Padlocked box for a bank
by their stories: “What they said felt to me like the essence of empowerment, and the idea of what can be done in helping people to help themselves.”
For Lauren Keiles, the prospect of going to Ghana opened up after Chief Rabbi Mirvis spoke at her university in Leeds, where she is studying international relations.
“I knew that if it was a Jewish volunteering trip, the connection would be that we would have a similar mindset — that social responsibility is part of my Jewish identity,” she said.
“Whatever denomination you are from, social action is what connects us. We all believe that we have to have global responsibility.” Two projects supported by Tzedek in the region are striking.
One is the Village Savings and Loans Association, which was founded by a Ghanaian community chief.
At its most basic, it consists of a large box with three padlocks — but it allows women to save small sums locally in a way not possible with the big city banks.
Then there’s the Shea Butter Women’s Cooperative. It creates one of the most desirable cosmetic creams in the West through the efforts of Ghanaian women in the most labourintensive way imaginable. The women crouch on pieces of card on a mudstrewn floor, adding water from disused paint cans to gigantic bowls of ground and dried shea nuts, stirring by hand to make a thick creamy paste.
Women traditionally have fewer work and education opportunities than men. Since men are allowed up to four and sometimes up to 12 wives, the resulting number of huge families means that there is rarely money for uniforms, stationery, or girls’ education.
The women’s co-operative allows them a measure of economic independence not previously available.
The Ben Azzai group was also able to visit one of Tzedek’s flagship partnership projects, the School for Life, set in an area which has Ghana’s lowest rates of literacy and numeracy.
The Tzedek team visited remote rural villages and persuaded parents to let their children come back to school.
Its desks and equipment may be Dickensian and the classroom overcrowded, but the sheer will to succeed and make Ghana a developed country is admirable.
The young people from Ben Azzai were also able to meet Ghanian youth leaders for whom Tzedek is running a leadership development programme.
These near-contemporaries, whose opportunities have been nowhere near The Ben Azzai students met local schoolchildren in Tamale, Ghana
those of the Ben Azzai participants, could well be the future social and political movers and shakers of Ghana.
Like last year’s India cohort, the Ghana group pledged to take their stories and impressions to their communities, synagogues and campuses.
Jordana Price, a first year geography
student at Cambridge, said the trip helped her to focus on the way she expresses her Jewish identity — and also on keeping tabs on international developments in the news.
She, and all the Ben Azzai group, left Ghana determined on one thing: to try to make a difference.