Bolga Basket

After three days of teaching last week, I was on the move again. I travelled to Bolga for our volunteer’s meeting. Additionally we had arts and crafts time before our meeting in order to make quilt panels. Peace Corps Ghana is making quilt about HIV awareness, stigma reduction, and honoring those who are living with HIV or died from AIDS to be shown at a World AIDS Day (coming up December 1) event in Accra. Each region has been working to construct 2 panels for the quilt. As the Upper East region representative for the Ghana AIDS Project (or GhAP) committee, I received a goody bag full of materials including clothe, needles, thread, scissors, paint, and beads. I made sure to take lots of photos to document the creation of our panels which will be part of a presentation of photos and videos from all the regions about the idea and panel creation process at the event. We had one panel nailed down as the logo of an organization one of our volunteers helped lead a support group with. I’ll blog about that one more soon. It took us a while to come up with another idea but we knew we wanted it to show the spirit of the Upper East. We brainstormed crocodiles, mud huts, baobab trees and then finally settled on a basket. Bolga baskets are famous for being very colorful; ours is red, green, yellow (Ghana flag colors) and blue. Our newest volunteer, a high school art teacher from Georgia, sketched the basket then our dear education art volunteer Lauren cut the parts of the basket. Then it truly was a team effort sewing the basket together on the square! We added red HIV ribbons to the basket for HIV awareness and to show our support for stigma reduction. To complete both panels, we stayed up until midnight which was way past our bedtime here! But they both turned our really well and we’re proud of our creations. Plus if it was a competition (it’s not) we feel confident we’d win.