Last days and back home
Now back in the UK, the last couple of days of our visit weren’t quite so hectic as the previous days.
After our ‘rest’ day in Accra, we decided to let our drivers have a day off and based ourselves at our accomodation for Sunday. After a later start for some of us, we used this day for processing ideas and thoughts, reflecting and gathering ideas of how we can feedback and progress all that we have found out during our stay in Ghana.
We knew that we would all be busy upon our return so thought it prudent to do the majority of the planning for the Yewlands Family of Schools Carnival before we returned home and whilst we were still together as a group.
I did a draft edit of a short film of the Blue Skies factory which will be shown to assemblies and school staff once Blue Skies have given me the green light.
Derek and Morag have planned several elements of our stall for the Carnival so we can get straight onto putting it together on our return.
In the afternoon both the medical team and education team got together to feedback our respective preliminary recommendations for projects and links. After this as it was our last evening together, Padma started the ‘last night’ celebrations early by serving some ’special’ pineapple juice. Shortly after this our productivity began dropping for some reason so we called it a day.
The following day we returned to the Blue Skies factory where we had a useful follow up meeting with the District Director of Education, whom we had met at the start of our visit. We thanked her team for all their help and support and fed back some outline ideas of how and where we would like to link and support. The discussions of the previous day had outlined a need to revisit one of the schools we had seen in Nsawam. Knowing it was a public holiday we wanted to have a more through look at some of the facilities the school has. It is not far from Blue Skies so we returned there to find a teacher with a group of advanced pupils enjoying some addition study even though it was a holiday. With their permission we had another look around the grounds and interviewed four students on camera. We put the questions suggested by Yewlands pupils to them amongst some others of our own. I will edit this footage soon and the Family of Schools pupils can ‘meet’ some Ghana pupils first hand.
On our return to Blue Skies we had a final meeting with the Blue Skies management team, feeding back to them our ideas and findings and most importantly thanking them for all their help and support, without which our trip would not have been impossible.
After a quick freshen up and pack, we headed towards the airport for our long overnight journey home. An eventful trip to the last; heading back into Accra for one last time on the now familiar duel carriageway, suddenly somehow both our drivers knew that the road ahead was blocked by an accident. Swiftly and to our grave consternation both drivers swiftly did a U-turn in the middle of the road and proceeded to drive down the carriageway in the wrong direction into the oncoming traffic! Amazingly it appears this is a common occurance in Ghana so most of the other cars seemed unfazed and got out of our way, many following our lead of swapping direction. This only lasted a few hundred metres before there was a chance to swap to the other carriageway and get on an alternative road to Accra.
Other than a brief chance for us to spend our last local currency in a local market our journey to airport was less eventful.
The overnight flight to Amsterdam luckily passed very quickly and we all returned safely to Birmingham early this morning, slightly dazed from lack of sleep but happy to be home.
In the coming days and weeks in conjunction with our colleagues we will begin to develop our ideas into projects, but for now, to use a cliché, I feel rather than the end of the trip, I feel it is the end of the beginning.
On behalf of the UK team, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all Blue Skies staff both in Ghana and the UK for all their help and support during our visit. We look forward to continue to work with them in the coming months.
