Thankful for What I’ve Got
Earlier today I had the opportunity to visit the Bawjiase Orphanage, approximately 1.5 hours drive outside of Accra – and I certainly felt thankful for what I’ve got after visiting. This was my second visit to an orphanage since I started working for energy4everyone, the first visit being to an orphanage in Tanzania, last September. While not as desperate or small as the orphanage in Tanzania, Bawjiase Orphanage still has many fundamental needs.
And these basic needs are multiplied when you account for the approximately 120 children, ranging in age from two months old up to their late teens, along with approximately 10 adults based at the orphanage who help look after them. To give you some context, to feed meat to all 130 occupants at the orphanage for one meal, they need 15 ducks or 20 chickens – no wonder then that most of their meals consist of beans, other vegetables or fruit.
In fact, the quantity of food needed at each meal time is so large that the orphanage requires two outdoor kitchen areas, both with two huge firewood cooking stoves. Unfortunately, because all of the cooking stoves only use firewood there is a huge amount of smoke during the cooking process. This thick soot has blackened the walls of the kitchen areas – and you can only imagine what the long term effect of this is on the inside of people’s lungs.
And the financial cost of such large quantities of firewood is also a heavy one. The orphanage spends approximately GHc 300 (Ghanaian Cede), which is approximately USD 200, for three weeks supply of firewood. Now I don’t have my home energy bills to hand (as exciting a read as they are!), but I would estimate my monthly energy bills for all the utilities and energy I use would be at or only marginally more than this amount. Yet, if you were look at the per capita income levels in Ghana and Canada you would note that they are quite different. So again you can see the increased financial burden that communities in need suffer in terms of their energy usage: more difficult to source the energy and more costly to purchase it, regardless of the energy type.
In addition to cooking energy issues, the orphanage also has lighting needs, the overarching one being that it has almost no lighting! Some of the buildings are connected to the grid. However, most of the buildings that are connected do not have working electricity because of wiring issues. But most of the buildings do not have lighting of any sort, including all of the on-site classrooms, so none of the children can study or do homework after dark. But not only does the lack of lighting lead to a slower pace of education, there’s a safety issue at play. Because of the geographic location of the orphanage and because they try and grow some of their own food crops, there are snakes in and around the orphanage. So even walking from the communal social area to the buildings where the bedrooms are located can pose some serious safety risks.
I certainly hope that energy4everyone can help Bawjiase Orphanage, even if it is just small measures at first – as the head of the orphanage said to me today “even a journey of a thousand miles starts with one small step”.
If you’d like to see some pictures of Bawjiase Orphanage, please go to energy4everyone’s Flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/energy4everyone and look at the folder titled Ghana – Bawjiase Orphanage 2010/02.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.