Search results for: Ghana
Ensuring girls’ rights to education in Ghana
Our Humanist Action: Ghana partner organization, Songtaba, has been cultivating relationships with the people in Northern Ghana, working toward ensuring girls' rights to education. This is a success story. This father was planning to trade his daughter to be another man's wife in exchange for a wife for his eldest son. Songtaba, with the assistance…
Read MoreGold mining in Northern Ghana
There are many gold mines, both legal and illegal, in Ghana. Currently, there are a lot of debate surrounding the safety and ethics of mining practices with workers getting hurt or becoming ill, and foreigners taking advantage of the heavy local need for work. One occupational safety issue is the use of mercury to extract…
Read MoreTeacher training day in Northern Ghana
The photograph above depicts training day for volunteer teachers in over 50 small villages in the northern region of Ghana. In our previous post delineating the Principles of Service of our Humanist Action: Ghana, one of the things discussed was the creation of sustainable change. The goal of HA: Ghana's work in Ghana is not…
Read MoreDeveloping HA: Ghana’s Principles of Service
At the end of 2014, I wrote the article below for American Atheist magazine. It was the fifth piece in a series about Pathfinders Project, the year-long global service and research trip intended as the first step toward the Humanist Action: Ghana. I submitted the first four articles to the magazine from the field as…
Read MoreGhanaians and the practice of tribal marking
As a kid between the ages of eight and ten, I used to follow my mum to her friends’ baby naming ceremonies in Tamale, Ghana. Here in Ghana, babies aren’t given names until seven days after they are born. On that day there is a naming ceremony that the whole community is invited to. I…
Read MoreFBB announces Humanist Action: Ghana fundraiser
You probably don't live in fear of being branded a witch. Chances are, you think of witchcraft accusations as a thing of the past – best remembered as a dark period in the history of seventeenth-century Salem. Still, you can imagine what it would be like to be blamed for a neighbor's miscarriage, a child's…
Read MoreHA: Ghana Ghana team member reminisces about her grandmother: “Stories from Maamaa”
When I was a child my siblings and I spent a lot of school holidays in the village visiting our grandmother. My grandmother, a small woman in her seventies, walked to her farm every Saturday to collect firewood and food. Maamaa, as we all called her, lived a full life until she passed away at…
Read MoreCode switching: learning Ghanaian English
One of the first difficulties to solve when coming to a new place is communication. When visiting new countries, there is a certain level of language barrier between you and the residents of the host country. Many times this requires learning a completely new language or at least survival words and phrases such as, "Donde…
Read MoreEnvironmental concerns in Ghana
In a country that doesn't have a working garbage collection service, let alone a recycling program, plastic bags are a big problem. A few years ago, the Ghanaian government tried to ban plastic bags all together, but the backlash was so large that the government had to back down. That doesn't mean no one is…
Read MoreDrinking water in Ghana
It's not safe to drink tap water in Ghana. In fact, many in Ghana still lack access to clean drinking water and safe sanitation. The situation is better than it was years ago but it still needs much improvement. You can see in this chart provided on the WHO/UNICEF site how the country is doing when is…
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