Retreat!

The rattling of the trotro shakes my hair into my face and the cap off my pen; it is clear the roads here have seen too many large trucks, too many passenger buses. It's the lush green they're driving through that they come to see: boatloads of tourists shaking and shimmying to the elephants at Mole game park, or the historic mosque at neighbouring Larabanga. However, our trotro comes to West Gonja for other reasons—although the perks of a foot safari were not ignored. The 2008 Junior Fellowship Midsummer Retreat is in Damongo, and the wildlife, greenery, and tourist-driven flush toilets are extras in the gift of reconnecting with each other.
Volunteer work for EWB is no easy task, and frustration, exhaustion and loneliness is part of the job description. Coming together gives us the necessary vent to release our anger, tension, disappointment and frustration accumulated in the first (and hardest) seven weeks, and recalibrate it into motivation, strategy, inspiration, and expectations. Even though we are on “retreat”, given an opportunity to withdraw temporarily from work, no one can stop talking shop. Conversations on government programs, how to motivate farmer groups, how to invoke behaviour change and the plights and successes of our women are continual. Every extra instant is spent on problem solving, project analysis, brainstorming and collaborating, making plans. For this one weekend, the problems of one volunteer become the projects of the others, and at the end of three days we emerge from the guesthouse each with a new initiative, a new plan, a direction, and the renewed verve to follow it.

I arrived frustrated, contorted into a mess by the difficult decisions and awkward positions of my life in Nalerigu. Now I know the best thing I could have been given was the safe time and space to cry it out, be angry, share stories of why we keep going, and decide what I'm to do about it. The motivation of the people around me is exhilirating; the passion I still feel about the work we are doing is more apparent to me when reflected in the faces of my fellow volunteers. This group of Canadians, sourced from all over the country and flung haphazardly across Ghana, has grown into quite the strong family. And after we cram our feet into dirty rubber boots, trek through Gonjaland in search of elephants, finish with our flush toilets and tourist inclinations and breathe our welcome sigh of relief, we'll rush back into the fold for seven more weeks of battling poverty--our brothers and sisters in arms in the back of our minds, and the stretch of the Northern Region in front of our eyes.