S-LC Staff in Ghana - An Update

We are writing this post from the beautiful country of Ghana, West Africa. We are studying here at the University of Ghana for the semester through Calvin College. For those of you who don’t know us, we are both in our third year and work at the Service-Learning Center.

Ghana is divided into ten regions and more loosely into the North and the South which are drastically different from one another. The South is green, tropical, and lies on the coast whereas the North is a savannah and generally very dry and very hot. Along with these climate differences are differences in their colonial histories. When Ghana was colonized the capital was established on the Coast and naturally infrastructure followed. Overall, the colonial powers choose not to develop the North because there was no benefit for them in doing so. These historical disparities have had a lasting affect on the development of Ghana.

About two weeks ago our group went on a week-long trip to “The North.” We visited six NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) in various parts of the North. We learned how valuable it is to learn about development first-hand. We couldn’t help but talk to one another about how much seeing these things first hand was helping us understand them so much better than if we had read about them from a text book.

We got to talk to real people about the real work that they were doing. They were able to give us a realistic, and not always rosy, picture of their development work. In going to numerous NGOs with varying approaches and missions, we saw that they were all firm in their methodologies. This was difficult because we could compare NGO A to NGO B and pick out the good and bad in each without being able to find a perfect “way to do development.” It highlighted the complexities in development work. As we sit here writing this post we are having a hard time articulating our experience because the value is truly learned so much better when experienced first hand.

This is just a glimpse into how very much we are learning here and we hope that we can talk more about our time when we get home. It’s funny how in a round-about way a small lesson that we are learning is how valuable learning outside of the classroom is.

Kelly and Becca