Bad Volunteer Programs: Warning Signs and Solutions

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Warning sign: You’re a woman and there are no local or foreign females involved in the management (not just other volunteers) of the project.

Solution: Find a project that has at least one female involved in managing you at your project site, foreign or Ghanaian. Ask to speak directly with that woman on the phone before you leave home. Ask about the project and the programme set up when you arrive.

Warning sign: You cannot get three positive referrals from other foreign volunteers (they must be foreign to avoid potentially corrupted local—Ghana or whichever country you’re looking at—individuals paid to make false statements) who volunteered with them.

Solution: First, you’re spending your time and money in a foreign country where you may have no support network at all. If you asked for references and they said no, take that as the biggest warning of all. If they gave you references, contact those people for first-hand accounts so you can make an empowered decision. If they won’t give them to you, find another project. FIND ANOTHER PROJECT!

We have listed 8 more key warning signs and solutions to help you avoid signing up the wrong programme. Sign up by email in the top right hand corner (it takes 3 minutes) if you’d like to get the full PDF and be truly empowered before making a decision.

Key attributes of a helpful volunteer

We have a new site www.g-lish.org where you can read all articles from This is Ghana in a much more organised fashion. Read Key attributes of a helpful volunteer there.

As a volunteer myself and first time traveler to a developing country, I went through many stressful moments. And as manager of the program for WiP in Cape Coast for 20 months, I saw many volunteers come and go. All in all I worked with over 100 volunteers from all over the world. During this experience I narrowed down the key attributes of a great volunteer.

As a manger of volunteers, what I wished for most were people who were willing to do whatever was needed. As a volunteer, it took me a while to realise I ought to be doing what was needed, not what I wanted to do--at least not immediately.

We outline key attributes in more detail. This is a sample what we’ll share in the Insider’s Guide to Volunteering. Sign up by email in the top right hand corner if you’d like to be kept in the loop about the release.

Key Volunteer Skills Always in Need and more

We have a new site www.g-lish.org where you can read all articles from This is Ghana in a much more organised fashion. Read Key Volunteer Skills Always in Need and more there.

Any skill will find a home in a volunteer organisation. Does that sound too easy?

If you’re a budding or experienced writer, many organisations need help with PR, marketing and newsletter writing and, these days, blogging and other social media activities.

If you’ve been a mother for fifteen years, you have organizational and management skills and you’re probably highly flexible and patient. Perfect.

Every organisation could do with an IT person at any level, but especially to improve networks, hard drives, and internet connectivity.

We list many more key skills that will find homes volunteering in Ghana or any developing nation. Sign up by email in the top right hand corner to be kept in the loop about the release of the PDF. Should be just in time for Christmas.

But What Difference Will I Make as a Volunteer in Ghana?

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The one comment that virtually everyone I worked with made was that they were disappointed with “how little” they achieved and they didn’t feel like they made a difference. I said the same thing myself early on.

This is what happens. Your expectations before leaving home of what you will achieve as a volunteer, and what you actually achieve in country, are usually quite different. That is, you can achieve the same amount of work you do at your project in half the time or less in a developed country where things work. Most volunteers expect to operate at that speed on the ground at their project. Unless you’re the World Bank—with air-con offices, back up generators, high speed internet, dedicated vehicles, and highly skilled staff—you just can’t.

You can’t change the world in two weeks, two months, or even two years—on your own. That’s impossible.

What you can and will do is…

We’ll discuss this point in the complete, full-length PDF so that you will be in the best position to make a good choice about a volunteer program in Ghana or anywhere. If you'd like a copy, sign up in the top right-hand corner and subscribe by email. We'll post when the PDF is up and ready to download.

About the Journey to Ghana and more

We have a new site www.g-lish.org where you can read all articles from This is Ghana in a much more organised fashion. Read About the Journey to Ghana and more there.

Very soon we’ll be posting a 22 page Insider’s Guide to Volunteering in Ghana as a PDF that you can download for free. It will include the sum of my and Godwin’s experiences—as volunteers and managers of volunteers. It will include this journey, posted below, key attributes of a good volunteer, key skills, reviews of 6 good volunteer programmes and NGOs, an item by item outline of costs I incurred over 11 months volunteering and a budget for a volunteer coming to Ghana for 3 months today, words of caution regarding bad and downright terrible volunteer programs based on our first-hand experience in more than six different organisations, specific warnings for women, warning signs of a dodgy programme and solutions to those signs, and some positive final words on what to expect once you apply to an organisation.

Be sure to sign up for email updates in the top right hand corner if you want to be kept up to date on this release.

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When I decided to volunteer I knew virtually nothing about the developing world. I didn’t do development studies or international relations; I majored in Japanese and Korean language and had worked for Japanese corporations for ten years until 2004.

I had been planning to work in England (probably for an oil company) when the tsunami hit on Boxing Day 2004. I worked in the oil and gas industry then for the Japanese Government and had researched gas exploration around the area of earthquake’s epicenter that caused the tsunami. Offshore Aceh in Indonesian waters was my backyard, in many ways.

And Boxing Day was, for my family and me, the one day of the year that our thoughts were firmly focused on the ocean already. Dad is a sailor and every year he heads off in an ocean yacht race that begins on the 26th of December.

News and images of the tsunami began streaming in soon after the race began on Boxing Day that year. I had a very clear and conscious thought while watching TV that evening that people were drowning so close to home and I was glad Dad was nowhere near there. Dad and his crew made it safely to their destination, but we’d been inundated with footage of the tsunami for days by then.

Sometime between Boxing Day and the 31st a thought crept in to my mind. I could do something to help. (Gotta watch those thoughts!) I felt I owed a debt to the region. And that’s when I started looking online to volunteer in the aftermath of the disaster.

I have to say, again, that I had no idea about the developing world. I knew nothing of volunteering. I’d never heard of Peace Corps or VSO. (I’m Australian, but still.) I searched and searched but I discovered that NGOs were overwhelmed with offers of help from professionals like doctors, builders and nurses. By early New Year their waiting lists were filled for months. I couldn’t see how my business skills would help.

So I finally decided to leave tsunami recovery to the experts, but the idea of volunteering somewhere in the developing world stuck. My new year’s resolution became: “Volunteer on the way to London.” I had no idea, back then, that this whim would take me to three continents, over a dozen countries, for the next five years—and I’d be paid for it (or at least come out even).

So I cast my net wider. I looked at Sri Lanka, since it was also hit, but I couldn’t find a suitable project. As much as I loved the idea of caring for orphan elephants, I didn’t feel like it was “doing the hard yards,” and I had this insane (in retrospect) notion that volunteering was about pain and sacrifice.

I started looking for orphanages but there were so many I felt overwhelmed. I was obsessed with belly dancing at the time so I looked towards Egypt and Turkey. But I couldn’t find anything and, by then, Africa was coming up in all my searches.

But I was not interested in Africa at all. I knew about oil interests in various countries, and I knew about Mandela, Biko and Tutu, but that was it. I had not even heard of Nkrumah. I didn’t know more Nigerians speak English than the English. But, I decided to focus on orphanages in Africa—the whole cliché—another life-changing thought/decision.

It was sometime late January that I found idealist.org which happened to have a database for a search of “business” and “women”. Ten seconds later I discovered my volunteer project in Africa. As soon as I read their ad I knew it was right—it was business oriented, for women, and they produced batik textile products (I’d studied textile design for three years after university) and they exported (I’d worked in a Japanese trading company for three years too). So I emailed them and received a swift reply. I made an instant decision to volunteer in Ghana.

But where on earth was Ghana? I didn’t even know what or where West Africa was. I remember thinking, west of what? I narrowed my searches for orphanages to Ghana and quickly found a reputable organization. That was it: six months in Ghana then off to England.

And then the orphanage coordinator wrote and asked if I would teach Japanese at a primary school instead. My problem with this was that I had a huge fear of standing in front of a class to teach (quiet voice) and I also have irritable bowels (IBS). I worried that I’d get nervous and want to run to the loo all day. I wanted to say no, but he begged and explained that they had too many volunteers booked at the orphanage already, so I agreed. I never did get to work at an orphanage but I did visit the one I initially was posted to. And I didn’t end up teaching Japanese (much anyway), because there was a greater need at the school for literacy teaching. One of the many things I learnt was to do what was needed, not necessarily what I wanted to do.

But I found my feet. Working in this environment satisfied me more than anything ever before—and I was good at it. That ten years of soul-destroying corporate work paid off in its own way—I had skills and knowledge I could adapt in a meaningful way.

Your skills and life experience—so long as you can adapt them to the local context—is something that developing communities can truly use. Anyone interested in this work would serve struggling communities anywhere better with solid skills and experience. The know-how you gain from a few years in the best-resourced businesses or organisations like JP Morgan, McKinsey, or any large corporation like Sony or Microsoft (the founder of Room to Read www.roomtoread.org is an ex-Microsoft man) are the very thing developing communities may never have access to. You can bring and transfer your skills where they’re most needed. In short, practical skills that meet a need are invaluable.

It took me a month to warm to Ghana and find my feet. After that, I loved it. I finally got to England after eight months in Ghana (I had frequent flyer points from all those oil company meetings) and applied for a job with Traidcraft almost by accident. I interviewed for it while still on that trip and received an offer of work—in Cambodia—after I’d come back to Ghana to finish my volunteering. So I left Ghana after a year for S E Asia. But I then received an offer to return and work for WiP. I was torn. I finally decided to return and work in Ghana for WiP.

Like many who travel to make a difference, I often feel the travel has benefited me more than I’ve benefited any place. It’s a facile, unquantifiable idea, but it certainly seems to have some truth in it. And I found my place where passion meets talent and experience—at last.

I believe that if my ambition upon leaving had been to work in Ghana or Cambodia, I would have tried too hard and missed other things going on around me, and it probably wouldn’t have happened.

I feel that fate played its role at each of the turning points in this journey— some call it “cosmic choreography” (I read that phrase in Caroline Myss’s Invisible Acts of Power.) But there was also a fair dose of “opportunity meets preparation.” What I mean is that I was in the right place (by accident), at the right time (unplanned), with the skills needed (accidentally acquired, but acquired nonetheless) and the heart to do it (that was natural).

My second trip to London for a week’s training with TC before heading to Cambodia coincided with the judging of the Top Shop/Tabeisa Design 4 Life comp that I worked on during my final months as a volunteer with WiP. I became a judge by virtue of being in London at the right time. I met Annegret, one of the winners, for the first time in person in late 2008 when she came to Ghana to work on her next season after we’d exported a few orders of her designs to Top Shop, which happened shortly after I returned to work in 2007. There was so much cosmic choreography it was positively Russian (ballet—alright, perhaps that’s streeeeeetching the idea).

If you made it this far, anyway, you have what it takes to volunteer or work in the developing world: patience and determination. A sense of humour, especially when it comes to toilets and departure schedules, helps too. We’ll get on to this in more detail further below.

Incidentally, there are so many ways to “make a difference” that don’t require traipsing half-way across the world, or even making great changes to your routine. We’ll outline one such opportunity below too, in case you should be interested but you have commitments where you are, for now.

A final word on this journey. In December 2004, if I knew exactly what was in store over the next five years, I would have thought I was not capable of it. I would have thought I was not mentally or physically strong enough. A lot of mistaken beliefs have been busted over the past five years. I urge you to go bust yours too—wherever it happens.

As an interesting aside, in 2006 I discovered that the BBC did a story on the phenomenon of post-tsunami volunteering. I read that tens of thousands of people felt compelled to volunteer after the tsunami, often far from where it hit.

What Makes a Good Volunteer?

We have a new site www.g-lish.org where you can read all articles from This is Ghana in a much more organised fashion. Read What Makes a Good Volunteer? there.

Age, gender, work experience and nationality have nothing to do with how much people contribute and how well they cope when they come to volunteer in Ghana—or anywhere. I never could tell who would adapt and who would have trouble. Many times my assumptions, based on impressions I formed after the first few days together when I was a volunteer (and later managing volunteers), were proven wrong as time passed—and I was glad of this. I saw that some people take a few weeks to warm up and find their stride and I shouldn’t be too quick to judge—I was one of them. Those who you think may be difficult to work with, based on emails before they arrive, may turn out to be the most helpful, effective and fun to work with. Some begin all optimistic, but become frustrated after a week or two with the pace of things.

You never could tell and it was a valuable lesson in human nature.

What I did learn, however, was that the ones who excelled shared certain key personality or character attributes irrespective of age, gender, background and nationality.

This is a sample what we’ll share in the Insider’s Guide to Volunteering. Sign up by email if you’d like to be kept in the loop about this PDF release.

Cape to Kumasi and Kejetia: the first time

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I wrote this after my first visit to Kumasi and Kejetia. Maybe it will help you brave it too.

Cape Coast. Tantre tro station. Touts shouting “Where are you going?” Market women selling stacked balls of Fanti Kenkey on the oil-stained concrete. “Buy some, bla bla!” they shout. Come, come!

No thank you. I'm thinking: I tried Kenkey and I didn't like it at all. I watch three women with babies on their backs sitting under an old store front. A small girl standing next to the crying baby holds a bottle of milk to its mouth.

The Kumasi ticket shed is dead-ahead. I buy my one-inch square piece of printed paper. A helper directs me on board a square-shaped bus. Ten rows, five seats to a row. The number of seats has nothing to do with the number of people that actually sit in them. A row of five might actually seat seven, and a chicken and a bleating goat.

Now I must wait, an opportunity to find purchase on a broken seat between fat market ladies and chickens in black plastic bags and time to suck strawberry frozen yoghurt from a pink plastic bag.

“Sss,” I hiss at the Fanice boy balancing a tall rectangular, glass-fronted container on his head. He pulls the case down and hands me a frozen pink pillow wrapped in a torn piece of newspaper. I hand him a few coins--with my right hand.

Forty-five minutes later, we're ready to go, squashed between farting fishermen, bags strapped and tied on to the roof.

The bus lumbers out of Tantre and up the slopes, landscape transforming from low-lying coastal plains to lush jungle. After a couple of slow-going hours we hit a stretch pot-holed road and bump our way into an urban mass of twisting highways and roundabouts.

We creep towards Kejetia in the mid-day Saturday traffic, bumper to bumper, with vehicles from all over Ghana.

Crowds of pedestrians carrying wares and luggage on their heads, women with babies wrapped on their backs, weave between the caterpillar of vehicles as if they, not the machine, rule the roads.

Welcome to Kumasi.

Kejetia is the busiest part of Kumasi. The adjacent market occupies half a hillside. Shops’ wares spill over into the footpath. Hundreds of mobile traders squeeze between tumbling tables and piles of wares blocking the footpath, buckets balanced and bobbing above crowds like balloons at a birthday party.

Queues reminiscent of rock concerts snake along the footpaths where I wait for a share taxi to my new home. This is a world away from the tranquil, laid-back, ocean-side life of Cape Coast.

My 2 Week Diary on Creativity or Working Without Electricity

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I was once able to sit and concentrate all day, without disruption. Now, even when I’m deeply engrossed in what I’m doing, I have no choice but to endure random disruptions and shift my attention to something else—that doesn’t require electricity, or internet, or water.

Indeed. I kept a two-week diary of living with power and water shortages. I hope this gives a sense of what life in Ghana is really like. Funny, though. I remember, with a wry smile, a comment I made within my first two weeks of arriving in 2005 and the power cut again. I lost all the work I was doing at the time and said something like: “I can’t work like this!”, out loud, surrounded by seasoned volunteers and Ghanaians who live like this their entire lives. Yes, I was that girl.

Fast forward: 4 years later.

Fri 13^th Nov

10.56 a.m. Power cut. I was saving in Word as I wrote. This is now automatic. I ctrl+S after almost every sentence. What to do now? OK, I’ll mind-map out a new project on paper until the power comes back. At least the water is still running.

11.13 a.m. Power returns. Not bad, just annoying. Cleaned dirty stove-top instead of mind-mapping so not an entire waste of time. Opened Word doc. Good. All saved.

1.21 p.m. Bloody power cut again. Time to make sweet potato salad with Khmer style dressing. (I’ll often work through lunch if there’s power, even if I miss lunch. I’ll eat crackers or bananas because you never know when it’s going to cut.)

1.49 p.m. Power back. Good timing. Called town. It was cut across the whole region. Mind mapped project and had lunch too.

Mon 16^th Nov

1.31 p.m. Bloody power cut again. It’s called “lights out” in Ghana.

1.55 p.m. Power back. Not bad. What is it with 20 minute cuts? Have to restart all over.

Wed 18^th Nov

10.10 a..m. Power cut in middle and didn’t save. Returns 30 seconds later. Bloody hell. Need to reboot.

10.20 a.m. Opened Word. Lost last hour of work. Walked out front of house. Truck ran over water pipe on Monday and its still gushing water today. Called Ghana Water Company repeatedly but they don’t seem to mind losing precious water for days on end.

6.10 p.m. Lights out again. It’s pitch black. No moon. Feel around room for phone with in-built light. Sit and listen to utter silence. Nice change. Mosquitoes start attacking. Buggar.

6.29 p.m. Lights return. Yay. Can cook dinner now.

Thurs 19^th

9 a.m. Just realised water has been cut off. Pipe out front fixed now though. Like living in a parallel universe. Use tank water for now. At least we have power.

10.05 a.m. Just as I reach to plug the stabilizer into the socket and start work, the power cuts. *Stream of expletives* Still no water. Continue mind-mapping new project. Make separate mind-maps of each branch of the main map. Nice and quiet, except for the Guinea Fowls squawking like World War III just broke out.

10.34 a.m. Power returns (we always leave one light on to know). Becoming ADHD. Start computer work.

10.55 a.m. Go to wash hands. Water back!

Tues 24^th

Day of Barcelona game. Godwin excited

7.06 a.m. Lights out again. Godwin starts cursing and worrying about missing game. I curse missing working time.

8.30 a.m. Power returns. Great. Start work.

12.02 p.m. Power cuts again. Oh boy. Godwin sounding like angry Guinea Fowls. He loves watching Amanpour on CNN at noon—one of the few foreign programmes we get each day via Metro TV. I empathise; I just want to finish my work. Eat lunch. Start working on writing out content for new project on paper. This is how I generate my best ideas anyway, so it’s ok.

1.00 p.m. Still no power.

2.00 p.m. Still no power. Godwin calls town. None there either.

3.00 p.m. Officially Dark Ages

4.00 p.m. Still living in Dark Ages

4.45 p.m. Back in the 21^st Century.

Watch game! Barca wins!

9.00 p.m. No water. Great. No flushing until morning.

Fri 27^th

7.08 a.m. Power cut. What’s new. Eat breakfast in quiet.

7.45 a.m. Power returns. Yay. Stays all day. Get work done.

Tues 2^nd December

Noon. Power cut. Seems to be a pattern of Tuesday cuts. Draw some new designs by hand.

3.04 p.m. Power back. Managed to get some designs done. Now to write.

Yesterday evening. 5 p.m.

Power cuts. Godwin stands up with hands on head and walks outside cursing. He returns. He looks like he’s about to cry. I’m about to cry. We’re missing the World Cup presentation.

5.05 p.m. Power returns. Phew. Ohh.

One hour later. Ghana and Australia are in the same group! Why?! And Ghana faces Serbia in their opening match, Ghana’s national coach’s home country and the one nation he expressly said he did not want to face. The “powers that be” certainly have an odd sense of humour.

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Believe it or not, this was a fairly reasonable couple of weeks. We were having cuts daily or every second day for a while. In 2007 it was for 12/24/36 hours on end, every second day.

Anyway, that’s a snap-shot of the reality of living without a reliable electricity or water supply. Add to all this, almost every time I go to the internet café the internet connection cuts in the middle of work. The power may cut too. Sometimes I lose everything.(As I paste and check this online now in the cafe I'm getting the message: Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Retrying...and so it goes. I hope we're still connected when I press publish. Oh it's back!)

The worst aspect is that it’s very hard to meet deadlines when you lose chunks of precious time. If a deadline is a Friday, you always plan to finish by Thursday because there is no way you can plan on having power or an internet connection on the deadline day—it’s too unpredictable for that.

The worst is when you’ve built up anticipation to do something, and were looking forward to getting stuck into it, and then suddenly you simply cannot do it. You just have to do something else. That becomes very frustrating. If you ever wondered where that look of defeated resignation that Ghanaians sometimes get comes from, I believe this may have something to do with it.

It’s forced me to become creative. I have learnt to write anytime, day or night, anywhere—especially on trotros, in anything—computer, paper, my hand. When you have no choice but to write “when the writing’s good”, then you just do it. I don’t need to be at a comfortable desk with a view. I don’t need a chair. I don’t need to wait for inspiration. I don’t even need air-con when the temperature hits 40. I don’t even need a fan. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you have no choice and it’s just you, your determination and your imagination.

I make sure I’m working on several projects at once, in different stages of completion. I make one low priority and default to it when the power goes out. If I’m writing something, I’ll have printed drafts and use the power cut to edit on paper. So all’s not lost. It just means that you have less control over things. For someone who was once a major control freak, this is good; I have no choice but to go with the flow—or lack of!

If you have any stories to share, please click the comments below and let us know. I know many who are yet to come to Ghana for the first time are reading this and will benefit from others’ wisdom.

Ghana Travel Planner: two different 10 Day Tours of Ghana

I tend to rough it as a traveler and don’t mind putting myself through hell to get where I want to go (which I didn’t know about myself until I came to Ghana), and sometimes forget that not everyone shares this inclination so I’ve written four itineraries that cater to different traveling styles and durations. The first two are based on 10 days and cover the major highlights: one easy, one more challenging. The next two (in the next post) are based on 19 days: one easy, and then the super challenging version.


You can click on all the Ghana Highlights here and check out the trips to each part of Ghana to help your plan your itinerary.


Also, read more about our Ghana Guide here at G-lish. 


Itinerary 1. 10 Days Beaches and Mountains. (Does not include northern Ghana, Mole/elephants.)


Day 1-3: Accra-Cape-Accra. Beaches, crafts, and history.
Things to do in Cape:

Old pirogues along the beach on the Eastern side of Elmina Castle.

1. Visit Cape Coast Castle (very interesting exhibit and easy to get to.) and/or Elmina Castle (Elmina Castle is the oldest European/colonial building in sub-Saharan Africa. Est 1482.)

Emma, one of the batikers outside her workshop. That's Cape Coast Castle up the road in the background.

2. Workshops. These are run by Global Mamas. Chefs love the cooking workshop and creative types love batiking (on the beach situated between Cape Coast Castle and Oasis—the no-frills outdoors bar of choice for backpackers.)
3. Hang out at Brenu Beach or Anomabu Beach, both within 30 minutes of Cape Coast.


Day 4-9: Accra-Volta-Accra. Mountains, crafts and waterfalls.
Day 4: Accra to Wli Waterfalls, to the east of Hohoe. Wli is as far north as you need to go, and then work your way back down to Accra. North to Hohoe (4 hours journey). At Hohoe change for vehicle to Wli (30 minutes). Get there by early afternoon and relax.
Day 5: If you’re feeling energetic, climb to the upper falls. If not, walk to the lower falls. Wli is a tranquil village. You can cross the border to Togo here. The border is at the end of the main road, about 5 minute’s walk from the visitor’s centre.

Friends at lower falls at Wli

The next are all optional/mix and match. Stay longer if you like some place.
Day 6: Return to Hohoe by (usually very full) taxi or, indeed, any vehicle you can catch a ride with, and catch tro to Fume (1 hour south—easy journey) if you want to stay at Mt Paradise. Hop off at Fume and get a taxi up hill to Mountain Paradise (or walk: it’s a 2 hour walk up hairpin bend after hairpin bend). Do half day waterfall walks. Stay another day or
Day 7, travel to Ho on tro and visit weavers in Kpotoe, a half hour outside of Ho. It’s about 40 minutes from Fume or 1.5 hours from Hohoe. Travel on to Akosombo Bridge area the same day. Stay at Akosombo Bridge, another hour or so south of Fume or Ho, or 2.5 hours from Hohoe, on the Volta River and hang out at Aylo’s Bay great location.
Day 8: Hang out at Aylo’s. You’ll want to. Perhaps visit Cedi Beads or other beadmakers or markets around Krobo about 20-30 minutes from Akosombo.
Day 9: Back to Accra. Visit the National Museum, Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, and any other sites of interest.
Day 10: Sad departure day!




Itinerary 2: Challenging highlights, including Mole National Park, Cape Coast and the Volta.


Day 1-5 Accra-Mole-Cape. Wildlife and markets
The reason I put Mole first is because there is scope for a lot to go wrong and it’s better to happen early, than when you’re rushing to get a flight. If you have your own vehicle (4WD) it’s fine. If not, you have to take public transport. If you are prepared for rough and ready experience and are open to ‘the journey’, you’ll be fine. If you expect everything to run smoothly and be like a ‘safari’, it will disappoint.


Day 1: Accra—Tamale. Depart Accra by STC in the morning. About twelve/thirteen hours to Tamale. Stay overnight in Tamale. There is only one public bus to Mole from Tamale and it ‘departs’ at 2 pm everyday.
Day 2: Tamale—Mole: Hang around Tamale in the morning. Buy a ticket at the central tro station before 10 am. Depart Tamale between 2 and 6 pm. It takes four hours. So you get there anytime between 6 and 10 at night.

Elephant crossing the road at Mole

Day 3: Mole. Do the walking tour to find animal herds at 7 am for a couple of hours or in the afternoon, or both. The motel is on an escarpment overlooking the flat savannah where the elephants, and antelopes and other animals gather. It has a pool.
Day 4: Depart Mole. Bus departs at 4 a.m. Arrive at Tamale around 8 am.
Your options of going south on the STC from Tamale are: On Tuesday the service departs at 8 a.m. for Cape Coast and on Saturdays at 3 p.m. It departs to Kumasi at 7 a.m. daily, but 11 a.m. on Sundays. It departs to Accra daily at 6.30 a.m. or 4 p.m., including Sundays. Unfortunately, none of those connect with the arriving bus from Mole which usually gets in around 8 a.m., provided you don’t break down. That’s usually too late to buy a ticket south unless the service is late, which the STC often is. The Metro Mass orange buses, quite a decent option (better than tros) leave Tamale daily at Tros leave the same station that the Mole Bus arrives at regularly throughout the day to Kumasi. It will take you about 6-7 hours to get there. Say you get in around 4 p.m. You can then jump on a tro to Cape which will get you in around 8 or 9 p.m. that night (I did this very journey).


You might not think that journey is worth the hassle to see elephants. Or, if you have the extra cash, it’s worth hiring a tour company to drive you around instead, which would cut 2 days off the trip north or give you 2 more days to see other things like Hand in Hand near Techiman or to go up to Bolgatanga.


Day 5-6 Cape—Accra. History, crafts, beaches.
Day 5: Recover in the morning by the beach outside Oasis in Cape Coast and then tour the castle, about 50 metres up the road. You could fit in a workshop at EliEmma’s batiking in the afternoon, between the Castle and Oasis.


Day 6-9: Accra—Volta. Mountains and waterfalls.
Day 6: Return to Accra from Cape. There are numerous vehicles for this. Catch tro same day from Tudu station, about a 4 Cedi dropping taxi from Kaneshie. Many vehicles leave Tudu to Hohoe in the afternoon. Arrive in Hohoe in late afternoon and tro straight to Wli or stay overnight in Hohoe.
Day 7: In Wli (or head to Wli—30 minutes) and climb the waterfalls. Hang out at Waterfall Lodge.
Day 8: Take a well deserved rest in Wli or add on any of the stops in the itinerary above for the Volta region: Mountain Paradise, Ho and Kpotoe, Akosombo, Beads
Day 9: Same as for day 8 and return to Accra.
Day 10: Sight-see around Accra.

The Power of Prayer

We have a new site www.g-lish.org where you can read all articles from This is Ghana in a much more organised fashion. Read The Power of Prayer there.

Thanks to the gift of a wonderful volunteer I worked with eighteen months ago, I began a spiritual journey that includes regular meditation and yoga. And I’ve been praying too. Usually for friends and family and even those who caused me pain in the past—everyone. It helps the healing process and it helps me know what’s important. Until recently, I never prayed for myself, though, other than, somewhat opportunistically, in trotros.

So I want to share something that happened a few months ago. I’ve held off posting because it seemed too hokey for blogging, but I decided, now, to share anyway.

I had been reading Caroline Myss’s Invisible Acts of Power (published in 2004 by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, USA) before I fell asleep. What she calls “invisible acts of power” are, simply, compassionate acts of kindness, or generous acts of spirit or material means between friends, family or even complete strangers. Through hundreds of letters from recipients of anonymous and not so anonymous acts, givers who received pleasure or wisdom from helping others and, most painfully, those who expressed regret at not helping where they could have, she shows that the “divine grace” inherent in the decision to help, accept help or not give help for whatever reason has profound affects on our spiritual being and interconnectedness.

I know that many reading, especially if they live in Ghana or have volunteered or traveled here may quite likely have been involved in some kind of act of kindness along the way. I saw it many times over.

There were countless inspiring stories from people who desperately needed their rent paid and the money suddenly materializing, to those who had serious accidents and needed a compassionate voice, to others who were abused and found themselves helped in the most unlikely of places, and yet others who may have witnessed, stepped in or supported others, that stand as testament to the human desire to share and help others.

I’m not religious in any conventional sense, and the book does not espouse any one religion, but I have been following spiritual teachings for a few years. Nevertheless, I felt a tad skeptical when I was reading these lines even though I had already received a bit of divine intervention myself over the years.

Myss wrote: “Even when our prayers appear not to have been answered, we can be sure that they have been received and that an answer is already here or on the way. Perhaps that answer does not come at the moment of the prayer or in a personal form that we recognize or an angelic presence that we would like to see. But answers to our prayers filter into physical manifestation when the time is right.” (p. 225).

And I read this story a couple of pages later (p.227). I have edited it slightly here. It’s what happened later that night, that I describe further along, that made me reluctant to post.

“A few years ago I was going through a very painful divorce. My soon to be ex-husband was doing his best to destroy my reputation since I was the one who filed. Worse than that was how all of this was affecting my children. Many nights I went to our church chapel and I would sit there until the middle of the night. One night I was in the chapel crying, but I was at my breaking point. I had been praying and then I started to weep. I told God, ‘I need help and I need it right here and right now right this minute because I can’t handle one more minute of this alone.’

“I sat in the pew crying. Immediately the door at the back of the chapel opened and a woman walked in. She marched right up to the front pew, sat down, and put her arm around my shoulder. She started talking to me and everything she said made sense. I felt the presence of peace sweep over me. How could she have known what was going on in my life? I had never seen this woman, yet she spoke to me as if she had been walking with me the entire last year through this divorce. As I calmed down, I looked at her and said, 'I don’t even know you, but I feel like I do. I have never seen you. I don’t even know your name.' She replied, 'My name is Grace.' With that she got up and left after she told me that I would be fine. I have never seen her since and I will never forget that evening. I know if you ask for help you get it, but that was really quick. I didn’t even say please, but I have definitely said thank you. I came away from that night with new strength and renewed faith.”

I fell asleep reading the book and then I suddenly woke in the wee hours. There was no sound at all which, if you know Ghana, is unusual. There were no roosters crowing yet, not even any crickets or insects, no breeze, no dogs barking. It was dead quiet and dark. But I was wide awake and alert as if it were mid-morning, which is unusual for me as I’m not a morning (and definitely not a 3 a.m.) kind of person. Godwin was sleeping quietly beside me under the mosquito net and I was tucked in my sheet, even though it was hot.

Wide awake, I became bit bored. I found myself thinking about what I’d read before falling asleep. After a while, I decided to try praying for something--this is something I had avoided doing for a long time. I made my first appeal to the spiritual powers that be as I lay wide awake at that odd hour.

It went something like this.

“Hello, I’d really like ABCDE and, by the way, I’ve already had bad malaria (yes, I started bargaining) and typhoid, and almost rabies, and giardia, and who knows what else, and I live with terrible bowels, so you know I know what pain feels like. So please, I would like ABCDEagain and I don’t mind working very hard for it, as you know, OK?”

That was it. I felt stupid as I said my first real prayer for something specific in a very long-winded way. And then…

The moment I finished this prayer and its last thought, the spoon in my tea cup on the other side of the room rattled. I feel a little embarrassed even posting this. (I’ve held off posting it for months.) It was just the distinct tinkle of metal on ceramic for a second or two almost the instant I finished the prayer.

Firstly, just so you know, I don’t take drugs and I hardly ever drink alcohol. I was wide awake and alert and dead still under the mozzie net. There was no noise before or after in the room, and geckoes stick to the walls, although we haven’t seen one in the room for a while before.

So I lay even stiller and thought, “Bit of a coincidence that was. Hmm. Was that an answer? Was that God? Or was that a mouse? Is there a mouse at all? I don’t want a mouse running all over me…” I was so shocked that I sat up and pushed Godwin awake and told him what happened. We got up and looked around, but we couldn't find anything.

The rational part of me thinks it was a coincidence. The part that’s scared to admit such a quick and distinct answer to a prayer is still in shock after all these months.

On balance, I’ve been pretty fortunate without asking for a thing over the past four years—other than not dying in a trotro crash and, well, that’s worked so far. I shall keep giving thanks for myself and prayers for others.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this? Or someone's generosity when you least expected it but really needed it? Or did you do something for someone else make a big difference in their life? Or something that you felt was insignificant but had a profound impact in the other person? Or a stranger made a kind gesture to you?