kasoa to the camp, 20 minutes including walking from the hotel to the junction to catch the bus.
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This evening coming back was another story. It was dark and I was waiting on the side of the road at the camp with Oretha. Finally a bus came that I managed to push my way on. When it came time to pay they were upset that I wasn’t going to Kaneshie (they wanted 5000 cedis even though it’s usally 3000 to Kaneshie, but I wanted to pay the usual 1000 to Kasoa but didn’t get change for my 2000 note.

That’s not the hellish part, however. When traffic backs up, some drivers like to ride on the left shoulder (this is a right-drive country). In this case there is road construction going on so the left shoulder is graded very wide in preparation for the new road. It’s not a new road yet, however and there are lots and lots of obstacles and other vehicles (including police) going both directions.
The driver tried to merge back into proper traffic several times but never made it.

The whole ordeal took more than an hour.
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Off to bed! :-)

categories: Ghana Africa Humanist Movement

one-on-one meetings

Yesterday I had six seperate one-on-one meetings with people in my
team. On past trips I lodged either in Accra or in Winneba, each
about an hour from the camp. That meant I was the one on the move
every day to meet people and if they weren’t around, I was just left
waiting a lot. This time I’m staying in Kasoa, much closer to the
camp so I scheduled these 6 meetings at my hotel at 2 hour intervals
(10am, noon, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm and 8pm) so that we’d have plenty of time
for each one, even if people were late. I saw Alvin, Boimah, Oretha,
Benjamin, Prince and Sampson.

My main questions for these meetings were these:

1. How do you see your future? How and when will you leave this
camp? Where will you go? What do you need to do in the meantime or
to make this happen?

To get some context on possible answers, they range in time on the
camp from 2 14 years and since my last visit, two of them have
departed (obviously not any of the 6 I met with), one for Minnesota on
refugee status and one to Liberia to put everything in place for a
move to the US on a Diversity Visa that he won in the annual lottery.

Answers ranged from, “I’m leaving as soon as my current schooling is
finished, by June 2005 at the latest,” to “I will go when my name is
called for the voluntary repatriation,” (going on now, but very, very
slowly) to “Because of my family’s connections it is not safe for me
to go back until everything changes quite a bit in Liberia so I will
be the last one to leave this camp,” to “I am working with my
relatives in the US to find any means possible to get a visa.”

Does anyone reading this know anything about this process? Is there
anything that I could be doing to help organize the Liberians that are
already in the US to help their relatives if that’s what they want to
do?

2. What’s happening with your humanist team? What do you need help with?

After Sampson sent me his team’s information about their clean-up
campaigns and need for tools of their own, people responded very
quickly to raise money for this purpose. Now the other teams are more
motivated to communicate with me about their own projects and what
help they also need. I will be posting answers when I get them from
the teams, hopefully with photos as well.

Tomorrow I will get up early and join Sampson’s clean-up campaign in
progress around 8am (they will start by 6:30). We’ll then finish up
by about 10 or so and have a meeting where we can go over receipts and
finances and plans for the future.

categories: Ghana Africa Humanist Movement

Budaburam refugee camp

Today was my first day visiting the Liberian Refugee Camp at Budaburam for
this current trip to Ghana (my 7th). There are noticible changes here and
there (a new building or a missing tree or a new front step on a house or a
new well), but nothing terribly significant different about the place itself.

What is significant is the fact that two people I’ve been working with for
some time are now gone. JJ called me from Minnesota about 2 weeks ago.
Apparently he’d received refugee status and was resettled by an agency to be
wtih his mother in the Twin Cities along wtih 10 relatives from teh camp.
Chris won the US Diversity Visa lottery and is not on his way to Liberia to
obtain a passport and other necessary paperwork to be able to travel. I
spoke with his wife today and she thought it would take him a year to get
things in order.

Anyway, my people in the camp seemed really happy to see me. Lots of people
that I didn’t recognize came up and greeted me by name today. Such is the
lot of someone without dark skin, I suppose. Plus I’ve been there a few
times and met with lots of people, and their people, and THEIR people
(pyramid-style).

Anyway, I’m visiting with the team of the shovels and wheelbarrows
fundraising on Saturday and will take photos and find out exactly what they
bought with the money and find out more about what they’ve been doing lately.
I also saw photos today of some other teams doing clean-up campaigns so it’s
quite possible that we’re going to need quite a few more tools. We’ll have
to prioritize what’s needed.

That’s all for now (downloading another IE browser upgrade so I can get my gmail!)

categories: Ghana Africa Humanist Movement

Ghana internet and such update

Since it’s only 50 cents an hour or so, I went to the windows update
site and downloaded an update to IE 6.0 and now can get to my gmail!
:-)

categories: Ghana Africa

Ghana internet and such

Landed in Ghana about 8pm last night and was met by my friend Sampson at the
airport. They now have a paystation system for parking where you pay on a
ticket system based on the time you’d been there. They even had a gate that
went up when you put the card in. Amazing, no?

It’s about 45 minutes to an hour from there to my hotel (New Timer Inn),
which is about 15 minutes from the refugee camp. I got checked in to my
air-conditioned room (200,000 cedis per night, about US$22), unpacked and was
asleep almost immediately.

This morning I met with Alvin and Prince, two members of my team. Later
Sampson came with 6 of his members and Nathane from Chris’s team. Chris left
last week for Liberia, on his way to the US on a diversity visa.

Now it’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m checking out an internet cafe
near the hotel (in Kasoa). It has internet explorer 5.0 so I cannot access
my gmail account. I also can’t seem to get logged in to yahoo messenger. I
downloaded firefox but can’t get it to work. Maybe a firewall? I’ll have to
see if there’s another cafe in town.

Tomorrow I go to the camp.

categories: Ghana Africa Humanist Movement

Amsterdam airport

Nice high-speed connections here. 3 euros for 15 minutes. So far
this morning I’ve already enjoyed the meditation room (shared it with
quite a few muslims for their daybreak prayers) and walked around.
Airport is still pretty calm at 7am on a Monday morning. Lots of
hours left in this place so intend to explore it all!

off to Ghana

I’ll be done the next 10 days or so. Full report when I get back. :-)
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Thanks for all the contributions for shovels & wheelbarrows for
Liberian refugees’ campaign for non-violence & fight against malaria.
We made out goal! http://tinyurl.com/5qmnc

Humanize the Earth!
blog http://tedernst.com
wiki http://chicagohumanist.org

3. The Principle of Timely Action

Debbie, John and I explored The Principle of Timely Action on Thursday night:

“Do not oppose a great force; retreat until it weakens, then advance with resolution.”

John talked about his own inner great force that keeps him back. My great force was also pretty much internal, whereas Debbie’s was a combination of internal and external.

In the second part of the meeting, we talked about Debbie’s plans to build a Purple Society. She’s going to blog about it, but in the meantime, here’s some of the conversations at omidyar.net 1 2 3
Categories: Principles of Valid Action Humanist Movement

What I’ve learned about trackback

I’ve been trying to figure out how conversations could take place on multiple blogs. It seems that if I post something, someone else can respond on their own blog and then send me a trackback ping, basically telling my blog that the response (or reference of any kind) is there so I (and you) can find it.

I’ve been told that some blogging software sends trackback pings automatically, but haven’t seen that happen yet. I’ve also found that I can do it manually using haloscan. I messed it up the first time by sending myself a ping for my own site. Very confusing. Then I got it right by sending a ping from the tutor to my site. Then, just to see what would happen, I reversed the process and sent a ping to the tutor from my post the referenced him. That seemed to work too. In both cases, the URL of the follow-up post goes at the top of the form and the trackback URL of the original post goes below. If one post refers to many, up to 5 posts can go in the bottom of the form.
categories: blogging internet

BloggerCorps

Here’s a new blog, BloggerCorps to help nonprofits find volunteers to help with setting up and linking together new blogs as well as setting up RSS feeds to aggregate link-blogs together. Sounds like a natural fit with the Small Change News Network and GiftHub as well as part of the Wirearchy.
categories: blogging internet giving