Volunteering in Ghana (Part 3)

The Orphanage Closes

A few months after returning home from Ghana, around Christmas time, Olivia and I found out through Facebook that the orphanage had been closed down. Initially I was incredibly frustrated, worried and sad. I was frustrated that the hard work Elin had put in to officialising the orphanage had been futile, worried about the welfare of the children that lived there, and sad that the big family of the orphanage, along with all the bonds between children that considered one another brother and sister, would be broken. However, I would later realise that the closure of the orphanage was a positive thing, but for very negative reasons.

Olivia messaged a lot of people in Ghana, desperate to find information on why the orphanage had been closed and what would happen to the children. We were both very concerned. The information we received was vague and unhelpful but eventually Elin agreed to a Skype call. We ended up talking to her for over three hours. She explained everything from her point of view in detail.

The woman in charge of the orphanage, Evelynn Appiah (Grandma), was well known to social welfare. Her unofficial orphanage had been previously closed down and she was prohibited from starting a new one. There was no way they were going to allow her new one to remain open. After hearing the news, Grandma’s attitude to Dream Africa changed. She vehemently blamed Dream Africa for the impending closure of her orphanage: she thought they had conspired against her. Volunteers were barred from seeing the children and she broke off all communication with Dream Africa employees. Any attempts by the children to speak to anyone from Dream Africa led to vicious punishments by Grandma: usually beatings and denial of food.

After weeks of bitterness, the final meeting between Dream Africa and the orphanage took place around Christmas time. Gloria from Social Welfare had worked hard to find suitable relatives that would provide the children with new homes. These families, along with Elin and Jamal (CEO) of Dream Africa, met with the orphanage staff. It was naturally a sad day for the children that had to say goodbye indefinitely to the people they had called family for most of their life. Grandma made a point to warn the children’s new guardians about Dream Africa. She told them to ensure the children had no contact with any volunteers and warned about the evils of anybody associated with Dream Africa. She also took everything. All the books, clothes, food, and technology (including the laptop) that had been bought and donated for the children was taken. Literally nothing was left.

Returning to Ghana: July 2016

Olivia and I felt shocked and betrayed about how abruptly Grandma had turned against Dream Africa and her irrational spitefulness. However, it was only when we returned in July that we realised the full extent of Grandma’s viciousness. We returned to Ghana to see the children from the orphanage: we missed them and wanted to make sure they were okay. We met several of them at one of the schools partnered with Dream Africa. Next, we met Erica and her Auntie and Uncle with whom she was staying. We were worried about how we would be received but they were extremely welcoming, especially her Uncle who offered to drive us home.

Erica showed us where Christabel was staying. She also showed us where Grandma lived and told us that several children were back living with Grandma either due to their new families’ neglect or out of choice. Erica proved invaluable in locating other children and providing information about what had happened at the orphanage. She felt very conflicted in revealing information: she had lived with Grandma most of her life (she was now 14) and felt a strong sense of loyalty to her.

Erica was treated especially harshly by Grandma in the run up to the orphanage’s closure. She had made strong friendships with Elin and one or two other volunteers and received physical punishments for talking to them. Nevertheless, she tried hard to repair her relationship with Grandma, visiting her and offering money for her forgiveness. However, Grandma was furious with Erica when she showed us where Grandma was living. In what had now become characteristic spitefulness, she visited Christabel and Erica’s family, told them how untrustworthy and nasty they were and urged their families to punish them.

The more Erica and Christabel revealed to us, the more we became aware of Grandma’s appalling malice, selfishness and incompetence. She was horribly wasteful with money: biweekly money given to her for food by Dream Africa was spent on a mobile phone, spiritual ‘readings’, and her close family among other things. Money given to her for registering the orphanage was given to her family, donations of clothes or food were often sold and again the money used for herself and her family. It quickly became clear that running an orphanage was more business than charity for her.

She was also deeply superstitious. She would pay sham ‘pastors’ extortionate amounts of money to find out which of the girls in her care was a witch. When Erica and a couple of other girls were deemed witches, they were forced to stay outside all night with malarial mosquitos biting at them. Worst of all, Grandma had a violent temper. She was witnessed knocking one of the girls in her care unconscious with a brick. She was quick to deny food for days at a time to children that were already severely malnourished. She had her favourites and those she consistently punished.

On a personal level, it hurt to hear that food Olivia and I had bought for the kids had been sold. The food cost over £100. That buys a lot of food in Ghana. It speaks volumes about the character of a woman that sells this food instead of feeding it to hungry children in her care. It also hurt to hear that the children never got to use the laptop I had brought them: Grandma’s son took it and as far as I know he still has it now. Most crushing of all, a large amount of money was raised to provide a hearing aid to Gabriella, an infant girl with cerebral palsy. We later found out that Grandma had ‘lost’ the hearing aid, severely limiting Gabriella’s opportunity to ever learn to talk and live an independent life. It would not surprise me if this hearing aid had been sold.

On the positive side, most of the children were now far better off than they had been with Grandma now that they were no longer in her care. Three sisters stayed with their relatively wealthy Aunt and Uncle: one of them was given a bike for Christmas. Some stayed with very distant relations that kindly offered to care for them. Without exception, the children seemed better fed. I was taken aback by the tragic situation that had occurred: these children’s families had assumed that these children would be better cared for with Grandma; they did not know they had inadvertently neglected them by doing so. It is painful to consider the families these children had available if only things had been investigated thoroughly.

Things were not great for all the children. Some guardians, such as Gabriella’s mother, had given her back to Grandma. Emmanuel and Benedicta, both teenagers, returned out of choice. Hiswell and Amo were both related to Grandma and so she was their legal guardian. We visited Grandma’s place. The first two times she was away and, as mentioned, she was very unhappy that we visited. However, under the pretence that we would provide money, she agreed to meet us the third time we visited. She told us that Jamal was evil, she was starting a new orphanage and she had the paperwork to prove this. Of course, we did not give her money, and after hearing that we had visited many of the children, she phoned us and told us never to visit again, we were not welcome. She abruptly hung up and that was the last thing we ever heard from her.  

We spent most of the month we were in Ghana travelling to visit the children that had previously lived at the orphanage. I was taken aback by the friendliness and warm welcome from the children’s new families. I was amazed how many of them were willing to invite us into their homes and talk to us for a long time. I expected suspicion and coldness given Grandma’s ‘warning’. Erica’s family were particularly kind. They always offered us a drink and had time to talk to us. We managed to visit roughly twenty children. We compiled a report* on each of them and made notes on their mental, physical and financial wellbeing. We felt that Dream Africa were not sufficiently aware of these children’s situations. Dream Africa had started other projects and it felt like these children were no longer a priority. By keeping a reference of most of these children we hoped to highlight which children were being neglected and needed further help.

Conclusions

This has been very difficult to write. It is hard to admit that you invested a lot of time, money and energy into something so naively and uncritically. I can’t help but feel in some way responsible, through ignorance, for the mistreatment of the children in the orphanage. It is true that the orphanage existed before and would likely exist without Dream Africa’s involvement. And it is true that the teaching I had done with the children still had value.

However, my time would have been far more valuable to them if I had thought about things more critically. Why are the children malnourished when there are so many volunteers and donations? Why are there no attempts to place these children with relatives? How exactly is the money Grandma receives spent? These are questions that I did not fully consider. I hid behind many reasons, perhaps some legitimate: cultural differences, not having the authority to ask these questions, not wishing to be confrontational, naively assuming others were doing the best possible job to help these children and they would have already asked these questions, not having the power to control spending or the treatment of the children.

In two distinct ways, my experience volunteering in Ghana reflects popular criticisms of the aid industry in general. Firstly, that money and goods designed to provide aid often don’t go to the recipients they were intended to help. There are too many greedy, unscrupulous people in the way to make aid effective. Secondly, the belief that charities are ineffective because they don’t have a clue what they are doing. Dream Africa proved themselves to be astoundingly incompetent: they provided large sums of money and many volunteers to an orphanage without even doing any background research into those that ran it. They never stipulated how money should be spent, never researched how effectively the orphanage used their money and provided inadequate records of the children’s wellbeing that lived there.

Personally, when things go wrong, I always find the most constructive approach is to ask: how can we learn from it and move forward? What can be learnt? Firstly, it is not enough to want to do good or to try and do good. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If you try and do good uncritically you will either end up doing more harm than good or doing far less good than you could have done if you thought things through. When giving charitably, be demanding about where your money is going. Always have a healthy dose of scepticism. And if volunteering abroad, don’t allow ‘cultural differences’ to blind your critical faculties: if something seems wrong, question it rather than accept it as a cultural difference you do not understand.

The most important lesson I have taken is to not be so arrogant in thinking that I will do an effective job in helping others without any expertise and training. Take a more humble approach and understand that people have spent years analysing the most effective ways to help people in poverty. Projects have undergone intense rigorous testing in order to prove that they make a difference in reducing poverty. These are far more worthy of your support than the work of organisations that offer no proof that their work has any positive effect at all.

How to move forward? I focus my energies more on the effective altruism movement. Effective altruism asks the question: how can money be used for the most possible good? It emphasises supporting charities that have proven to do a lot of good with the money they are given. They allow you to do (significantly more than) your bit in making the world a better place for less time and money.

I still think about the children in Ghana a lot, especially the ones with Grandma. There were talks about involving social welfare to have the children forcibly removed but I haven't heard anything since leaving. Olivia and I currently sponsor one of the children but we don't have any plans to return to Ghana, and if we do it would be in a tourist capacity rather than as volunteers. I also want to say thanks to Erica and Christabel for all their help whilst we were there. Going to the cinema with them was the highlight of our trip.

*I still have the document with information on how the children were doing in July 2016. There is a lot of information I have left out about them. If you want the information in the document I can give it to you. Just send me a message on Facebook or email jimmygough3@hotmail.co.uk.