We got to the British Council ready for rehearsals and were having a look around the auditorium, which was nice. This was to be our Grand Performance! The stage was quite small, and carpeted and so I wasn't overly confident about the quality we would produce. The auditorium was surrounded by large glass windows, which doubled up as doors in most cases. Most of Ghana has buildings which involve the exterior in the rooms due to it being so hot, not many places have closed rooms.
So we had been bringing in the instruments through the glass door at the side and then all went to pose for a photo on the stage under the British Council Logo.
Someone from the British Council must have closed the window/door during this time.
Kassim realised that Derrik was not in the picture and so he rushed to get him..CRASHED straight through the window/door thinking it was still open.
It was awful. We just stood and watched him run right through - we all thought it was an open door - especially as it was one of the only windows without a logo on the glass. Most of us froze to the spot as he lay there in the middle of all this glass, Scott, Terri and others rushed over immedaitely to help him.
As he sat up we could clearly see blood spilling from his forehead, they soon washed this through and put pressure on it, he was rushed to hospital.
Everyone sat around for some time and Derrik made no effort to get people rehearsing or take their minds off what just happened. So myself and Terri decided we should occupy everyone and start practicing on the stage.
We did what we could, we felt that a lot of the day had been wasted as Derrik kept disappearing and did not seem to see the importance of running through the piece or even the cues so we would know when and where to enter and exit from! We did our best to sort this ourselves.
The show went quite well, although we did not have a very large audience. Derrik disappeared at the beginning of the show to get Martha some food, even though we had shared biscuits and snacks with her earlier. Tim-Afrik like to think they are very professional, but they dont seem to realise the importance of keeping to a schedule or backstage etiquette - especially when an audience are in.
I convinced Tim to start the show without Derrik, we would do our puppetry and if necessary, have an interval if he still wasn't back.
Luckily he arrived in time, but the whole show started 45 minutes late.
Tim-Afrik were also a nightmare backstage, our group are never silent but they NEVER cause a racket the way these guys did. Many of our younger girls kept telling the African boys to be quiet during the show. How do they not realise that this kind of thing is important?!
We found ourselves wishing it was over, they even stopped us from going on stage at one point when we were actually supposed to go on! It made us look bad.
Later on, we all met up outside our hotel bar. The guys from Tim-Afrik were a little off with us as we had stopped paying for EVERYTHING and I think they had also expected us to jump in and offer to pay for the broken window if necessary. We did a little speech for them and said that as it was our final performance we wanted to give them a gift, instead of giving them it on the final day. We presented them with the keyboard to keep - they leapt about and whooped and had their pictures taken with it.
It was lovely to see them so happy, but we wondered how long this would last before they expected something else from us? We all had some drinks and eventually disappeared to bed.
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