Ghana with Design School Kolding
At 2nd year, we are offered to go on a study trip to Ghana. This is mainly to learn how to work in an intercultural group with many differences, and learn to work with many different methods concerning group work and process.
There is much more to the trip than this.
At first, I didn’t know if I wanted to go – it’s five weeks in this African country that I have had heard is rough, weird, dirty and very different from Denmark. But I guess that is exactly the point, and now I’m very glad that I decided to go.
When we first got to Kumasi, the city where we were going to study, we met the Ghanian students at a party they were throwing us. So much fun, and also very weird!
The project and collaboration started the next day. One week was spend on choosing groups and subject. I was in a group with two other danish girls, Olga and Mie, and three Ghanian boys, Francis, DJ and Asamoah. Working together was definitely a learning experience, but it was also quite difficult at times. Ghanian and Danish culture are not exactly alike, and neither is the was we work as design students and painting students.
But the problems that we had as a group was what the whole project was about, and they helped us find solutions and ways to work together, despite our differences.
Our group chose the subject “navigation, colors and symbols”, and after two weeks of process and investigations, we decided to make a map of the campus that we were studying at. At campus there were teachers, students, guests, children as well as people working there with no education. In Ghana, many people are illiterate, so we had to make a map that could navigate people without words, but with symbols and colors. So we made our own Ghanian pictograms, which related to the Ghanian reality of things. For example, a restaurant was no longer a form and knife, but a bowl of food with a hand reaching into it.
When we got back to Denmark, we had two weeks to evaluate and reflect on what we had learned. It was great to talk it through, because in the rush in Ghana, it was difficult to say what we had learned. After we finished the project in Kumasi, we had one week to travel in Ghana, which was needed. We were at Mole National Park in the north where we went on a safari, a boat ride and rode motercycles. We saw crocodiles, elephants, monkeys and other wild animals.
We also went to Elmina, a small fishing village by the coast. We stayed at Stumbled Inn, a very simple, primitive hotel mostly without water and electricity, but right by the sea and with a beautiful garden and beach.
After Elmina we went to Cape Coast, which is a nice town to be touristy. The people were different here, more relaxed, and Bob Marley must have been the most popular artist of all time at this place. There were tons of little food joints, shops with homemade items and markets as there had been all over Kumasi as well.
It was great to have the opportunity to travel around. We experienced so much in that one week, just as we had in the previous four weeks in Ghana. I learned a lot from being in Ghana, maybe especially to let go and accept, that when in a place like this, you cannot control everything and you must learn to adapt to the way they live their lives and interact with each other. Diffucult, but fun.
I was very impressed with their way of always seeming happy and open to other people, despite their – in my eyes – rough conditions of life.
We also saw sad things though. Sometimes a mother would try to hand us her child and say “take him back to where you came from”. She would give up her child to give him a “better” future in Denmark. A very difficult situation to handle and very sad to see. But this didn’t happen often, they were mostly happy. Fortunately.