12.01.2025 – Only the early bird catches the worm
After barely 4 hours of sleep, we had our first meeting this morning at 6:00 am. What a Sunday morning! We met with Dr. Isaac Amegbar and his wife Philippine to discuss new ways of reliably unloading cargo from the customs port in Tema. The fast and uncomplicated forwarding of donations from the port to their destination is of enormous importance to us. In particular, the next container must go through all the formalities in the shortest possible time so that the donated IT and medical equipment can reach its destination without delay. Our idea is to share loading capacity with other organizations in the future in order to increase the “pressure” on the port authorities. We have therefore prepared several meetings to discuss this possibility with interested organizations. Issak has a PhD in agroecology and is trying to improve the maize harvest in Ghana through better seeds. To this end, he receives agricultural equipment from donors in Germany to support him in his work. Issak is also very keen to receive “his” equipment as quickly as possible. He seems to have an excellent network and will try to get in touch with his “contacts” today. We are confident that this will open up new opportunities for us. A big thank you to Philippine and Issac for joining us this morning before their long drive to Tamale in the north of Ghana to discuss new opportunities for cooperation. A highlight of our day today was a preparatory meeting with our long-time friend Tina, the former head teacher of Mawuko Senior Girls’ High School, who has taken on a new challenging role outside Ho. She has the task of upgrading Kpetzke High School, about 45 minutes’ drive north of Ho, and significantly expanding the school. We at HITA e.V. want to support them in this and will also be signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with this school in the course of the week. You will be able to follow how we do this here over the next few days. Finally, on Wednesday, hopefully after all the preparatory work has been completed, we want to sign the MOU in an official ceremony. We are very much looking forward to working with Tina and her team, which consists of 126 teachers, a three-person management team and countless additional staff. We will all meet tomorrow morning to plan our collaboration for the coming years.
We have been supporting students for many years, enabling them to complete their studies. We met with one candidate today. Sedem wants to study computer science in Cape Coast and needs support to do so. You can enable him to study for relatively little. With 10 euros per month, 120 euros per year, you can enable students like Sedem to study. If you are interested in supporting students, please get in touch with us. Send an email to spenden@hita-ev.org. We are very happy to have Sven, a committed young member of the association, with us on our journey. It is great that he is supporting our work in Ghana professionally on film. He is also working on his own documentary about Ghana. We find it fascinating how professionally equipped he is. For example, he has 8 terabytes of storage capacity with him, which is enough for more than 58 hours of film. The equipment itself includes not only the camera, but of course also many microphones, which enable him to ensure the sound quality accordingly. You will soon be able to view his first short contributions in our reports and also on our YouTube channel.
I’m sure you’re curious to see how our luggage is doing. Local time 20:10. We don’t know yet. Daniel and Sven went to the airport in Accra again with Kenneth, the driver from Kpedzke High School. None of the phone numbers given on the official forms worked, so we had no way of checking whether our luggage was on today’s flight from Istanbul before we set off. We decided to take the risk, as we didn’t really have any other choice. We can’t stay in Ghana any longer without our luggage. Local time 20:30: 4 out of 6 suitcases are actually there. We are cautiously optimistic that the remaining 2 will also be there. The tension is almost unbearable. Local time 21:00: it was worth the wait. All the suitcases have actually arrived in Accra!!! Now the three of them just have to get back to Ho safely through the night!