At 5:45, just after the sun had broke, Ziblim (the T-Poly driver) arrived to “pick me” at Jisonayilli. We headed to T-Poly to pick up three members of the Entrepreneurship Club and load the truck with supplies for the Entrepreneurship Olympics I had organized for the students in Bolgatanga. The night before had been a late one as my best friend here, Kristine, had celebrated her last night in Tamale-she was heading back to Denmark, having completed her internship for her Masters in African Studies. I snoozed for most of the two hour drive, awaking every half hour or so to a cluster of mud huts or a small bustling village full of porters walking through the streets with various items on their heads and livestock shuffling through the traffic.
We made impeccable timing and arrived in Bolga within 2 hours; everything was going so well it was almost scary. We picked up some sacks of water and then made our way to the B-Poly campus, which is about 25 minutes out of town. The 40 students competing in the E-Olympics had been informed that a bus would be waiting for them at the old campus (which has now been turned into a Gov’t office) in town to pick them up and take them out to the new campus where we’d been given a large classroom to set-up our event. When we were about halfway to the new campus I called the professor from B-Poly that I’d been coordinating with to confirm that everything was going according to plans with the bus. As soon as he picked up he said “Shawna, we have a HUGE problem!”. My stomach dropped, I knew it was too good to be true-everything had been going too smoothly. The bus wasn’t working and Dr.Batse suggested that we should turn our truck around and come to the old campus to meet with him and try to sort things out. It turned out that the B-Poly bus we’d rented hadn’t been used in a long time, so no one had discovered that it didn’t have a battery. They had gone to start the bus to go get fuel and realized it wasn’t working. As Dr. Batse described it-we were having “one hell of an African time”, and he made no attempt to water the situation down-“Shawna, this is how it is in Africa. We have 3 students waiting here-the rest are late, waiting somewhere else, or decided to attend the funeral today. The bus hasn’t been used in ages and no one came early to fill it up with fuel.” We definitely had a problem- some students were hanging around the old campus waiting for the bus, others had indicated they would be waiting along the roadside for pick-up, and some had decided to meet the group at the new campus with their own means of transportation. So now it was 20 minutes past the designated departure time and I had students sprawled out from the old campus to the new one, waiting for the bus and waiting for our arrival. There was definitely no way of piling 30 students into the back of our pick-up truck and the window of time to fix this problem before students gave up on us and went home was quickly depleting.
We made impeccable timing and arrived in Bolga within 2 hours; everything was going so well it was almost scary. We picked up some sacks of water and then made our way to the B-Poly campus, which is about 25 minutes out of town. The 40 students competing in the E-Olympics had been informed that a bus would be waiting for them at the old campus (which has now been turned into a Gov’t office) in town to pick them up and take them out to the new campus where we’d been given a large classroom to set-up our event. When we were about halfway to the new campus I called the professor from B-Poly that I’d been coordinating with to confirm that everything was going according to plans with the bus. As soon as he picked up he said “Shawna, we have a HUGE problem!”. My stomach dropped, I knew it was too good to be true-everything had been going too smoothly. The bus wasn’t working and Dr.Batse suggested that we should turn our truck around and come to the old campus to meet with him and try to sort things out. It turned out that the B-Poly bus we’d rented hadn’t been used in a long time, so no one had discovered that it didn’t have a battery. They had gone to start the bus to go get fuel and realized it wasn’t working. As Dr. Batse described it-we were having “one hell of an African time”, and he made no attempt to water the situation down-“Shawna, this is how it is in Africa. We have 3 students waiting here-the rest are late, waiting somewhere else, or decided to attend the funeral today. The bus hasn’t been used in ages and no one came early to fill it up with fuel.” We definitely had a problem- some students were hanging around the old campus waiting for the bus, others had indicated they would be waiting along the roadside for pick-up, and some had decided to meet the group at the new campus with their own means of transportation. So now it was 20 minutes past the designated departure time and I had students sprawled out from the old campus to the new one, waiting for the bus and waiting for our arrival. There was definitely no way of piling 30 students into the back of our pick-up truck and the window of time to fix this problem before students gave up on us and went home was quickly depleting.
One thing I will definitely say about Ghanaian people is that they are resourceful-they are so adept at using what they have to make things work. As I began to feel the pangs of disappointment that our whole day was down the drain, one of the men working on the bus came up with an extra battery that they had extracted from another vehicle (hopefully with permission, haha) and began to install it into the bus. A few minutes later, after many unsuccessful attempts and a lot of whining from the bus engine, the ignition turned and the bus came to life-raring to go. The students hopped in and we sped off to the new campus to make sure the others waited.
Despite our rocky start, the Entrepreneurship Olympics turned out to be a success. The T-Poly E-Club members that had come to help man the stations and set-up moved quickly with me to get everything organized before the bus made it out. We had 34 students show up out of the 40 that registered-impressive stats given the situation. They had a great time moving through the five activities I had extracted from the DREP curriculum and made into a relay. (This was a great idea Mike had shared with me during his visit to Tamale). The students were really enthusiastic and we saw a real sense of competition between them as they worked their way through the following stations:
1) Characteristics of an Entrepreneur
2) Brain Teasers
3) Idea Generation
4) Tower of Power (my favourite-they are given a stack of various materials like pens, flipchart paper, string, paper clips and masking tape. They have to build the highest freestanding tower they can that will hold an egg for 15 seconds. It’s a team building activity that helps students get “outside the box” of the structured classroom environment they’re used to and puts them in a creative thinking mindset.)
5) Pass the Ball
A representative from the local radio station made a visit to check out the Entrepreneurship Olympics and see what we were up to. When we had tallied up the points and made our way to the front of the classroom to announce the winners, the students were so excited. They whooped and cheered as each team’s final points were read out. Finally, the winning team was declared and there was an explosion of cheering as the team jumped out of their seats and came to collect their prize-the blue and white DREP t-shirts we designed for the event. We handed out all the participation certificates and gathered for a group picture. I had one t-shirt left over and many of the students came up to me to give me their pitch of why they should take it home-“I left my baby to be here today”…"I’m an entrepreneur..I’m taking a leadership role and asking you to give it to me”- each followed by laughter and more teasing.
We packed everything up and were just about to leave the campus when we found out that once again, the bus wouldn’t start. So the 5 of us taking the truck and some nearby students gathered behind the bus and began pushing to give it a kick-start. It sputtered and whined again and then grudgingly started took to our efforts and set off for town again. I took the E-Club members and Dr.Batse out for some jollof rice and fufu and then we were back on the road, heading home to Tamale.
I returned just in time to take a quick shower and join Morgan and Shawn to attend Nancy (our Canadian grandmother ; ) and Frank’s Canadian pre-Christmas party. It was a similar crowd to our other Canadian events, and a nice chance to hear what everyone had planned for the holidays. Some people were making a visit home for Christmas, others were done their work and heading home for good, and the rest of us swapped travel itineraries and shared advice for places to go and places to stay away from. True to the Christmas spirit, we all indulged in one too many appies and far too many Christmas treats before piling merrily into the back of two vehicles that a couple of the long-term expats had come with.
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