Read Online Call of the White by Felicity Aston - Free Book Online

ambitious and a little unrealistic.
    That evening I logged onto my email account with trepidation to see if the interview on Joy FM had prompted any last-minute applications. I squealed excitedly as my inbox showed 17 new messages. This brought the total number of applications from Ghana to 23. I excitedly read through the new applications and saw with relief that some of them were really great: a development worker involved in women’s rights, an investment banker who had given up her affluent lifestyle to follow her dream of becoming a successful singer-songwriter, a nurse from the northern region and a chef in one of Accra’s plushest hotels. I wrote to the ten strongest candidates inviting them to an interview and went to bed in a good mood. Once again, disaster had been diverted by the narrowest of margins.
    On the day of the interviews I sat drinking coffee in the hotel looking out at the sea. I’d already checked my emails and been disappointed. Of the ten candidates I’d invited for interview, only six had replied. I had tried ringing the remaining four but there was no answer. I consoled myself with the thought that six candidates were better than one. My first interview that morning was with Ama, who was waiting for me when I arrived. She had been the only candidate when I’d arrived in Ghana two days previously. Ama worked for an NGO, looking after volunteers from the UK who came to Ghana to work on school building projects. She was a lovely person but had so much humility that I wondered if she would have the conviction she would need to stand up in front of halls full of people to talk with confidence about the messages of the expedition. The interview made my heart sink: could I really give this wonderful woman the training she would need in order to take part in an expedition like this? She was certainly tougher than me in many ways, but an expedition to Antarctica was so clearly beyond anything she had ever experienced or had ever thought of experiencing that the thought of it seemed almost cruel. The interview brought back all my old doubts about the sensitivity and questionable wisdom of what I was doing. These concerns had never been far from my mind, but the enormity of the responsibility now made me feel sick. Could I take a woman from rural Ghana – a woman who has never left the country, seen snow or felt freezing temperatures – to Antarctica?
    My hopes weren’t raised by the application form of my next candidate. Sheillah was 23 years old and, although her form was well written, it struck me as rather naive. When she arrived she was so timid that she wouldn’t sit directly opposite me for the interview, but insisted on sitting across the room on a chair just inside the door. Once she had recovered from her initial shyness, I was soon struggling to interrupt her flow of dialogue and a different person altogether began to emerge. ‘I was the first born,’ she told me. ‘So, of course, my parents wanted a boy. But because I was the first born they gave me the freedoms they would have given a son. So I am privileged to have had that freedom to do whatever it is I want to do.’
    She was interrupted by a sudden flood of water gushing from an air-conditioning unit in the office we were using. I pushed a bucket underneath to catch the water but Sheillah instantly fell into business mode. She strode off into the reception area, returning quickly with a reluctant orderly who mopped while she stood over him directing. Now I could see how this 23-year-old in her business suit could cut a formidable figure at work and carry her authority. Sheillah was ambitious as well. ‘After the expedition, whoever goes will have a platform,’ she explained. ‘I want that platform to launch my own NGO which will use peer pressure for positive things, to encourage volunteerism among young people in their holidays and other ideas that I am working on.’
    Barbara