Today l share a true story of my personal life. It is an adventure that occurred to me some years back. This was one of the very moments l regretted in my life for accepting a job opportunity. But in the end, it was worth it. This has given me so much experience in so many angles of life. I am excited any time l share this with anyone.
It is expected that all fresh graduates here in Ghana undergo an exercise after completion of school. It is one of the basic requirements that will certainly get a fresh graduate an opportunity to be employed. It is a scheme conducted by the government each year to ensure that all fresh graduates serve the nation.
This exercise is called '' National Service''. During the period of national service, each individual will be posted to work in any community in Ghana. It does not really matter where you get posted to. Once people live there you are expected to go serve the people for your nation.
A group of three guys got posted to work in a village in Ghana called Akyem Ntrubo. We were designated to work under the National Identification Authority(NIA). This named town was nowhere to be found on the map after our investigation. We then proceeded to the district where this town would be located.
As young graduates who are dedicated to serving our nation, we proceeded to be given directly to locate the town called Akyem Ntrubo in the Oti Region of Ghana. Before the journey, we were informed by a nearby town that, it should take us a minimum of 3 hours to walk from the identified town to the town of our destination.
Unfortunately, there were no vehicles that could transport us to the town and so walking was all that we got to do. However, we commenced with the 3hour journey with our luggage on us as seen in the shared images. After an hour, we had no sign of human settlement and all we could do was to walk and walk more.
We were earlier informed that the town lies in the mountains. It is fully surrounded by mountains and heavy vegetation all over. After a 2hours walk, we still could not have a sign of human settlement and we kept walking. There were many times of disappointments along the way. All we could do was to keep walking even as we had no hope of meeting the town. There was never a moment we met a person on the road which we journeyed on. This was more frightening than ever.
Ith a determined heart we made some progress with the journey to the unknown town. Finally, we landed in this town with no hope of staying longer. Even though we got so much worried about getting back home knowing we were supposed to walk back again. There was nothing we could do other than to get ourselves motivated to work as patriotic individuals who are dedicated to servings their nation.
In the end, l enjoyed every bit of the moment spent at the village where we walked to. The entire journey took us about 4 and a half hours to reach our destinations. With this, you could be imagining the kind of lifestyle that goes on. The nature of where the town is situated prevents it from getting access to telecommunication network and so the use of mobile phones were out of context. They had no access to electricity as well. This made our stay at Akyem Ntrubo more difficult and with no hope since we could not reach any of our families.
I share this today with so much joy for the many experiences that were given to me and my colleagues. Thanks to all my readers for making time to have a taste of my personal life story.
Fresh graduates in Ghana under national service? I did not know that! We do the same here in Nigeria. It's called National Youth Service Corps and just like you, our graduates are posted to towns and cities they are unfamiliar with so they could mingle with people and serve the country, sort of. Hehe.
😳😄 Really? And it's was a four hour journey on foot! Wow. How did you find Akyem Ntrubo community without a local to guide you?
It's a good thing you found the community at last...and without telecommunications and electricity, how will you cope?
Lovely pictures. I'm sure it's going to be an exciting adventure! I wish you all the best in your national service. Thanks for sharing a part of your Ghanaian culture. 🙂
It was a great adventure. We walked for 4 hours. The only guide we had was when we got told to keep walking till we see human settlement. Until then, we kept walking. That was strange. No cellular network to reach our families. We just lived the life the people live too. All was over after 3 months when we returned to our respective homes. I am glad you passed by dear.
Oh, the service was for a period of 3 months. Ah, good thing it is over. That's another feather in your cap of experience and adventure. ☺️
The service is for a period of 1 year. One of our guys was so sick and the environmental change affected us so much that we had to kam back to be reposted. There was no portable water but drinking from a flowing river. It was such a deep village.
Hello! I am @kemmyb and I've chosen this post for 100% curation in Hive Cross Culture's curation project.
• You will receive a percentage of the rewards from our curation post.
• And this post would be featured in our next weekly digest article.
Hive Cross culture is a community for conversation about culture. This can be national, local, community, or personal culture, subculture or your ideas about culture, language posts etc. We also invite and support bilingual posts, and are searching for ways to support and grow the local communities on Hive. Come join us in our discord chat if you are interested!