Ghana! A Travel Journal of Ghana and West Africa

It's running into the last week here of my time on camp and tension among the volunteers are running high. It's a combination of living in such close proximity to each other with almost no privacy and the whole car scandal. The car deal is a real slap in the face; for me it’s a physical manifestation of my uselessness here. I guess I can tell the whole story now because we've already spilled the beans to GVN. But first a little background on how everything works around camp.

I am placed by the organization GVN with a local NGO here in camp. Almost all of the money the local organization gets comes from program fees paid by the volunteers who are place by GVN. This local NGO is headed up by a Liberian refugee who we shall call Rob, and let me tell you, this Rob is a real piece of work. He's rather short with a protruding belly, formed from years of gluttony, and a joyless half smile perpetually plastered on his face. Further, he is generally not a pleasant character, to put in mildly. Right before I arrived the volunteers in the other house heard him essentially raping his wife (he lives right next to them) but there was little recourse the volunteers could take besides knocking on his door (which they did and he stopped, but then the next day he called a meeting and tried to make the volunteers come out to be the bad guys). He basically runs the NGO here, what he says, goes. So whenever I talk about the local NGO and its decisions I am, in essence, talking about Rob.

Last year a bunch of volunteers made some rather sizable donations (on top of the mandatory donation that’s included in the fees we paid to come here) to go towards a salary increase for the employees of the organization (I think I already mentioned that they currently get a paltry $17US a month). However, when the time came to give the raise Rob claimed that there wasn't any money available in the NGO's bank account.

The volunteers pressured Rob as to where all the money had gone to but to no avail. Then, one afternoon Rob drives down through camp in a Toyota minivan with the organizations name painted on it. The volunteers, of course, went ballistic, called the head of GVN in New Zealand who then flew in to threaten Rob with pulling out. The volunteers decided to keep GVN in place but decided that a GVN representative would be stationed in camp along with the regular volunteers to make sure no more of this blatant corruption continued.

So then this last June the GVN rep. left and no one replaced her, meaning their were only volunteers here like before the car scandal. Except that these volunteers (yours truly included) had no idea about the car scandal because anyone who knew about it had already rotated out, and Rob was none to keen to fill us in on the issue. So around June the volunteers were pushing for a salary increase for the employees, but Bob refused claiming insufficient funding (sound familiar??). So, two weeks later Rob heads off to Togo to "perform maintenance" on the car. A week later he rolls up in a nice barely used Land Rover! And those are expensive cars! Supposedly the car is to be used to scout out new prospects for opening up operations in Liberia, a ludicrous notion considering they can't even get their act together here, let alone trying to expand to the international level.

So while the hard working employees of his organization go hungry trying to feed themselves and their families on the pathetic salary he pays them, Rob refuses to increase their wage, lies to us, and then uses our money (and money from numerous other generous donors) to buy himself a new car!

Now it looks like we're going to be faced with a though decision on whether or not to pull GVN out. It's not the volunteers decision to make by GVN will place a lot of value on our recommendation. If GVN pulls out the local org. will be basically shut down, and most of the people working for it will be out of a job. But the idea of staying and feeding more money into Rob's coffers just makes my skin crawl. I mean how bad do you have to be to steal money for malnourished, sick refugees! It's nauseating...