Harvesting

It's that time of the year where almost every farmer makes their entire year's profit and food stores. It's time for harvesting!



I'll be out in the bush for a while so enjoy these pictures.

Everybody gets 1/5 of the groundnuts they pick. So you better pick a lot!

My Loot. 7 hours of work.

Husking with my family

My Garden

This is a way over due post.

Months ago I started working on a garden and am now just posting about it.

One day while I was sitting around in my compound I happened to mention casually to Barkeysu (oldest house girl) that Mary had built a garden at her site. About 30 minutes later I hear her digging around in front of our compound. I come out to see that she's clearing a space to make a garden! Takes me by complete surprise.

I decided then that if she was that gung-ho about making a garden I was going to help her. This turned out to be a super more involved project then I thought it would be. For starters everything is made from local materials which means me wandering around in the bush cutting down branches that I can use for my fence. I'm probably one of the biggest tree lovers out there so no bashing me for doing what I had to do.

Machete in hand I'm wandering the dry river beds (since this was back sometime in April or May and still in the dry season) cutting and hauling the branches back and forth. This is a long and laborious process. Walk around in the hot sun about 30 minutes away from village, spend 2 hours cutting and fighting trees, spend another 20 minutes gathering all the branches, then tie and place bundle on head and walk back. I spend a total of about 3 or 4 days doing this.

With the branches collected I need to dig holes to place them down into. Then I put 3 sticks horizontally so that I can weave the branches through it. However with all the branches I have it's still not enough and I need to go and collect local grass (a woody type of grass) to fill the spaces in between the branches. More weaving, more sweating.

For the door I weaved together about 20 branches separate from the rest of the fence. I found making a door without hinges was difficult. It's jimmy-rigged but somehow still functional. For a while I would just move the whole door aside and put it back but the door is really heavy so I've tied one side of the door to the fence and placed a big rock in the same corner. Then I just pull the untied side and squeeze in.

And there you have it. My first garden.
So I'm growing tomatoes, onions, and cabbage. In a classic Diana fashion I confused my cabbage and onions seeds so there are way too many cabbages growing together and fighting for space. Hafizu (smallest house boy) snuck in corn while I was away and Adam-bla (second smallest house boy) planted a mango sapling in the middle of the garden. I spit some water melon seeds into my garden and apparently 3 of them started to grow. That is everything that is contained in my too small garden.

I think in the next week or two everything will be ready to eat! You're all invited.

 

Door to my garden.

 Side wall of the garden

Front of the garden

My villagers sometimes come to ask why my garden is so small and I tell them it's because it's just to supplement to what I normally eat. It's a concept they aren't use to since their farms are large enough to provide for their families for a year.

I also had a girl in my village ask me if I had a garden in America and I told her I did not. She was really interested as to why I would try one here then. The concept that I would try something new was shocking to her.

Small differences between different worlds.

My house dog gave birth to 5 puppies too! 

Another beautiful sunset. 

Loving it here and missing you guys!

The rabbits have arrived!

Small update of the rabbit project. I wrote this for a PC article.

Rearing Rabbits in Yapalsi

We’ve all heard “obroni give me toffee” (in our respective dialects) enough times by now to probably feel it before it even comes out of the child’s mouth. It seems we are always surrounded by talks of food. With our own dreams of food, our cravings for food, I would venture a guess food is probably on our minds 40-70% of our days. 

Spending time in my village I realized how much time everybody else spends thinking about food. The difference is that while I may think about a deep dish pizza, my house children were just dreaming about meat. This is when I realized what I wanted to accomplish my first year at site- implementing rabbit rearing. I want to be the meat winner.

I began my project by holding two meetings, one on the benefits of rearing rabbits and another about how to construct the hutches.  I foresaw the rest of the project proceeding smoothly. Those interested would build their hutches in a timely manner and come to me with any questions they might have. Once they finished I would go and buy some rabbits. This, of course, was not how it happened.

Days crawled by and the weeks flew by. Week after week passed by and nobody, aside from one person, built their hutches. Why not? Didn’t I make it clear that this would be the ideal time to raise rabbits because vegetation was plentiful and the birthing rates would be at its highest? I thought people would be naturally motivated into beginning and finishing their hutches. However after a month passed by I decided a change needed to happen so I set a deadline- in fact I set 3 different deadlines.

Before I could set a 4^th deadline I had a turning point. This happened when I brought in a professor to discuss nutrition and maintenance of the rabbits, with a practical portion. She brought one female rabbit to Yapalsi that same day and showed the villagers what the rabbits liked to eat. The one farmer who had finished his hutch first was allowed to keep this rabbit. This re-sparked interest and 5 families began constructing their hutches. This was roughly one and a half months after the first meeting was held. 

The week before I said I would bring the rabbits to Yapalsi (and 2 months after the original meeting) I went to visit my homes with the unfinished hutches. Throughout this week I visited every other day begging and pleading for people to finish their hutches. My criteria for a finished hutch consisted of: a watertight room, an outdoor patio, and two nesting boxes. Of the 6 houses that said they would finish their hutches only 4 truly did. I said sorry to everybody who didn’t finish but I could not bring them any rabbits (what were they planning to do, hold the rabbits in their hands until their hutches finished themselves?). The next morning on my way out of town the two families who were not finished the day before rushed to show me their finished hutches. Also another 4 families, who had not shown interest before, stopped me and tell me they had almost finished their hutches.

In a happily ever after scenario I could have accommodated everybody who wanted to rear rabbits, but it simply was not possible to buy an extra 8 rabbits the day of from my seller. I went with a “first finished first served” method. 

Since the arrivals of the rabbits I’ve come to realize that my project has really just started because the real challenge is going to be raising the rabbits. I’m sure there will be more unforeseen obstacles but if there is one thing I’ve learned while being in Ghana, it’s that laughing makes everything better.

 Overall 12 rabbits have been brought in and another 8 are still to arrive.