Welcome back, another week and another blog post. This is our penultimate week, so we need to make every second count. That said, let us start logically at the beginning.
Sunday was a Sunday, a lazy day where the closest thing to work was when I headed to a restaurant in town to give my friend Mariam, the owner, a letter for her church. I then spent the rest of the day chilling out with a cold drink and sporadic company from strangers and friends alike.
Monday was far more strenuous, Dylan and I were left in the office as the team was split in to two very uneven halves, one group leading a goalball session for primary school children, and two of us left to work on our own projects. I spent the day developing the sachet knee pad while Dylan turned his attention to pictures, videos and the REACT social media pages. I was particularly excited to discover that by pressing pads made of sachets very firmly with an iron you can make a thin foam-like material that can be cut up like polystyrene.
The school session was more chaotic, even with the support of a teacher named Fatty, [Emma’s host-mother and world’s most wonderful human being], there are only so many primary school children you can fit on a goalball court, and that’s before you start asking them to lie down. Our preferred warm-up is a game called “over under” in which a goalball is passed down a queue, back over one person’s head and then under the next person’s legs. This warm-up is great fun at the best of times, however adding the random element of a 5-year-old’s understanding can make this game as fun to watch as it is to play… even before blindfolding them.
We followed the success of Monday’s school visit with two sessions on Tuesday on the same field. Split more evenly in to two groups, we took it in turns to tackle classes of unruly pupils, [some of my best friends have unruly pupils, that’s why they’re blind].
I was one of the lucky chosen few who arrived at International Service an hour early so that we could set up the court for an 8 o’clock start with the Bugga school children, [ yes it is pronounced that way and no I cannot give you a phonetic spelling for reasons of decency].
While we were coaching 14-year-old girls to play goalball, the second half of our team made themselves busy building goalball playing mats… until they ran out of tape and worked on a concept for an accessible game based on Jack-in-the-box instead.
After a hard morning’s work we realised that it was still only 9 o’clock, so we headed back to the office to continue working on various projects and the second team replaced us on the goalball training job.
Team leader Chris appeared to think that this arrangement worked well as we did exactly the same again on Wednesday. The rest of our training session typically involves teaching the basic defensive positions on the floor and encouraging students to get down low when shooting, then we finish with a series of short games.
Wednesday was also notable as it was the first day of Ramadan according to a Muslim UK volunteer from a different project.
Thursday brought a school visit of an entirely different nature as we travelled up to Walewale to give a sensitisation talk to the community and a goalball training session to the local school. This was the day we were given our first reminder that we are entering the rainy season in Ghana. I actually noticed the change in light as within 3 seconds the sky darkened giving us a minute’s warning of the wind and rain that was to come.
The talk went smoothly as it was held under a large Markey that seemed to be a permanent fixture. The school training session, on the other hand, was an experience that no amount of forethought could have prepared us for.
We were given around 200 children ranging from 5 to 15, crammed in to an assembly hall with torrential rain drumming on the tin roof, and expected to run an introduction to goalball… so we did! After a brief demonstration of goalball on a small stage, [none of which I could hear over the rain], Mahe over-saw a series of two on two goalball games on a 9/3 court while others introduced children at the back of the hall to zoomball, with a third group forming three queues for over under with their eyes shut. The result was a chaos of children and sound and yet in that chaos there was order and while we never did the training we hoped to do, none of us felt like the day was wasted as we watched the students experience things and consider ideas they never would have without us.
Thursday was also notable as the first day of Ramadan according to almost all the Muslim volunteers in our team.
Friday was a lie-in, as we were due to visit the other international service project in tamale at 9:30, a women’s empowerment project giving employment to women making shay butter along with a number of soaps and creams that can be made out of shay butter.
Then the best laid plans of mice and men etc., Ramadan means that Muslims and mosques set alarms for 3 AM for breakfast before dawn so the lie-in was not to be. Then Mahe took me and team leader Chris [my gramma is correct] to look at playing bibs for our tournament next week, this made us late for the shay butter tour.
After our factory visit we took a leisurely lunch time stroll back to the office via the tailor’s. While it is possible to buy clothes off-the-peg in Ghana, it is more normal to buy material from one of a thousand cloth shops or hawkers then take your chosen fabric to your favourite tailor who will make your clothes. We have been using one of these tailors to turn my sachet pads in to strap-on elbow-pads, so we dropped in to see how the latest batch of pads were getting on as well as picking up a few items of clothing that the tailor had also been working on.
The afternoon was then spent in a fever of activity, plans for our last week in Ghana needed close attention, equipment quotas had to be met, radios needed to be contacted, hardware for our events needed to be booked and a trophy and medals needed to be made. In all we had work to keep us going until 6 before we finally called it a day.
Friday was also notable as the first day of Ramadan according to Hassana, apparently you only start fasting after you or a trust-worthy community member has seen the moon.
Saturday was a complete day off, so it is on a note of excitement that I must leave you for this week, our penultimate week is closed, a week of teaching and learning, of careful planning and rapid readjustment under pressure.
Next week will hold more goalball than you can shake a white stick at, [it’s called a cane but never mind], tournaments, triumph, heartbreak and a VIP VIP from Britain.
But that must wait.
So until then, good bye.
Blog by Richard Wheatley
Richard is a goalballer who currently plays for London goalball club after a few years away from the sport. Richard has a small amount of international experience having played for team GB in an under 19s tournament in Brazil in 2013 but is thoroughly outclassed by next week’s guest star.