A regular feature of the volunteer experience is playing host to friends and family from home. As I mentioned in the last item, we have had a run of visitors to Koforidua over the past month, often overlapping. Many itineraries have been planned and replanned, hotels booked and guidebooks thumbed. You want to make sure visitors have a good time and go home reassured that their distantly located friend or family member is in relative comfort and safety.

My parents have just returned to the UK after just short of two weeks in Ghana. They did not get off to a good start. Fog at Leeds/Bradford Airport led to them missing a connection in Amsterdam and a rerouting via Dubai. They arrived 17 hours late and had travelled more than twice as far as necessary. Their luggage arrived later that evening having waited in Amsterdam for the next direct flight. We hung around in Accra while we waited for it to show up.

Things improved. In Koforidua, neighbours and work colleagues were all delighted to meet them. I was a little surprised to find nodding acquaintances proudly claim that they were my sister or mother. They met all the Koforidua VSO volunteers and a few from other areas. We squeezed most of Ghana’s top tourist attractions into barely a week – Cape Coast Castle, Elmina, Kakum Canopy Walk, Kejetia Market, the Manhyia Palace and National Cultural Centre in Kumasi, Wli Falls, The Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary, the Nkrumah Mausoleum and Independence Square in Accra, Boti Falls and Lake Bosomtwi. They visited five out of Ghana’s ten regions. They used countless taxis and tros, they spent a morning in church, tried Ghanaian food (steering clear of the more ‘hardcore’ dishes), bought beads and cloth and waved at ‘obruni’ shouting children. They saw crocodiles, fed mona monkeys, watched drumming and dancing and waited for an hour on the roadside outside Asamankese while a replacement was found for a sick tro tro.

I returned them to the airport on Tuesday in roughly the condition they reached it in and was back in Koforidua before they took off.