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Akwaaba to Ghana!

Posted on May 17, 2012 by bb

After Jeremy, Michelle and I bused and tro tro-ed from North to South, ate our way through groundnut stews and mangoes, got some Azunto dance lessons from the streets and lived without power (“it is lights out”) in our home-way-from-home in Sandema, we are now grinning ear-to-ear at welcoming our first batch of participants last night!

Akwaaba (welcome) to the first stage of the journey: Accra. The busiest and biggest city in Ghana, can be overwhelming and almost too colourful at times. But our group didn’t want to rest after the plane so we wandered the Osu streets and had drinks outside at a nearby resto-bar, where there is always football on TV and friendly people to greet. Sarah, who was the first to arrive, helped us make a giant OG banner to surprise the rest of the group. She got the first real taste of the city: eating fresh pineapple in a bag and watching trip leader Michelle have an epic awari match with a local Rasta. Awari, or the Bean Game, originated as a game played on the ground by scooping handfulls of dirt to form two rows of six shallow pits, and is now a popular Ghanaian board game. Of course Michelle won proving that we may be from far away but we are here to adapt and learn. We watched the sunset from the beach and met up with some other Canadians who are working around Ghana as journalists, or who just aren’t ready to leave!

We are still anxiously awaiting the final two young women, who have staggered their arrivals. I’m not complaining: the Accra airport makes the best chicken shawarma in all of Africa and I’m always hungry, just sayin’. Today is a relaxation day before we scramble off to Cape Coast where we will get a first hand Ghanaian history lesson and experience coastal life before heading North to the Upper East Region where we will start our projects and reunite with our partners and friends. Horizon’s Children Center, the Disabilities Center, the Builsa District Radio Station, the G-Roots project and the girls and boys football teams are all happy to welcome us back for another year.

We are off to an awesome start; members of our team have already lugged large duffle bags full of donated soccer and sports equipment, clothing, toys and school supplies for the Sandema community. Imagine what we will be like when the whole group is all together: unstoppable!

Posted in West Africa Discovery | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

You, Me and Ayiti

Posted on May 16, 2012 by jonah

In less than 12 hours, OG Haiti Grassroots Engineering will begin! All of our preparations are complete and we’re super stoked that our team is arriving very soon. We won’t bore you with too long an update but there’s a couple quick moments that are pure Haiti that the world must know about.

This past weekend, our fearless leaders, Steph and Jonah, ventured from the cramped confines of Port-au-Prince to the lovely beaches of Jacmel. Though just 75 kilometres apart, our journey took almost 4 hours from door to door. Once we arrived at the bus station in downtown PAP, there seemed to be no spots left in the next vehicle leaving. What we may have viewed as no spots, the bus wranglers viewed as an opportunity to offer spots on the roof rack with the bags.

Best part of the journey? Climbing the mountains past Leogane, a truck full of corn was trying to pass us. Two guys were chilling on top of the truck eating some mangoes. They yelled hello to us, we yelled hello to them. They laughed at the idea of white people on top of a bus. We laughed at the idea of guys on a corn truck eating mangoes. We asked them to throw us one. They laughed…and threw us a mango while driving 60 km/h on a mountain road. Oh Haiti…

Once we arrived in Jacmel, we found the most beautiful villa for our group to stay in for Disorientation in June. After that, we visited Basin Blue, an amazing set of three crystal clear waterfalls and widely regarded as one of the most beautiful places in Haiti.

 

Well that wraps up our pre-con. The tables are set for an epic OG adventure. And we here are ready for it.

Stay tuned,

Team OG Haiti

 

 

Posted in Haiti | Leave a comment

Namaste from India!

Posted on May 14, 2012 by norbu

Cock a doodle doo… About 5am, I wake up to my first morning in Nepal to the sound of a rooster. Really? A rooster in the heart of downtown Kathmandu, in the middle of the tourist hub, Thamel! That is funny and new. Later as I walk past multiple shops, restaurants, internet cafes and hotels I could see that things haven’t really changed in the past 6 years when I immigrated to Canada. The same old buildings, pollution, noise, electrical cables wildly hanging loose everywhere, thousands of chaotic neon signs and the the same dim look in people’s eyes as they wait for customers. I had once lived here and as much as I loved the place I had always longed to leave for a better one. To escape the mess, to be in a promised land, land of abundance, freedom and opportunity. Now after six years and becoming a Canadian citizen, I am returning with a mission. I am representing Operation Groundswell and coming with a group of North Americans. Operation Groundswell as the name goes has the wellbeing of the world at its heart. OG provides safe and ethical travel plus volunteer opportunities for the participants to gain valuable first hand knowledge of developing countries. This time I have come back with a new sense of responsibility. I have come to understand development on a deeper level, to learn more from the locals and from my participants, to make new connections, to look for new possibilities and opportunities.

Since my first day in Thamel, Alan, my co-trip leader and I have met the villagers of Tibetan refugee camp where we organized homestay and village activities with the young and energetic regional youth congress staff. We travelled long and hard on a bus all the way to Leh and met the most wonderful Cynthia, the founder of HEALTH Inc, who beautifully arranged for all of our needs and led us through some of the most remote villages you can imagine and has prepared for us an absolutely amazing program at Domkar Barma School. Back from Leh, Alan is in Patiyala making sure our program is in place at the school for the deaf and blind and I am making final preparations for our group’s arrival in Delhi.

I must say that apart from it being the most fun and beautiful trip, it is not the easiest and there are many challenges. I believe we have come together to face those challenges, learn new lessons and enrich our experience. I am positive that everyone will return with a lifetime of memories and laughter to share. Tomorrow we receive our wonderful participants and I can’t be more excited. Our long wait is finally over and we are ready to embark on this journey together. Listen, I can almost hear the footsteps of my first participant arriving. Gotta go…

Namaste everyone!

Leh

Beautiful town of Leh

Posted in India/Nepal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Bon Bagay en Ayiti!

Posted on May 10, 2012 by jonah

And so it begins…

Another year, another summer of OG trips and another new faraway place to call ‘home’ for a few months. But this summer, its a little different. This summer, instead of criss-crossing one or even several countries and working with a variety of partners, I’m lucky enough to be based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for the entire time working with Haiti Communitere.

Why Haiti? Why now? I’ve been asked that question dozens of times in the past few months. My answer: Why not? Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, has survived colonialism, occupation, violent dictatorships and natural disasters that we’re all too familiar with. So that’s the why. As for the why now, we at Operation Groundswell are always looking to expand our own horizons and offer our unique programming in new regions. Immediately after the January 2010 earthquake, people kept on asking us why we didn’t have a trip to Haiti. Safety and security are always our utmost concern but more importantly, we didn’t have the right partner in Haiti. After working at Pisco Sin Fronteras (PSF) with the Peru: Disaster Relief group last summer, we met Sam Bloch, the Executive Director here at Haiti Communitere, who said that if we thought PSF was cool, we needed to come down to Haiti. And so we did. And so began our programs in Haiti. This is the organic process of how all of our trips are created. Good partners, good projects and good country.

How do I know that Haiti Communitere is a good partner with good projects? Here’s why. Within days of a massive fire destroying HC’s workshop, donations flooded in from all around the world, thousands of dollars in equipment has been flown in from Miami, a konbit (community work day) brought over 50 young volunteers from Cité Soleil and the scrap metal is being sold to fund the new workshop. All in all, the plan now is to build back better. Just like Haiti’s reconstruction slogan, building back better at HC will involve the hard work and time of community members as well as international volunteers.

And that is why Operation Groundswell is coming. Steph and I are setting everything up and are eager to see our participants arrive in just over a week. We hope you’ll follow our progress throughout this journey as we have exciting projects lined up for our time here. But we’ll send an update with that soon enough.

Until then,

Team Haiti

Steph and Jonah stand in front of the Haiti Communitere gate with an assembled Ubuntu Block

Posted in Haiti | Leave a comment

What backpackers do when they stay home

Posted on May 10, 2012 by admin

It is the same thing every time. A gasp, and a look of puzzlement before they say something like, “You’re not going abroad? Aren’t you sad that you aren’t doing anything cool?”

After 5 years of traveling in East Africa, West Africa, and South America, people just can’t imagine that I would be happy spending a summer in Toronto. Well they could not be more wrong.

To me one of the great joys of traveling is that stepping outside our comfort zone enables us to look at the world through the adventurer’s anthropological eyes. We want to know: What is going on? Who is involved? When did this begin? How does it work? And, can I join?

To me, a backpacker is someone who can take that anthropological sensibility everywhere they go. That is why I do not view this summer as a year off from traveling. I endeavor to be an urban explorer; delving into and the sights, sounds, and secrets Toronto has to offer.

This city has so many opportunities to be a backpacktivist. This past weekend I went to the Mining Injustice Conference hosted by MISN. There, I heard panels by affected community leaders and mining justice activists. At the conference I met up with OG alumni and Trip Leaders who have become personally involved in this struggle since OG’s own Guatemala program works closely with mining impacted communities. It was great to see OG alumns keeping that connection to local partners after coming home.

I also brushed shoulders with familiar faces from Occupy and No One Is Illegal, as well as a ton of new faces from all walks of life. We discussed how Canada’s brand is changing in many places around the world from being seen as a ‘peacekeeper’ to becoming the face of environmental and human destruction. I was not surprised, but still disappointed, to learn how Canadian money meant for development projects was used to gain entrance into communities on mineral rich land abroad. The development world is a web with many knots, but we can all agree that schools and hospitals should never be bribes.

We also talked about the many issues Canadians face at home. It’s a good reminder that “development” is a process every country is working on, whether we are in the Global North or the South.

At the end of the day the difference between a tourist and a backpacker is not where you go. It’s how you treat the people and places you encounter and how you let the world shape you.

Jo Sorrentino
Program Director OGHQ, Toronto

Posted in OG Headquarters | Leave a comment
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