After another weekend chill out at Green Turtle Lodge, and a visit to Fort Metal Cross at Dixcove, it’s been another eventful week in Takoradi, where I’ve been busy preparing for teacher training workshops next week, helping negotiate gigs for the Highlife band at Busua Beach over Christmas, and most importantly – sorting through the orchestra music which has finally arrived from the UK!

BACK AT GREEN TURTLE

I returned to Green Turtle Lodge last weekend for much of the same as I’d enjoyed before- relaxing by the sea, great food (their BBQ Kingfish – delicious!), reading and swimming. Infact many people find Green Turtle hard to leave, and on my first visit I met a Swedish couple who’d arrived 7 months previously! I’ve been reading so much since I’ve been in Ghana, which is a real joy, and infact my mum has been frantically posting me books out here to keep me going! The sea at Green Turtle can get quite rough, and on Sunday morning I had a rather nasty encounter with 3 huge waves, which dragged me around, spat me out and generally just shook me up. So I justifiably spent the rest of the day in the hammock recovering! The English owners – Tom and Jo – are a really nice couple, who are doing a lot for the local community, and are running Green Turtle as an eco friendly lodge. On Sunday afternoon I accompanied Tom to nearby Dixcove where he was going surfing, but this really is a story of its own….

AFTERNOON TEA WITH BOB AT DIXCOVE FORT

As many of you will know, Ghana was central to the slave trade, and to the exportation of gold, ivory and cocoa, for hundreds of years. Around fifty of these original colonial forts and castle still exist along the coastline, many of which you can visit and look around. In the tiny, colorful fishing village of Dixcove, near Green Turtle Lodge, is Fort Metal Cross, a 17th century British built fort. It is now owned by a charismatic and somewhat eccentric English farmer called Bob, whom I spent a couple hours with on Sunday afternoon. As Tom and the others went surfing, he showed me round his relatively small fort, which is in immaculate condition. Whilst it was mainly used for traded goods, it did hold slaves for up to 3 months at a time in very cramped conditions. When the (Ghanaian) guide told me this I couldn’t help asking how he felt about this history- angry, resentful, etc? He simply replied that the past is gone, and today race relations are better between blacks and whites, and he hoped this would continue to improve. Quite a touching sentiment. Bob, however, still has an eye for the past, and as part of his plans to turn the fort into a luxury hotel (!) he is considering making ‘slave rooms’ that you can stay in for the night. I told you he was eccentric! He told me all of this as we were sat having afternoon tea (cheese sandwiches and a pot of tea, naturally) as we sat overlooking the cove, a somewhat surreal experience. His heart is in the right place, and he has put a lot into the local village, but I couldn’t help thinking it would still be in rather bad taste. Anyway, it had been an interesting, and somewhat bizarre, introduction to Ghana’s dark, inescapable past

ORCHESTRA MUSIC ARRIVES AT LAST!

The orchestral music I have been waiting so long for arrived this week, 11 weeks after it had been posted from the UK! Hooray! Establishing an orchestra (or at least a small chamber-like ensemble) has been one of my priorities in my work at Mansek, and so the arrival of the music spells the beginning of this exciting project! One of the new pieces was, fittingly, ‘Yellow Submarine’ which the Ghanaians love, and so we enjoyed played that on Thursday. It was great to have one of the students joining us – Teddy on saxophone, who is very keen and is progressing well! So the ‘orchestra’ was seven of us – violin, flute, clarinet, trumpet, saxophone and trombone – and it sounded great! At the training course next week, we have dedicated a lot of time to the orchestra and so will hopefully achieve a lot in a short space of time. We go away on Tuesday morning and arrive back Friday evening, and are staying at the Brenu Beach Resort, which is quite idyllic and I couldn’t think of a better place to run a training course! The title of the course is ‘Becoming a more reflective and effective music teacher’, and will be led by myself and Fiffi. This is perhaps a little ironic as I’ve never had any formal teaching training! But we’re all looking forward to it, and think it is great opportunity to pass on new skills and to develop their teaching further.

To be continued…………………… with photographs!