couple days

big dump!

May 22nd

lordy!
So, I biked 32km on a crappy used bike from China. It wasn't as bad as i thought itd be, but it was bad. When i got back it took me 1.5 litres of water and a 20 minute rest to get from one end of town to the other. I made it though! I went on this bike ride with one of the agricultural extension agents (AEA) from my district office to visit a farmer group. We bike about 16km to this village, only to find that he hadnt told anyone he would be coming, so none of the farmers were even there. His two options were to either go another 8km (HA!) or backtrack to the other side of the village where there might be another farmer group, so i opted for that one. We wound up meeting a small number of people from a farmer group there. I learnt quite a bit from this short experience though so id say it was worth it. It was interesting seeing how people reacted to the AEA being there, to me being there, and how the AEA did his work. Im finding that everyone presumes im some important person from MoFA and not an outside westerner. Im not sure if that can be advantageous or a problem?

Another interesting discovery made later on: evidently AEA's are supposed to spend a week in the field learning rural livelihoods, just like me, except they have a policy requiring “suitable living conditions,” eg. A toilet, clean running water, electricity, etc.... so what you will never see in any rural setting ever. Its interesting that a requirment so detached from reality exists, because it suggests quite a bit about the mindset of the people creating these policies. Defintiely not people from the ground!

I just measured the inside temperature here, its 29 degrees at 9 in the morning. Thats after it having rained last night, so this is “cool” weather here. Itll probably hit 35 around midday if i had to guess. I here its 20 degrees in Ottawa. Just the idea of not feeling hot makes me homesick right now, lol.


May 18th

Okay, so...

I'm living in a small village called Mankoma, 10 km outside of Bole where I work. I'm at the MoFA office atm, this is actually the first time I've come here in 4-5 days I think. I came into town tuesday from Tamale, and met some of the staff then. I stayed the night in a guesthouse in Bole, kicked around town again a bit wednesday and then went off to Mankoma to greet my host family.

Mankoma has made me realize what a strange but beautiful collision of worlds Ghana really is. I'll often be sitting just outside of my room watching some goats or something wander by the door to the compound, or further down one of the neighbours pounding tz or foufou with a giant mortar and pestel, and then a big cargo truck will drive by, roaring past and forcing a couple goats off the paved road that runs through the center of town, blowing some dust behind it. Then perhaps your eye will catch the powerlines running parallel to the road, part of the Rural Electrification Project by the federal government, which have just been put up a couple days ago, adding a few new posts to the small number of trees dotting the village which people often use as shade during the hottest part of the day. Often someone has also built a small platform out of logs to sit on where it is shadey, or else added their own thatch roof to it to make small pools of shade where people may rest. The houses often have tin roofs, which make all sorts of racket when it rains but reflect the sun well when theyre new. Other houses are built with flat roofs, so sometimes at night that is where the family will sleep, climbing up using a ladder made out of a carved log. At night it becomes pitch black, as there is not yet electricity, but flashlights turn on all over town as the younger people go out to talk with friends, or stay in to study for school. In my house they bring me a carisine lantern for my room as well, so I have some general light. Many people here seem to have well-developed night vision, so that a flashlight isnt terribly necessary, but they may bring it anyways.

Mankoma seems to do well for itself in general, but its still definitely a rural village. There are three bore holes, which I've yet to see run dry, but they also have 3 rivers and a couple of small lakes nearby. The furthest river lies beyond their farms, a 5 mile/2 hour walk west. Beyond that river is Cote D'Ivoire, the country bordering Ghana on its western side. My family uses unclean water to do washing of dishes and things, but borehole water to cook, so one hopes it evens out to a healthy enough meal.

The people in Mankoma speak Gonja, although I'm picking up that there may be different dialects of Gonja even between Mankoma and Bole. Gajin has learned different greetings in Bole, and another westerner from the UN, David, seemed to be using what I thought was a greeting to mean “name.” I have a small notebook with about 8 pages of different Gonja words and the translations already, so I'm starting to pick up what people are saying sometimes. For the most part though I'm understanding Gonja by the tone of voice and body language accompanying words. Concern, anger, frustration, a joke, these are all easily identifiable because of Ghanain mannerisms. There are probably more nuanced things that I'm understanding but don't realize it yet.

My host family is fairly large. There is my host father/landlord, my host mother, and then their 2 sons and 2 daughters. One son and one daughter are very young, while the eldest daughter looks about 9-12, and their son says he is 19. He has been showing me around the village quite a lot. When I first arrived the MoFA director made it clear that I was there to learn about the life of a rural farmer, so everyone is interested in showing me their farm and their house, and what they do when they work.

I walked the 5 miles to my host family's farm, getting a pretty serious sunburn in the process. They grow so far away from town so that the goats and cows they keep in town do not graze on their crops. Why they dont just build a pen for these animals I haven't quite figured out. Well, the cows at least. The goats are handy sometimes, because they eat bloody well anything they find, so its like having a lawn-mower, vaccum cleaner and garbage man rolled into a tiny bleating animal. Baby goats are probably the most adorable thing in the world, just fyi. As you get out of town you come across these giant 7 foot high mounds, which at first you kind of think are just weird rock formations. But then you see the termites crawling all over them. I don't have any idea what would possess anything to go through what I'm sure is months of work to build these giant structures into the air, but I guess it works out for them. Apparently people sometimes dig into them to get female termites from the center of the colony, apparently this is to eat... so im watching what i get served now. After walking for nearly 2 hours we arrived at the farm, which was pretty large. Each able bodied member of the family keeps a plot to themselves, so there are 3 large fields of yams with a couple fields of tomatoes, casava, and beans being planted nearby. Yams are planted in a small mound, and they each grow a vine, so each mound needs a stick put in it, or otherwise a tree nearby that you can wrap several yam vines around. However, they kill the tree with fire so that it does not steal water or nutrients from their crop. So a yam field is an interesting thing to look at, as it is several yards of small mounds with sticks and stringy little vines coming out, occasionally dotted with a burnt dead tree. The farm also had three small grass huts, one which seemed to be purely for putting your bicycles and other things, and 2 others which seemed to be for storing yams and other produce.

In the village I ran into a woman from Japan, named Satomi. She has been in Mankoma for 4 years, so she speaks Gonja fluently. I had heard some various things about another “white” woman in the town, but it had never been clear to me that she was still there (nor that it was a she, there seems to be some confusion about that for some reason, i couldn't see why). If I remember she was staying in Mankoma while working for the UN in the surrounding area. Apparently she is leaving this week though, which is too bad because I'm sure I could've learned some interesting things from her.

Another place I stumbled upon in the village is where they make Pito. It is made out of maize that they let germinate a little bit before grinding up and boiling. It smells and tastes like a beer of some kind, but apparently isnt alcoholic, although I'm not sure I believe that bit! I've had only a little bit because it generally isn't sanitary where they make it, with flies buzzing all over the place. It's... intriguing. Not something I seek out to drink.

My host familys son also showed me a couple places on the other side of town, across the highway. What was most interesting from the perspective of my placement was his school, where there is a teacher that teaches agriculture and proper planting and harvesting techniques. I talked with him briefly, and I think I would like to work with him to develop a lesson plan for students about agriculture as a business, as a potential side project in my spare time. I talked with my coach and he seemed to be okay with it, so meh =P How they plant is a bit different than I've usually seen in Canada. First they make a big circular mound of dirt and sprinkle the seeds all over it, water it, and then cover it with some loose green foliage to keep the moisture in. They let the plants germinate a bit and sprout from this, and then transplant them all to rows to grow fully before harvesting. In Canada it seems we often just plant directly to rows no matter the size of plot, though I've seen some transplanting happen from a bed to smaller planting pots before.
Another very interesting place was this one house belonging to a family that has come from out of town. The father of the household has gone and come from the U.K. and been certified to sell a fertilizer that is apparently good for any crop, so he is busy trying to sell this to farmers in the surrounding area. At his house he also raises an absurd number of animals. There are goats, sheep, ducks (many many ducks), chickens, roosters, turkeys, dogs, a monkey, etc. The first time I went a bunch of ducks came up in a circle where I was sitting like I was their mother or something, it was awesome. I went a second time with my camera to take a video, which is pretty awesome too, I'll upload it the first chance I get.
Lastly, I had a long visit with the town blacksmith, Yusif. He's a pretty chill guy. I watched while he and his assistant made some knives, hammering the blades out of metal and then carving the handles out of wood. He has something seriously wrong with his foot, so he cant farm, instead he just sits under his grass hut all day working metal. He has offered to make me something, which would be a pretty awesome souvenir I think =)

It's been a bit difficult to adjust. I've basically gone from one extreme of living to another. No running water, no electricity, no toilet, no sink, no real bed either. I have a fairly large room, but its occupied by a mattress with a mosquito net over it and a wooden table which I've pretty much completely covered with various things that I need on a daily basis. My host mother brings me a small table to eat on as well. I finally got up the courage to take off the little cloth shed draped over it. Hopefully she will not be offended and just realize I don't need it. It's pretty much impossible to stop them from bringing me things I really don't need. Wherever I go a plastic lawn chair materializes. Sometimes its welcome, like when I had my nasty sunburn, sometimes its just silly. Sitting in a white lawn chair under a tree a few hundred yards from the nearest house, beside a borehole where women are washing clothes, thats just too much, even if it does hurt like hell to kneel or whatever.

Oh, I also saw my first praying mantis, which is an interesting story in and of itself. I was watching the women wash to figure out how its done, when suddenly something big falls from the tree to my left, big enough that i can hear it hit the ground. I look over and theres this praying mantis laying on its back, its wings (?!) stretch out by its side. Its still kind of alive but obviously if it just fell out of a tree it isnt doing so hot. I notice that one of its forearms seems to be missing but otherwise I can't see anything wrong with him. He's still twitching a little and looking around so I decide to keep watching to see what will happen. The boy washing in front of me picks it up to show me and asks if I'd like to hold it, which I politely refuse, so he puts it back down. Around then one of the ants thatd been crawling around comes up to check out the mantis. The mantis totally flips out and stabs the ant through the head with its working forearm before going back to its previous twitching and whatnot. The ant somehow survives this and starts trying to... unstab itself, I guess. At one point it actually pulled so hard it dragged the whole mantis with it a bit, but this seemed to wake the mantis up again, so he reeled the ant in and munched on it a bit, though the ant seemed to survive that too, except now it was half an ant and behind held against the chest of this almost-dead mantis, clutched between the two mandibles of the mantis which seemed to have finally kicked off and entered a fairly peaceful looking death pose, well fed I suppose. Around then I had to head out, but it was an interesting first encounter with a mantis.

I've also seen a crocodile, kind of. I guess its more accurate to say the crocodile saw me and I saw what it was looking at me with. One of the tiny lakes around Mankoma is apparently chalk full of crocodiles, so some of the kids took me to show me. Evidently this meant taking an en masse swim in crocodile infested waters, which I also politely declined. In any case, all i could really see was the eye poking out so it wasnt the most interesting thing in the world, though when they swim around you can see the water rippling. To my understanding they sometimes use that water to clean some of their clothes, which seems like a generally bad idea to me due to A) the aforementioned crocodiles and B) the brown, dirty, not-for-cleaning colour of the water. It would explain why so many people in Mankoma seem to be wearing dirty clothes all the time though, I guess it's cleanish. Maybe its also why so many clothes have holes in them?

Three pages 0.o time to stop, hehe. Oh! But I'll also just mention that my village has named me Kamyiti (ca mnyee tea), which is Gonja for patience =) which I think might be a womans name but meh, i make it look good.