Community Engagement by Fred

The world they say is a very small place, well I agree. It is just a small portion of our big universe but it is the only part of the big universe that breeds life. The Jana community is a very small village even compared to where I live back home in Tema but this is where International service and the International Citizenship service have presented me with the opportunity to learn and also become a part of wonderful people. A small village filled with hospitality and a sense of community, a community of hardworking individuals all determined to make the most out of their lack of opportunities.

Jana is located in the Savelugu –Nanton municipal in the northern region of Ghana, my first engagement with the community was when I was stationed in the community to work with a group of thirty (30) women put together by the NFED- the project partner to research their income generating activities and provides basis for them to become cooperative some time to come, I was quiet skeptical about the whole idea. I began asking myself questions; questions about communication and language comprehension, questions about my purpose of being there and overall how I can build an interpersonal relationship with the women in the income generation group as it was important to my project. Well, I had all of these burdens on shoulder and like they say “travel and see” I travelled to Jana and saw everything from a positive perception and this removed my doubts about my engagement with the community.

On October 1^st 2015 when my working partner Candace from London, United Kingdom and I paid our first to the community to have our research done, we were surprise to meet a well organized body of women seated outside a mosque in the community awaiting our imminent arrival. I must confess we were caught out of our perception about the community thinking we were going to struggle bringing the women together. We were accompanied by a supervisor from the NFED, Mr. Rauf and colleague volunteer to help us with the translation of dabgani, although we have been taught some basic dabgani to be able to start a conversation while we were at the community, we needed their unflinching support.

My counterpart and I with the IGG of the Jana community. 

The engagement started by us greeting them in dabgani as “dasiba” meaning good morning, which caused laughter amongst the group at our accent, the laughter transcended the language barrier and made us feel more like we belonged. We communicated our aims and objectives to the women and explained our procedure of work to them in their community. After  a short interpersonal conversation amongst us and the IGG we took a leave of them then paid a visit to the chief palace as tradition demands in every community here in Ghana so as to formally introduce our self as International service volunteers and tell them of our project. We learned about the death chief, that withstanding, we were embraced by the elders and we offered cola nuts to them and they approved our work in the community. We were assigned an informant, Abdul Rahman to take us stroll the village. It was long but it was worth walk and also fun. We learned a lot about Jana, their farms, homes, festivals and even we learned about how almost all the members of the community assemble at the only tea shop in the community to have fun and play.

As first cohorts of this project, we are aware of how the achievement of this project is going to be very difficult from the beginning but from subsequent visit to the community we have a very big smile on our faces and we believe with the help of the community this project is going to be success story told to the world.