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Sailing in Ghana

Dear friends,

We are on schedule to help the new libraries in 2005. We were able to collect the container from the port of Tema in early December. Then we worked with a group of young people and sorted all 26,000 books into boxes according to their Dewey Decimal numbers. This only took a week because Hilda and I had put the Dewey Decimal number on each book before we shipped them this year. In doing this we saved about ten days of work here and avoided shipping books that were too old or inappropriate.

As I write this, it is January 4^th. We have just returned from a four day "get away" into the Volta River basin. During the trip we visited the town of Dzodze where we had set up a library in 2003. We had not heard anything from them since then and they did not send a representative to our annual inservice in 2004. Fortunately we were able to meet with one of the original members of their Board of Trustees. He assured me that the library was still functioning well. They had to shut down the library for a short period when the librarian abruptly resigned, but they found a replacement and have reopened it. This vindicates the time Hilda and I take to make sure there is a viable board of trustees to oversee the running of each library. In this way Books For Africa Library Project uses a "community development" model. Each library is a partnership between us the book donors and the local community which runs the library and solves any problems that come up.

January 8^th we will have an annual inservice for the existing libraries and the representatives of the six towns requesting books for 2005. We will have the towns give reports on the reaading contests we sponsored last ykear and then we will have some guest speakers talk about the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has hit Ghana. The number of people with HIV/AIDS in Ghana has not hit the numbers infected in East Africa and Soouth Africa but the numbers are growing. American culture with its practice of casual sex has hit African countries hard. In pre-independence times the traditional values of Ghana condemned adultery, pre-marital sex and thievery In recent decades traditional values have decreased in influence and sexually transmitted diseases have become a problem.

We have included some pamphlets about HIV/AIDS in the materials we give out to each of the old and new libraries. The speakers this Saturday will relate some sense of the magnitude of the problem to our gathering and suggestions will be made as to how to teach young people about the epidemic. In the face of this world-wide epidemic Books For Africa is trying to educate people about it.

I wanted to relate something about our four day vacation. Hilda and I love to explore areas of Ghana that are new to us. It gives Hilda the opportunity to get away from cooking for all the people in our family house in Kukurantumi. I love to paint and to sail so I take along my digital camera to photograph appealing landscapes as subjects for later paintings. I also take along my ten foot folding dingy with its sail and three horsepower Mercury outboard motor.

My sailing in Ghana began four years ago when I crossed the bridge over the Volta River at Atimpoku and noticed the wind moving on the water below. How I longed to be out on the water in that idyllic setting where the hills come down to meet the beautiful Volta River! I looked about for some way of bringing a sailboat to Ghana. In 2002 I decided to buy a folding dingy made of marine plywood and manufactured in England. This little vessel folds flat, eight inches high, ten feet long and three feet wide. It weighs 80 pounds and can easily fit it onto the top of our car. It assembles in thirty minutes into a very seaworthy little vessel that can handle even ocean waves. It is part of the Mirror class that sails competively in England where they sail it on the English Channel. I had the opportunity this past weekend to try it in a comparable setting.

The town of Ada is at the mouth of the Volta River. It is an old fishing town and the local boats take advantage of the estuary and run their fishing boats in and out of the estuary of the river. I had always been curious about what the mouth of the river was like. The Volta River compares in size with some of the big rivers of the USA, the Ohio and the Missouri. It’s not quite as big as the Mississippi, but it is no small river. Where it is dammed some thirty miles from the coast it has created the largest man made lake in the world, the Volta Lake. So I decided last Sunday to sail out to the mouth and explore.

I didn’t want to expose my Mercury outboard to the corrosive element of saltwater, so I was determined to use my sails and oars if necessary. The wind was a little weak when we set out for the shore after attending an early Mass in Ada. So Hilda and I went to the beach for a few hours. We walked up and down the beach area to the west of the river’s mouth. The coast along this area is being heavily eroded. We passed the ruins of buildings that had fallen into the sea and I had to be very careful when I swam that I wasn’t thrown into an underwater cement pillar from a destroyed building. I was also surprised to observe the dorsal fin of a large sea animal, a porpoise or dare I say it, a sh… sh…shark playing in the surf some hundred feet out. We had never seen any large fish out in the coastal waters before this. In the end I didn’t spend much time body surfing.

We went back to the estuary around two o’clock. The wind had picked up nicely and I could see how I could make a nice tack diagonally across the little bay of the estuary and out to the mouth of the river. I put the two inflatable sacks in place on the interior sides of the dingy in case I should be swamped and need to bail. Putting up my sail I was quickly swept off across the wide body of water to the opposite shore. Drawing in close to a fishing village on this shore, I noticed a big mother pig wandering freely over the shore in front of the village. It looked like those photos you see of the South sea islands with the village life close by the shore and the boats pulled up on the sand in front of the grass roofed houses. About thirty feet from this shore I came about and started the opposite tack which put me close to the spit of land jutting into the mouth of the river on the western side. On the final tack I was able to sail along the estuary parallel to the shoreline and some hundred feet off the spit of land.

As I sailed into the mouth of the river I was deeply moved. The huge volume of water that poured through this four hundred yard wide gap had been gathered in several countries north of Ghana. Among the tributaries of the Volta are the Black and White Volta which orginate in Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. We are speaking of a drainage basin covering thousands of square miles. The mighty force and beauty of God’s creation can leave one in awe and quiet wonder. I was alone on the mighty waters and that was how I felt.

The water became very choppy as I passed out from behind the protecting spit of land to meet the waves rolling in off the Atlantic. There were many different currents mixing in this water and I sat in the bottom of the boat to lower my center of gravity and observed the waves to determine how best to meet them. My little dingy has excellent lines below. The bow and stern curve up so that oncoming or following waves can roll through underneath the boat without catching a side and pushing it. I sailed out into the middle of the mouth. Off to my right a hundred yards the waves were breaking. My guess was that was where the two bodies of water actually met. My boat was able to handle the choppy four foot waves where I was, but I could not see me successively negotiating the boat through the breaking waves out there. I watched for a break in the choppy waves and then came about and headed back into the estuary. The force of the ocean was apparent. The waves in the river’s mouth weren’t breaking as they were off shore, but they produced powerful rolling waves which picked up boat and pushed it onward into the esturary. It felt like my boat was a surfboard. I had the wind and these rolling waves behind me and I was propelled thus into the quieter waters. It was an exciting and challenging experience. I kept my daggerboard down and steered straight. If my boat were to go sideways to the waves, they would flip us over.

After I was about two hundred yards into the estuary I steered over to the spit of sand and got out for some pictures. I pulled my boat all the way up on the sand and then walked across to the ocean side. I was amazed at the amount of trash lying on the sand. Shreds of black and clear plastic covered the beach above the wave lines. Unlike the flotsam and jestsam of the USA it was all plastic. I wrote in my water letter of the plastic problem in Ghana. The pervasive problem is bound to be found here at the confluence of waters. The population of the Ada area is not more than ten thousand people at most, but it is some seventy miles down the coast from the cities of Tema and Accra with its population of four million.

I made photos of the problem which I hope to post on our website eventually. I still hope a machine can be found that could recycle all this plastic in a viable business venture. As I walked back toward my beached boat my vision again was drawn back to the beauty of the water and the beach. I took several shots of my boat from different angles. I was about ten feet from the boat and framing a final shot when I noticed the boat starting to move. I had simply beached it and left the sail up and blowing freely. There was no danger since the sails weren’t cleated down. Somehow the tide must have come up in the ten minutes I was gone and I hadn’t noticed that the boat was no longer fully pulled up on the sand. Camera in hand I made a dash for the boat. I leaped for the stern and caught hold. The camera landed dryily on the seat with a bang and my upper body sprawled over the boat’s edge. Not only was the boat floating, but the wind had caught the sail and we were headed back out into the moving water. I sought a position of leverage with my legs still in the water and started to haul the boat back to shore. My glasses had gone flying into the sea in my initial dash but it behoved me at the time to secure my ride home first. In a short time I had the boat safely beached again and I went back and retrieved my glasses from the water.

I had to thank God profusely. Imagine that the tide had risen when I was on the far side of the spit of land taking pictures. Imagine what my chagrin would have been were I to watch my little dingy from two hundred yards distance set sail into the moving waters without me. It was God’s Grace. How else to explain why the boat started to float when I was just ten feet away! There was no damage done to my glasses or camera or boat. I was gratefully humbled by the experience.

The sail back to Hilda and the launch side was easy and picturesque. It was five o’clock pm. The sun was in its descending arc and sending orange colored rays over the water as I sailed back on a northwest tack. Sailing is a quiet sport and since you don’t go fast, there is plenty of time to think. And time to observe your surroundings. I was surrounded by colors: the bright glint of the sun’s rays on the water, the greens of coconut and palm trees, the bleached yellows and clean browns of the sands, the pale and deeper hues of blue in the sky and waters, the grey and bleached browns of the wooden fishing boats, and the occasional reds and whites and blacks of buildings and people.

Okay, enough of my reveries. My mind is back from my trip and I hear the voices of the birds outside my window and the people downstairs. Hilda and I are expecting some seventy people on Saturday from among the twenty-one libraries we have already set up and the six new ones for this year. Hilda already has some ladies frying fish for the lunch meal Saturday and we’ll be making a trip to the regional capital this afternoon to buy supplies, and I’ll try to e-mail this missive.

Happy New Year from Books For Africa Library Project and Hilda and I.

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