Platform 2 funded by DFID is an amazing program for 18-25 year olds where they help in countries such as South America, Ghana, South Africa and India. The project in Ghana i was lucky enough to have the opportunity of taking part in for 10 weeks. Our task was to: build a community center which will consist of a library and post office as well as teaching at schools and spending 1 day a week with an allocated family (mine was a coco farmer, Elder Isiah).

There were 17 of us all together coming from the UK. For 10 weeks, we had to fully emerge ourselves into the culture and really understanding the truth of developing countries rather than the stereotypical views promoted of Africa in the media. It was a hugely emotional and overwhelming experience. We visited clinics and taught in schools where the children had no space in the class rooms to sit comfortably to learn. What made it extremely difficult, was to see rubbish around the streets. The sanitation was an obvious major problem.

The villagers often burnt the rubbish, which could be extremely harmful especially if the rubbish contained plastic bags, releasing poison toxins in the air. As a collective we decided to try and do something about this problem, we gathered money as a group and got the community (the entire village) to also help. We approached the chief of the village and discussed what we proposed to do, luckily enough, he got on board and we raised a whopping 60 Cedis which is Ghana's currency. To put things into perspective, we earned 15 Cedis every week, this amount can feed a family of 4 for a week so this was a lot of money!

We took the initiative to not only do the community center build and teach but decided to tackle the issue of sanitation. We constructed wooded poles where the bins could sit into and bought 10 bins to put around the entire village. The chief of the village was extremely happy with all our hard work and he alerted us that he employed 5 workers to look after the rubbish in the village, what a fantastic result!

One would think this would be a simple process, but we faced a few obstacles such as raising the money to buy the materials, however, with the help of the community we did it! Juggling building at the work site from 7am until 11am then teach from 12-3:30pm with the heat and exhaustion was difficult indeed, but as a team we worked together and helped out in developing KASAPIN!

Viviane Williams

For more information on what i did you can view my online blog of my time: http://vivianewilliams.blogspot.com/

or visit platform 2 website
www.myplatform2.com/