Day 3 - the bank

The Bank: It’s called the Opportunity International (OI) Sinapi Aba Trust. They have about 50,000 clients in Ghana, split between an NGO operation (who handle the really small loan sizes) and the bank part. The bit I am working with is the actual bank – the biggest loan they do is about $2500 at the moment and the smallest can be about $50 per person.

Lots of meetings today, the major component of which is (a) chasing people to come to the meetings in the first place, then (b) trying to keep them in the room once they turn up, then (c) trying to keep them off the phone if they do decide to stay in the room! You just can’t wait for everyone to be giving you some attention, if someone is on the phone, having a very loud conversation (always the case) and drowning out everything else, no amount of impatient looking meaningful glances will get them off the blower. Asking them firmly is good, but won’t stop the next call from happening.

Ate lunch with the staff – a typical meal is yam, plantain, fried fish or chicken and “Kotomre” (sp) which is a bit like fried spinach. Plantain is ok – looks just like a banana but tastes a bit like a slightly under-boiled potato (I subsequently found out there is another type of plantain, red plantain, that is MUCH more like a banana, softer, sweeter, much nicer) Everyone eats with their right hand – and only their right hand - as the left is associated with ablutions. Pulling apart a (quite stiff) fried whole fish, with sloppy sauces and slippery veges is pretty tricky one-handed!

It was dark when I left the office. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, hadn’t brought any mossie-spray with me – and was walking home. Malaria-carrying mossies only come out at night, so I was a bit worried. The air outside was beautiful, very warm, very humid (within seconds you feel a coating of moisture on you) but not unpleasant at all. The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers and other plants.

Walking to the hotel, only about 700m is a real challenge. I am lucky to still be alive…ankle-twisting potholes in the road and road-shoulder are like mini grand-canyons. No streetlamps means you really have to concentrate at night. And there are things by the roadside here that you really don’t want to fall onto. And god-forbid falling onto the road itself, in-front of the traffic!