Just another day...

What to do on day ~61 at site? I’m taking a stay-cation, which here translates as shutting the main door and all the windows as to appear not here. I’ll be inside drying and making powder out of thousands of moringa leaves and watching Mission Impossible one, two, and three. It is now 3 days later, I’ve watched MI1 and am sad to report that most of my moringa leaves managed to mold. Deep breath. It will grow again (and soon).

Yesterday I traveled to the district capital, Nkwanta, which is only about 30km from our village of Jumbo. I woke up, saw Kris off to school, ate some breakfast and went outside to pick our bunny, Luna, some grass. I was already mostly dressed and ready to begin my journey to Nkwanta, so I was casually dressed in Jeans and a nicer t-shirt. I walked passed the borehole and greeted the small girls pumping and fetching water. I found a nice spot of healthy looking wide grass (Luna’s favorite) and began pulling. Not 3 minutes into the process I felt a sharp pain on the inside of my right foot. Mostly normal, there are a million things here that bite… mosquitoes, flies, bees, other flying insects and oh yeah, ants. I carelessly had stepped directly onto the path of some driver ants. I don’t particularly like ants. I also don’t fear them, like I do spiders, but one step in the path of some driver ants is enough to give you nightmares. They can sting, but they don’t have to because they’d rather rely on their powerful cutting jaws. Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia, “Such is the strength of the ant's jaws, in East Africa they are used as natural, emergency sutures. Various East African indigenous tribal peoples, e.g. Maasai moran), when they suffer a gash in the bush, will use the soldiers to stitch the wound, by getting the ants to bite on both sides of the gash, then breaking off the body. This seal can hold for days at a time, and if necessary, the procedure repeated - allowing sufficient time for natural healing to commence.” So I was being attacked by natural, emergency sutures; too bad I wasn’t injured. I think the girls at the borehole already knew the English S swearword, but maybe hadn’t heard it used quite so many times by a white lady hopping around with tall grass in one hand and the other hand trying to pull up her pant legs to swat at something (maybe that’s why they don’t wear pants here?). It didn’t take them long to realize my predicament, so they came over to assist me. I was now surrounded by ants and six Ghanaian girls pulling at my pants and slapping my legs and feet. Eventually I had to make a run for it; the ants were too fast, and my jeans were too confining for me to catch the ones making their way above my knees. I made it into the house and depantsed myself. Luckily there were only about ten of them left at this point, mandible deep into my legs. Some of the others had been confused by the blue jean material and decided to sink into that instead.

I wrapped a two-yard of cloth around my waist and chucked my jeans outside. Someone came to greet me at that moment (typical). The person’s uncle had died (kinda puts getting bit by ants in perspective). He had come to see how my health was, and to let me know that there would be a funeral for the next few days. I gave him my condolences and told him I would try to attend the funeral. I managed to leave the house shortly after, finally starting my journey to Nkwanta. I waited to hitch a ride on a vehicle for a few hours, hoping to get lucky. It was not to be. I then walked to the police checkpoint, where one of the officers was very kind and rode his moto to the station, bought a ticket, and told the lorry driver to save a seat for me. Soon I was on the road, and finally arrived in Nkwanta around 12:30pm. 30km in 1.5 hours… did I mention our roads are really, really bad? I went to the market and bought some things I can’t get in Kpassa (cabbage, carrots, cucumber, honey bread and wheat bread). It started to rain, which is normal for this time of year and seemingly typical for when I have to walk a significant distance. I was about 1.5 miles into my walk when it really started pouring, so I took refuge under someone’s roof overhang. The residents noticed me and told me to come in out of the rain, they gave up their only un-broken chair for me to sit (this is known as the white person treatment – I experience it often).

After sitting for about 40 minutes I decided the rain was just going to have its way and get me wet. I was already about an hour late from I had informed the District Health Team I would arrive. I finally arrived, moderately soaked, but welcomed warmly. My business was to discuss progress in preparing a main building and nurse’s residence for a small clinic in Jumbo. I had been recently promised funding from the District Assembly (general funding pool not specific to health, agriculture, etc.), so I had some good news to share.

After the meeting I walked the 2 miles back to the lorry station, bought the last ticket on the lorry back to Kpassa and took my seat… in the back row wedged between two Ghanaians on one side and two on the other. By no means do average Ghanaians travel in luxury. Personal space is foreign, as is common sense like leaving the last seat in the very back of the vehicle, which to access requires that an entire aisle of people in “jump seats” get up and exit, let you in, then file back in. Luckily for me I was sharing this coveted back seat with a student from the University of Ghana, in Accra. He is from Kpassa, and is going for his degree in Psychology. So, in-between being launched by craters the driver was not taking care to avoid, we discussed Sigmund Freud, Piaget and Miller. It was one of those pleasant, “I never thought I’d be…” moments. I can’t recall a more enjoyable trip from Kpasa to Nkwanta.

The student’s story was impressive. This 20-something-year-old’s parents are farmers. They have 11 children. All of them have gone or are going to at least secondary school (high school), with many going on to teaching college or even university. Unheard of! I had found the exception to the norm here (at least in my neck of the woods): illiterate farmers keeping their kids illiterate by having them help at farm. We discussed the problems Ghana has and that we thought education would help the most with those problems. He told me that even for a poor farming family it was possible to send all of their children to school, they just had to make it a priority. Even though (per typical) I arrived back in Jumbo bruised at the knees and migraine fogged, I felt refreshed. Sometimes when you’re working in development your efforts can seem futile. Progress is slow if you can see any at all, and desperate situations somehow manage to get even worse. Meeting a young person from my greater community who is pursuing higher education in Ghana is a breath of fresh air. I had been given enough motivation to keep trying, even if at times it seems as though I’m beating my head against a wall. Somehow I will help the people in my village understand that it has the resources it needs to succeed. Maybe those resources should be in a classroom instead of fetching water and assisting some careless foreigner who stepped in the path of some driver ants.

The latest

My day planner tells me September is over. I’m not sure I believe it, but when I accessed the internet (which is never wrong), it agrees. It feels like it was August only days ago. But I have at least one hypothesis for explaining this seeming contradiction. For one, the weather is not changing. Back home in Wisconsin, the weather is turning cooler, the leaves are turning, and there is football. Here, the heat remains, the rains come almost every day (average of 0.5 to 1 inch per day), and our garden here is in its juvenile stage (cucumber blossoms, sweet corn thigh-high, tomato and green beans knee-high). There are no cool evenings where we have to think about how cold it is and whether to throw on a sweater or (gasp!) turn on the heat just a little.

Another reason that September flew by is due to “waiting” for school to start through most of the month. There is a nationwide census in Ghana right now, and out of the various government service sectors the education service chose the short straw, and so teachers are the ones that have to conduct the census. But wait, what about school and teaching classes? Turns out actual education is fairly low on the priority list. So at my school, a junior high, we were supposed to start September 13th. But they delayed one week and one day to September 21st so that teachers could attend a workshop to learn how to do the census, which will take place during the next two weeks or so (I’ve gotten as many answers as the number of times I’ve asked this question). September 21st is a government holiday, so we finally started on the 22nd. The first two days there were no classes, just weeding and sweeping the school grounds (with minimal supervision from teachers, due to the ongoing census). On Friday Sept 24th, I taught my first class. The other math teacher is MIA because he was in a minor motorcycle accident (he’s ok, just needs to rest and keep his road rash clean so it doesn’t get infected), so while I only prepared a lesson plan for Form 1 (7th grade), I had to teach Form 2 and Form 3 on the fly. It was the same story this week – two to four teachers attending, with students getting only two classes a day, (compared to five or six). I was looking forward to the school term as a good source of structure for my daily life here, but I’ve been having to create my own amongst the chaos. So while I was dealing with these recent events, September has escaped.

As for the earlier portion of September, we have kept ourselves busy by becoming full-time chefs. For any of you that are worried that we are not eating well, behold Figure 1 through Figure 4:

Bean burgers with fresh tomato slice, lettuce, HEINZ KETCHUP, and mayonnaise (with a side of seasoned yam fries)

Close-up of bean burger (seasoned with Weber burger seasoning – thanks Mom & Dad!)

Chicken thigh and leg (from rooster gifted by a chief and freshly butchered by yours truly), with tomato sauce and mashed yam (both made by Tricia)

Tuna and avocado pie (courtesy of Tricia), with biscuit topping

Additional dishes we have made include spaghetti sauce from scratch (with corned beef added), guacamole and homemade tortilla chips, potato salad (made with yam instead), peanut sauce over yam, chicken and rice soup and various other hodgepodge sauces served with noodles, rice or yam.  

We’ve also  made some desserts, including cornbread, banana crisp, and M&M cookie bars.  And for afternoon refreshment we have made plenty of limeaid (lime trees are everywhere).

We have discovered some unlikely sources for some of the foods we have been craving since arriving in Ghana.  One of these is meat.  Meat is butchered and sold much differently here.  Where you go depends on what type of meat you want.  There are “cold stores” (small shops with a chest refrigerator) in town that sell chicken and fish (mostly smoked, not fresh), albeit for a steep price (out of reach for most Ghanaians in this area except on special occasions).  You can also get plenty of smoked fish in the market (fear not - they don’t charge extra for the diseases left by flies).  Though we have heard about it, we have not yet found a source for fresh fish. Stay tuned.  Or, if you are welcomed into the community like we were, by being given two live roosters, you can butcher chicken yourself.  This can be the more sanitary option, as you know how it has been butchered and that the carcass hasn’t been sitting outside for hours.  For goat meat, the easiest source is your neighbor, when they are butchering one.  It’s not very sanitary…but we don’t really like goat meat anyway.  There is also some bush meat (grass cutter, rabbit, etc.), but it is being depleted rapidly, and some of the hunting methods are wasteful (i.e. burning bush to force animals out and then shoot them), so we won’t be eating any of it.  In fact, we will probably do a rabbit project where we sell babies from our rabbit and teach people to raise domestic rabbits.  We have also seen domestic turkeys and pigs running around our village – we hope to get more information on that (turkey for Thanksgiving???). Then there’s beef.  There is plenty of it in northern Volta, but you don’t go to the cold store to get it.  You instead go directly to a butcher shop.  Keep in mind that none of said butcher shops are protected from flies.  Sometimes they even take a hock and hang it outside so that people know the butcher has it.  So not sanitary at all.  Did I mention I have bought beef once so far from a butcher?  The trick is to go there very early in the morning, just as they are doing the slaughtering.  Then you point to an area on the carcass where you want meat from.  In my case I pointed to the tenderloin/sirloin area (couldn’t tell which).  The way I found out the price was by saying I wanted 4 cedi of meat, and then later finding out that I was given about 2 pounds.  So the price isn’t bad.  I don’t think they butcher the cows until they are old (read: chewy), so the best thing to do with the meat is grind it.  Unfortunately the meat grinder I bought is missing some pieces, so I’m going back to the store in Hohoe to hopefully get them.  So instead I cubed the beef and sautéed it, and combined it with brown gravy and mashed yam.  It was delicious.

Another exciting source is for milk.  Yes, that’s right, milk.  Fresh from the source – so fresh, in fact, it’s still warm from being inside the cow’s udder.  There is a tribe of nomadic people in the area called the Fulani that have a settlement nearby.  Apparently the previous volunteer at our site had been buying milk from them, because one day they stopped by with a warm bowl of milk.  We could tell they were different, from the elaborate and beautiful clothing and facial tattoos, and from the fact that they did not speak a lick of English, Twi, Konkomba, or any other language we knew.  They are apparently originally from Nigeria and have migrated here with their bovine in search of better land (i.e. land where rain falls more consistently).  So through hand gestures and other non-verbal, we were able to negotiate a price for 5 cups of milk.  Since then they have been delivering milk about twice a week.  We do pasteurize it, just to make sure it is safe.  It’s an amazing feeling to drink a cold glass of milk in the hot afternoon, or even spread a bit of real butter (not the 2-year shelf-life margarine) on some bread (shake a cup of milk in a jar for 20 minutes and you’ve got about one tablespoon).  One fascinating aspect of the Fulanis is their appearance.  Literally straight out of a National Geographic magazine.  We hope to get some decent pictures soon, because attempting to put it into words is more than I am capable of.

And, just in case we don’t cover all of the essential nutrients, we are taking a multi-vitamin every day. Tricia’s taking a calcium supplement; no need for the combo calcium + vitamin D, there’s sun to be had.

One more shout out to fall, and those enjoying it; we miss it terribly. But we may not miss what follows fall nearly as much.