The Ghana Thing : background

In 2000, ‘Stof en Aarde’ started up a project in the Ashanti-region of Ghana (West-Africa).

During  my  first visit in 1998, the family I am now well acquainted with, showed me the vast woods and substantial pieces of land they own.
These people had fled from the poverty of the villages and have lived in the suburbs of Kumasi, capital of the Shanti-region ever since.
Also here, survival is their main concern, but their chances are better than in the villages.
Anyone who lives in the big town, only has one explicit wish; to get to Europe or America and find a job there.

At that time, I was voluntarily active in migrant working, teaching Dutch to children of migrants.
I was also closely involved with the complications of the sans-papiers (the paperless) and  it became obvious  that my compatriots became more and more intolerant towards migrants .

The multiple opportunities that I saw as an entrepreneur in Ghana as well as the poor conditions of illegal immigrants that I saw here were the main reasons for me to set up a small-scale ecological project, mainly motivating  Ghanese people  to stay in Ghana.

By means of an ecological project, I would try to show them  what their country offers  them and I would concretely prove them that it is possible to have a good life in Ghana. Those who were busy dreaming and  settling for  Europe could stay in Ghana  and raise their children themselves instead of being one of the thousands of parents who phones every fortnight and who monthly sends a  sum of money, year after year… while the children have one main goal in their early days; a reunion of the parents…. In Europe!

In the course of time, it repeatedly came to me that my work in Ghana can be seen as a quest. The dictionary explains a quest as an impossible and unworkable task that one has made oneself...
My original plan to help turning at least one village into a sound, viable and  selfsustaining  place in an ecological manner  (according to the principles of permaculture) was  upset before I could even undertake a first step as there was a very complex tangle between the local traditional Ashanti-‘legislation’, imposed by the chiefs and based on ancestral consultations on the one hand and the official, ‘gouvernmental’ legislation on the other hand.
All of a sudden it was forbidden to start on their land and I had to lease a piece of land myself.  I was constantly sent here and there and the endless traditional cultural regulations as well as the necessary ceremonies  before  starting on a piece of leased land were stated as  ‘legal’ procedures (meaning a concern of the government). Those procedures cost  a  handful of money, time and energy.
Moreover,  a part of the money,  carefully put aside for seeds, education, transport,   accommodation  or a well... and trusted  to someone  responsible  was spent as ‘chop-money’ (daily food) each time after my departure. Another part of the money was stolen by others…
At the end, the so called reponsible persons appeared to be in the red with others and each time, the point of my arrival (or departure) was reported as the moment for paying off their debts.

I had to learn all about these and other inherited peculiarities and also learned  to cope with them.    I had to ‘experience’ my way in both the formal and informal social network that is way beyond ours.  I had to embrace ever more elements of what is called ‘the logic of the poor’. I once read this expression that sounds  so right and that  says so much and  it  clarifies, to my opinion, a great deal of the dead-end situation in great parts of Africa (and the world).

As physical poverty  never appreared  in my personal life nor in my living world (that is to say not to the extent of daily food survival efforts) it demands a lot of time, patience and an open mind to estimate  the mechanism of poverty and certainly its consequences in all domains of life. Furthermore  the situations  demand full  recognition when you are immersed into them instead of seeing it all on television or on paper.

This website-page is too restricted and restrictive to give a full record  of the more and less subtle forces that engineer or that  obstruct the project. 
Besides full details of the project, events and background can not be given loose from my personal evolution.
I hope I will ever find the moment and the energy for  such an extensive writing.

I now have to make a great leap indeed and express in some lines what 10 years of Ghana have taught me (at the moment of this writing)

We do all we can and we will never neglect to do all we can in the future, but real enduring and structural help is only possible with a world that gives up  the free market economy that  deprives Africa of its raw materials while the free market economy  also  exploits the work force and it stuffs the continent with the waste it doesn’t know what to do with. It shouldn’t  restrain us from further help as  hunger is terrible and acute. Policies and further actions are essential though.

What is happiness? In my opinion, the Ghanese people are on average not less happy than the Belgian people; they are not depressed,  they don’t commit suicide, and are more likely to  give away a smile, they dance a lot and have plenty of time for each other, they greet each other, support their numerous relatives, need no rest homes  nor  children’s day care centres  as the child normally travels along on the back of its mother.
I would say that the Ghanese are more happy than the Belgians as Ghanese social cohesion  is much tighter.

Life in Ghana (and in Africa) has no  spiritual bounderies. We may compare ourselves with them as  being the smartest lucky bastards who made it, who are rich, have jobs and food and who have all we want. We have forgotten and lost spirituality in the sense of experiencing all that is connected with all. We have lost it from generation to generation and it made room for scientific statements and the so-called common sense. We can learn plenty  from them.