Very early on, I introduced you to my host family in Swedru - Margaret the matriarch, Claudia (30) Junior (28) Peggy (24) Edu (3 and a half)and Ishi (2) and an absent Lois, mother of Edu and Ishi, who's living in London with her husband (and will send for their daughters soon, I hope).
The family opened their house to KErstin and me for a month and were always kind, courteous and curious. Meals - breakfast and dinner - were Ghanaian style - awful tasteless bread and jam/peanut butter or spanish omelette and awful tasteless bread or awful tasteless oats for breakfast, though sometimes we were lucky enough to be given pineapple, watermelon or papaya. Dinner was a far more successful culinary experience - always interesting and tasty from red-red: (black eye beans with rice in a sauce and fried plantain); palaver sauce (made from spinach-like cocoyam leaves); titale (plantain mashed with flour and deep-fried as fritters); jollof rice (rice fried up in red palm oil with chicken or fish).
Thankfully we managed to avoid fufu (cassava and plantian or yam, mashed until the starch breaks down and it becomes a gooey ball, then cooked with no water to firm an even gooier ball. Normally served submerged either in a light soup, or with palm oil or groundnut (peanut) sauce. Very gelatinous and really quite disgusting! Fried yam however is delicious as are yam balls ...
Meanwhile, back to our hosts and their house. They have one living room that is exceptionally dark (lighting in Ghana isn't one of their strong points) and hot with a small fan circulating the warm air so you feel forever as if you're about to pass out. The dining room table acts as storage so there was only ever enough room for Kerstin and me to eat at it, the rest of the family eating (seldom at the same time as us) with their dishes on their laps, using hands (right hand only, note - it's considered rude to eat with the left one) to spoon up the food. Quite an art!
The kitchen is square and every inch is covered with dishes, cooking pots, cutlery and food that it took me a while to realise that there's actually a sink in there! (You can just make it out in the pic)
There are only two bedrooms - Kerstin and I shared one room whilst the whole of the rest of the family shared the other. That's 4 adults and 2 children. Never once did we hear a cross word, any shouting or arguments amongst the adults, despite living in these cramped conditions. Always charming, smiling and wanting to be helpful. Lessons to be learnt from this??!!
Then there's the toilet which is a WC but only flushes on certain occasions and has to be manually filled with buckets. The bucket shower room is what is says on the tin - a tap half way up one wall which sometimes has running water from which you fill the buckets, which are of different sizes (see pic). There's a drain in the floor to let the water out and a large blue cistern just outside the door to act as extra storage when there's no running water. This happens quite frequently and usually lasts about 3 days.
There's a fairly large yard outside where you take the dishes to be washed (by hand of course, using 2 large bowls) and where we also washed our clothes also by hand (never as clean as the machine!). Bonus is that our clothes dried wonderfully quickly due to the sun in the yard.
All Margaret's children muck in with the chores - Claudia would get up at about 5.30 and sweep the yard for about half an hour, then she'd shop for our breakfast in teh stalls immediately outside the gate of the house, then make our breakfast. She'd also get the two little girls ready for the day and all this before 7.30 a.m.! Peggy works as a cleaner at Barclays Bank (may they rot ...) so leaves the house at 4 a.m. comes home at 12, sleeps for a couple of hours then washes dishes, helps with cooking and looking after Edu and Ishi. Junior is a bit more enigmatic and elusive but always mucks in with chores such as washing clothes and being the practical one. Margaret herself is the main carer for the two girls as well as working as a primary teacher during the day.
They loved talking to us about their life in Ghana and their aspirations and were interested to know about our respective lives in the UK and Germany. They are true Christians and frankly an inspiration to how simplicity and hard work can be their own reward. Extra money would always be useful of course - they've a broken sink that the landlord keeps forgetting to replace, the ceilings sometimes let the tropical rain water through and of course education is an expensive but very desirable commodity. So our Christmas gift was to pay for Claudia to return to Uni to study finance/banking so she can pursue her career. The whole family was grateful and Kerstin and I were so happy to be able to contribute in some way to making a difference to Claudia's (and as a result, all the family's) life. Only now though we discover that Junior has had to give up his course temporarily as he has to work to be able to fund it - so I may start yet another fund-raising campaign ...
Living with them made our time in Swedru and at the orphanage bearable - it was like returning to an oasis after the chaos of each working day. I will always be grateful to them to opening their doors and letting us see how a real Ghanian family lives.
