Day 6: Bamboozled

Travel in Ghana Can be hard work…..so, to ensure a genuine experience much of yesterday evening and this morning were spent perspiring in traffic and bouncing off the walls along the highway. A five hour journey to cover the 25 miles out of Accra after the symposium was followed by a gut busting journey in the back of an overground truck this morning as we made our way to Elmina to stay with our other local partners, Sabre Charitable Trust – where we’ll spend the next few days learning about bamboo as well as finding out about their work.

The afternoon began with a visit to the Sabre’s new kindergarten school. Working with Arup, this will be the second school they have worked on, and it is due to be completed in the next couple of months. Unfortunately, weather conditions made a visit to the completed school in Dwabor impossible, but hopefully tomorrow will bring the sun to dry the road out.

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the bamboo testing site, where we were introduced to the treatment process, and began to think about working with bamboo. Tomorrow we’ll be on site all day working first hand with the material and exploring the potential of the material, which grows around 4 to 5 times faster than wood, can be as strong as steel, and grows in abundance in a country where timber consumption has left only 20% of the natural forests remaining. Thoughts and feedback to follow.