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Author Bio - Gayle Pescud

Gayle Pescud has spent two years traveling and working in Ghana, West Africa, where she’s now employed as manager of one of Africa’s leading fair trade organizations, Global Mamas, enabling more than 400 Ghanaian women to earn sustainable incomes, and its volunteer program, Women in Progress, which accepts over 60 volunteers annually whose cumulative efforts help keep WiP moving forward.

Pescud is thus uniquely positioned to comment on the reality of traveling, volunteering and working in Ghana. When she is not hard at work managing WiP and GM, she’s hard at work completing her book G is for Ghana: An Accidental Quest to Make a Difference, from which this story is excerpted, about her life-changing year as an independent volunteer and traveler.

Australian-born Pescud has lived in four countries, on three continents. Whilst fluent in Japanese, she can haggle, swear and declare true love in Fanti, French, Twi, Ewe, Korean and Khmer. In her travels she has survived countless trotro journeys, severe malaria, and a bungled taxi robbery in which she turned on the three male assailants and, employing scary slapping tactics and a profusion of expletives, demanded they return her wallet, pen-drive, lipstick purse, lap-top power cord, mobile phone and petty cash. She tells the whole story in Daylight Robbery.