Ghana Trip Three - The Videoing Experience

There are numerous aspects of the Theodora Project that have unique aspects to it.

1. The sex workers we are dealing with (who represent a majority here in Ghana) are not 'captives', 'slaves', or 'trafficked' as most people in the United States automatically assume sex workers to be. They rather are people who, because of the very challenging circumstances that people find growing up here, make a series of logical decisions that lead them to finding sex work the optimum career for taking care of their personal and family economic responsibilities.
2. The women who grow up in this environment may get frustrated, feel they are disrespected, feel misused, but they don't feel they are victims. Rather they look at themselves as being tough survivors.
3. There is a high degree of abusive behavior that permeates society. There is a high degree of marginal income that supports society. These combined lead to situations where young women find they either need to leave home or are forced to take care of themselves at very young ages. 
4. This in turn leads to high levels of women who cannot complete their basic high school education. Without the certificate that you have completed high school, getting a job is near impossible.
5. The overall economy here is short on jobs and those jobs that exist tend to not pay well
6. To address this as we contemplated how to create an exit path out of sex work for these women, we had to do more than just help them complete education and get a certificate. We had to actually create jobs. And those jobs had to be high paying jobs so those we worked with would not be tempted to go back into sex work.
7. Our solution has been to create a virtual personal assistance business that can market the services these women are taught thus allowing them to translate their work into remuneration far higher than they could receive in Ghana.
8. Finally to ensure sustainability, we have determined that this enterprise needs to ultimately be a commercial one owned by the women who are participating.

 Okay, you can see that it took me quite a lot of words to describe this situation and solution - 8 points worth. Now imagine going in front of individuals, business owners, potential donors and groups like fellow Rotary Clubs and trying to explain this in a concise, understandable manner. Difficult. So we decided early on that we needed to make use of the power of video to create a tight, concise, powerful presentation. And we wanted to feature the voices of our participating women as a critical component.

It proved to be a real challenge to pull off. Finding someone in Ghana was the task of my partner GG. The first person completely flaked out on us on the day we were to do the shooting (causing our women to be royally pissed but then become even more committed). We found a second group and decided to wait until GG and I were both in country. These folks are way more professional, even if young and clearly very new at what they are doing. Their communication with everyone was great. They did a wonderful job of getting from the women their stories and guiding them on camera to be shorter and more concise. And they have a lot of empathy which carries through to how they interacted with the women.

The process has not been without issues. Originally they were just going to film the woman and I was going to use a resource in the U.S. to make the videos. Then it was decided that it would be better to do as much of the process in Ghana as possible. The amount quoted for just the filming was hardly anything. But the quotation for the full project was a lot. I suspected I was getting the "white man's" price. Some investigation indicated that this was probably a reasonable fare for a very experienced group doing a project of this size, which are team is not.

Then there has been the issue of the 'sound studio'. They said we would video in their studio, but there proved to be no sound proofing and we had all kinds of outside noises while doing the videos. GG and I are greatly concerned about what the audio quality will be.

But I am sure we will work things out. If need be we will redo some of the audio. For the money we will be paying (I will pay what they ask), I will require they do whatever they need to do to get things right. Working in this country as one would totally expect is a different animal than working in the U.S. I understood there would be issues like this intellectually before I started the effort. Now I am understanding it much more viscerally.