Asa Baako at Busua – a music festival in Ghana

I went to Busua for Asa Baako at the beginning of March, a local music festival. Busua is kind of the local backpacker beach – it’s just 30-40 minutes away from Takoradi on local transport, and cheap and cheerful with a laid back vibe when you’re there. The place was bustling at the weekend, although I never saw any music (apparently the show, delayed from 2pm, finally started sometime around midnight after I’d given up) and I skipped the jungle party all-nighter the day after due to the extortionate price of lodging at the festival (50 cedis for a mat on the floor of a room and a bucket shower!).

Peace Corps vs VSO

Busua was crawling with Peace Corps volunteers however, and it was nice to meet up with other Americans, and hear how another programme works (and compare allowances!). The differences that struck home the most compared to VSO were:

• They’re here for a LONG time – 2.5 years – which includes a substantial 3 month (vs 2 day for VSO) orientation.
• They’re here on slightly more money than us (good), but in super rural areas (yikes)
• The two above add up to slightly more integration than us, I think. Instead of being placed with wealthy DFID funded projects, a lot of them are carving their own niches, and they were much more comfortable eating fufu, having bucket washes, and drinking sachet water than me. To be fair, some of this might have been down to the time difference, since they’d all been there at least twice as long as I had.
• The idea behind VSO is that we don’t replace any local jobs, but we ‘add value’ and increase ‘sustainability’ (DFID buzzwords in quotes). So if you take the example of education, where both VSO and Peace Corps work, Peace Corps people may or may not have prior experience in education, but get some teacher training during their orientation and then work as teachers in local schools and colleges. VSO education volunteers are former head teachers or experienced educators, and are paired with trainers working in teacher training colleges to help guide the introduction of a new training curriculum.
• Peace Corps get a mega completion bonus. VSO gives us a trickle of money throughout the time we’re away, which basically covers the odd weekend away or Amazon order for a colleague to deliver on their next trip back, and if you’re lucky will maybe cover a month’s rent when you get back to the UK. Returned Peace Corps get something like six to eight thousand dollars once they finish. So they can’t use it to help fund themselves while they’re away, but they can have quite a nice and relaxed re-entry process.
• Mostly though, the biggest difference was just how many of them there were. At every bar there were a couple of tables of Peace Corps volunteers, all hanging out together and catching up. VSO? There’s five of us in the whole country, and one’s going home soon.

So, although I felt a bit like an interloper, I tacked myself on to the Peace Corps group and enjoyed a bit of socialisation with other volunteers, quite a relief after a month and a half spent more or less on my own in Takoradi. Through them, I even met some Ghanaians and got to hang out and not worry about getting harassed, although by the end of the night I was being called ‘baby’, and it was at that point I thought an exit was in order.

Asa Baako = good fun and great for some sun, beach, and meeting Peace Corps. No idea re any music however.