Back from Vacation

Hey everybody I just got back from Vietnam and it was such a fun trip! For 1 month Ran and I traveled up the coast of Vietnam and also made a side stop in Cambodia to see Angkor Wat. It was a great trip and vacation but there's nothing like coming back to Ghana and feeling like you've come home.

The welcome back to my community was so uplifting, I mean, it's pretty hard not to break out into a big smile when 40 children are running over to you screaming "Madam Weeeeelcome! Madam Weeeelcome!!" Haha jeeze.

So after being gone a month the rabbit project I've been working on for the past year seems to be continuing in a sustainable manner. The rabbits seemed healthy and even 1 house's rabbits gave birth while I was gone. So far so good!

In a 2 weeks we'll be going to "All Vol" our annual all volunteer conference where every PC volunteer in Ghana will be meeting up. How interesting it will be to see everybody again.

Current projects:
Starting the tree nursery and the women's group to be associated with the nursery.
More world map lectures.

Bush Fire

It's that time of the year again, bush fire season. It hasn't rained in almost 3 months and everything in the bush is a matchstick waiting to be stuck. Due to habit or a lack of education about the consequences of a bush fire, several farmers purposely start bush fires. Some of them think that it makes the land look "pretty," some do it just because "that's what we've always done," and others just do it because everybody else is.

It's strange because every time I tell them about how bush fires take nutrients away from the ground (thereby making next years harvest yield less) and how they kill saplings and cause soil erosion, I'm almost always met with a, "Yes I know. It's a bad practice." So I'm not sure if it's a few strange pyromaniacs who don't seem to believe that bush fire consequences exist, or whether farmers just really don't believe it's that big of a deal. Personally I think it's more the latter.

Now with this introduction it's time for me to begin the story...

The other day I was at the school when I noticed this huge black cloud.

I've seen lots of bush fires but I haven't seen one that could cause such a massive smoke cloud. I went out to go and see how big the fire was and where it was. About a 30 minute walk outside of town I find the fire and it is raging. I'm watching it as it swallows up trees. I'm almost tempted to walk closer because I'm naively thinking that if nobody else is paying attention to this fire it must not actually be as bad as it looks. Then a gust of wind comes and the fire jumps 5 feet forward and 10 feet high devouring everything around it. I hightail it out of there.

Many times before I've asked whether this fire was going to become a problem or whether that fire was going to move in toward town. Every time I am met with a no. So naturally I've become accustomed to thinking none of them will ever make it into town. About 2 hours later I come back out to see the fire almost in our backyard. At this point I'm still somehow amazingly unaware of the fact that this fire has traveled 2 miles in the direction of my village and that it probably will not just suddenly stop and burn out by Yapalsi's backyard.

I'm taking still more photo's and videos commenting about the fire and how close it is to my house (the house on the edge of town and therefore first in the path of the fire) literally never really thinking that if this fire continues it is going to start all of our grass huts into one big bonfire.

Luckily others are not as unaware and I start seeing people gathering at the edge of my town with sticks and machettes cutting down growth by the village. It is at this point that I realize this is actually an immediate problem.


The village have a very specific sound they make to alert others of a fire. Make this sound and every person who hears it will do two things; grab a bucket of water and run in the direction of the sound, and recreate the sound to pass it along to those who didn't hear. Within minutes you'll have the entire town force running over with water. This was a really interesting thing to witness and the coolest fire service I've ever seen.

For the next 20 minutes my village and I throw buckets of water at this bush fire. The women carrying the water the men either beating the fire out or spraying it with their farming equipment. It's a really tense 20 minutes but we get the fire put out.

Then about 30 minutes later I hear the fire alert, "waaa-yee... waa-yee" and before I know it I'm running out with a bucket of water. The fire we put out earlier has restarted! So again we pour water everywhere. This time we take extra care to douse everything that was once on fire. And once more the fire is back under control.


How did the fire start to begin with? A farmer started it to try to create a fire belt around his yam farm. On this particular day though, the wind was particularly strong and the farmer didn't clear the area before starting the fire. The wind just picked it up and ran with it. The farmer lost his entire yam farm to a fire of which he created. You might think it's karma but I know first hand that this kind of thing happens all the time. My house father lost half of his cow pea farm from doing the exact same thing 1 week earlier, only on this day the winds weren't as bad so the fire didn't make it very far.

My house made it out okay though and the village made it out okay too. Talk about memorable moments.

The fire behind my house

The Village deciding they would create a fire belt around Yapalsi to prevent further scares.

Also, bush rat is back in season. Can you guys believe it's been over a year since I've come to Yapalsi!

Happy new year!

Hey everybody happy 2013!

For Christmas and New Years it was a relaxing and uneventful (Muslim community, remember?) but I enjoyed it none the less. I've been hard at work on a world map in my community and have just finished the painting portion of it (leaving the labeling). It's been a fun 2 weeks and the children in my village really seemed to enjoy helping me paint.
I also had to go down to the capital of Ghana (Accra) for my mid-service medical checkup. The results say I'm healthy and happy, so sleep peacefully Mom.

So a new year and some new projects planned:
1. More soak away pits
2. Start a women's group making a moringa nursery which will eventually lead to two things: better nutrition for family cooking and extra income for selling the extra seeds/leaves of the moringa tree.
3. TBD

Also the world map is coming along quite well!

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.