The past 3 months

Hello everybody! It's been a busy past few months so let me catch you up right away.

So since harvesting what have I been up to?

1. I have given a discussion on the importance of keeping records to farmers in my village. The rabbit project is going well and some houses are on their second litter of rabbits (mine included)!

2. My mom came to visit me in my village! We had a great time together. My Mom spent 3 days in my village where she got to experience a local festival, eat local cuisine, and respond "Naaa..." to everything asked of her in Dagbani (well almost, "ney" sounds close to "naa" right?). She got to watch people carry water from the local watering hole and take bucket baths. She got to experience the pleasantries of a latrine and the joy of listening to animals talk to each other at all hours of the day (night). She was able to combat malaria by taking slightly hallucinogenic malaria medicine and she was able to reorganize my entire room (thanks for that Mom).
      She was ready to leave.
      We went to Mole National park where we got to see a bunch of different animals- baboons (man do they have red butts), warthogs (Timon!), monkeys of all types, antelopes of all sizes and stripes, birds of varying colors, but no big cats (no Simba) or elephants.
      She survived the trotro riding experience where it's always a fun game to see what somebody next to you will be carrying (chickens? their 3 children? a goat?).

      She participated in making local pottery! Any ceramics teacher could learn a thing or two from these very talented pottery makers.
      Then she had to wave "byebye-yo" to everybody as she flew back to the land of promises and dreams, though some people still think she drove home...

On that last point....

3. I've started working on a world map to be drawn on our elementary school. 6.5 feet by 13 feet.

 4. Fire Festival! There is a festival to celebrate the end of harvesting everything and that was a blast. Pretty interesting to watch everybody dance with fire. I tried my hand at it and was not good. I almost set a child on fire. Yeesh.

 

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.

My Door

So my door (if you refer back to my last post) literally just rotted off of my mud walls. It was a bummer when I tried closing my door one day and the frame fell away.

So I called the carpenter to ask him to come fix it. His grand plan? Switch the left frame with right frame. Okay... one rotten side for another.... Sigh.

A few more days pass and another carpenter comes who actually does fix it. Of course this doesn't go as planned either. Just as he finished the frame it started to rain and work was called off. So I had a big hole in my wall without a door. Then the light rain that was falling turned into a downpour. So as I'm struggling to save my room from destruction my house father totally comes through for me and covers my room with a local mat. I chilled with the local mat for a door for 2 more days and then my door was finally put in.

The cultural minuses: making up crazy ways to fix a door, not coming to fix the door when you say you will, stopping work because it's raining leaving me door-less
The cultural pluses: Not letting me pay for the labor because I'm their guest in the village (even after 7+ months)

And I have to say that to me, it was an okay trade-off. I'm a sucker for hospitality, kindness, and hilarity. And looking back this was kind of funny.

My old frame

Mat for a door

(my greatest regret actually getting the door fixed though is losing the "love the one who love you" quote above my door)

My new door (I never took a finished picture, but rest assured I have a working door now)

Cham Cham. Yeah, I ate it. This has nothing to do with my door. Think of it as a bonus.

 

Sorry for the delay in blog posts friends and family (Mom). I was feeling under the weather a bit but I'm all good now!

Let me make good on my last blog post- climbing trip.
During the All Vol conference my friend and I bought a rock climbing trip offered from another volunteer. This trip we cashed in on at the end of May. I took a bus down to Kumasi and met up with Ran there. After a bunch of small trotro's and taxi's we reached our fellow PCV's Nathan's site. It took me about 12 hours to reach his house (imagine I-70 with potholes so large that your entire tire could fall into it).

We were met with an awesome offer of homemade pizza. Delicious. We may or may not have dropped one on the floor, picked it up, dusted it off, and put it back into the toaster oven for a few extra minutes and ate it.

The next morning I awoke to rain and I had my hopes dashed to go climbing. However the rain was light and let up so we were still able to climb. We reached the rock around 10 or so and after an hour approach were able to touch the rock face. It took about 7 hours to get up and descend. Nathan led the route while Ran, Andy (mutual PCV along for the trip), and I climbed up after him. Rich would come up the rear and clean the route (collecting the equipment left in the rock).

The descent was scary. Rappels have always scared me. Everything was done with awesome grace though and out 250 feet repel went off without and troubles.

Hilarious times were had and it was definitely one of the best trips in Ghana I've had.

Since that trip I've also gone to a meeting about kayayo's. A kayayo is a name given to a person who has left their village to go be a type of porter or seller in a larger city. This is becoming a bigger and bigger problem because more young women (as most kayayo's are women) are leaving their villages and flocking to cities where they have no shelter and expose themselves to all kinds of risks (sexual assault, robbery, malaria, etc. etc.).

Personally in my own village I've had 6 girls leave (all whom I knew) and only 1 has returned. It's sad the pressure the family's are under. A mother (who is not allowed to own land and therefore does not farm) with a family of 5-10 children has almost no source of income but is expected to provide the soups that accompany all meals. The money needed to buy the vegetables and spices is also needed to pay for school fees for their children and other odds and ends. You can see how a mother may be pressured to send a child into a city they know nothing about to try to make some extra money and perhaps have 1 less mouth to feed.

Add onto my list of things to do: Hold kayayo workshop in village.

Village life is going well though. My villagers have all started to construct their rabbit hutches. I hope by August to have purchased the rabbits and have the project completly underway.

Thank you all for your letters and until next time!

Yours truly

Nathan, Ran, and Andy

The view from the top!

Next post, the story of what happened with my door.

Woken up and still smelling the sh*t

Mary and I are walking down a road looking for cattle. We've left her village and are now ready to create some more delicious tea in Yapalsi.
---
"All right, are we ready for this again?"
"Yup, let's do it."
"Okay I'll bring my bike so we can get it back."
"Yes definitely."
... ...
"Hello? Gaafaraaa...?" (excuse me)
"Okay Mary how do we tell me them we want their cow poop?"
"Umm..."
*Begin expansive hand movements* "Cow... poop.... we want... make-heyhowdoyousayfertilizer?"
"Dang man I totally forgot! Uhh... we want make vegetables pretty. Cow poop and vegetables small time pretty! They will be big! I guess that's as good as I can get it."
"Do you think they understand?"
"Eh. Maybe. Let's just get the poop."
... ...
"Dude this poop is like especially watery."
"Yeah I know. Let's not get too much like we did last time."
...
"Okay that's enough. Let's drag it back to the bike."
*struggling*
"Oh my god it's juicing on us! DUDE. GROSS."
"Diana, it's okay. This happened to me yesterday."
"This bag is so heavy. Grossgrossgross! God just another day in Ghana."
"Hey, why don't I bring the bike over here to us?"
"Ohhh."
...
"Dude literally this bag is dripping all over my bike. What's with this cow poop?"
"I don't... ohh it rained last night!"
"Ohhh. Grand."
---

All the Yapalsi people loved seeing the two of us hauling around a bag of cattle dung. Haha.

 Totally separate event/topic now.- Leveling the ground in my compound.

My family repaved the inside of their compound with cement, but this isn't the same process as we would see in the States. It begins a week or two in advance. My family slowly dug up the existing floor in my compound and then beat the hardened clay that was dug up with a stick to turn it into small pieces.

Then on a determined date everybody from the community (the women and children, no men/boys) shows up the early morning. They begin to shuffle buckets and buckets of dirt into the compound. One bucket at a time per foot until the whole compound has a fresh layer of dirt. This takes all morning up until noon prayers.

After the small break everybody shows back up, one by one. water is sprayed on the dirt and the real fun begins. Everybody begins to sing and pound the dirt flat with check marked shaped pieces of wood.  This video is one of my most favorite and I suggest you watch it! True Ghanian culture right here.

 They're all in sync!

 The floor leveler

 It's a dirty messy process. Everybody really enjoyed that I helped, sang, and danced.

 The rain washes away the clay of buildings so boiled cow poop added with some plants creates a mixture that keeps the buildings from melting away. Once I thought I finished playing with poo I come home and see my mother painting a whole side of a building with it haha. Just can't get away from it!

(also notice how nice the new floor is!)

Next blog post, my hiking trip!