Nzulezo

It is not every day that you sit in Nzulezo and receive an oral history of the village from its chief. Traveling this weekend, we have ventured west, almost to Ivory Coast. Over six hours by bus and tro-tro to Beyin, then an hour by dugout canoe to Nzulezo. Accessible only by water, Nzulezo is a stilt village that for over 400 years has enjoyed a peacefully isolated existence on the water. This feels uniquely African. We are guests of the Acid Project, acronym for the Amansuri Conservation and Integrated Development Project, not some Keysey-esque hallucination. While their existence seems hard the people are friendly and welcoming. The small village is currently residence for 500 and has a school, three denominations sharing a small chapel and a bar. There is even a guest house should you like to stay. Fortunately we are not staying and after our peaceable paddle back to Beyin we escape to the tranquil seclusion of Beyin Beach Resort. The warm ocean, soft sand, cool breezes and swaying palms of the resort are not uniquely African - we could be in Hawaii or Mexico or the Bahamas but we are enchanted with the welcoming climate and our thatch-roofed hut facing the ocean. Our hosts, Nina, a Brit, and her Ghanaian husband Partick Sarpong, in addition to operating the resort, have begun a sea turtle conservation project. There are three species of endangered sea turtles here including leatherback which are thought to be near extinction. These turtles may not reproduce until they have reached an age of twenty-five years and the survival rate from egg to adult may be less than 10%. The Sarpongs hire security to patrol the beach at night and protect turtle nests from predators and locals, whom they will also pay for revealing a nest or delivering eggs unharmed; sometimes two or three times a day in buckets of over a hundred. They also pay local fishermen a stipend to release captured turtles from fishing nets instead of killing them or eating them. Awakened at dawn the first morning there by the couple's young children, we hurry to the beach with the excitement of Christmas morning to see a nest of over 70 turtle hatchlings safely reach the ocean and swim off into the surf, tiny heads breaking the surface for a breath before disappearing into the waves. We are uplifted by the stark contrast of the experience to the harsh poverty that surrounds us in Elmina, a small glimmer of hope that something here is succeeding against difficult odds.