Two Years

Today is the two year mark from when I joined the Peace Corps. It is crazy to think back of all the ups and downs that have happened during this journey. I can think back to different time periods of my service. The beginning I was so positive, seeing sunshine and rainbows. I integrated really well into the community. I visited people all the time and put myself out there trying to get to know the community members. Then came my excitement to start projects time, full of ideas and expectations. Then came the disappointment period, project failures and people lying to my face who I had thought were my favorite people in the village. The constant laughing at my expense started to wear on me. Then was my miserable period, questioning why I was here and if anyone in the village actually cared if I stayed. Then I visited home and was reminded that I have loving family and friends, with a lot of support for me. Following my return to Ghana was my depression time and unhappiness with people shouting at me all the time. There is a blurred line between this time period and the numbness period. The numbness came from living with a dull spirit, lowered expectations but still making a huge effort to try and accomplish something. Then came the beekeeping group time! My one functional group, started from the ground up, given total ownership over themselves, my pride and joy. Just having one project finally go right really boosted my morale and gave me something to do. That time period has come to a close, and now I am in the not much to do but also trying to make sure I don’t forget anything that I want to do before I leave. I leave the village in 37 days. I want to get pictures of me with my favorite people, print them, and give them a copy. When I think about who these people are though it adds up to over a hundred people…it’s a daunting project. It is also rainy season which makes the weather great right now but makes it hard to do things in the afternoon. I hope I can get it all done in time. I will leave too soon.

So...two long years.

 Two years of heat.

Two years of sweating.

Two years of bug bites.

Two years of no electricity.

Two years of squatting.

Two years of stooping.

Two years of body aches.

Two years of noise.

Two years of anti-malarial medication.

Two years of instant coffee.

Two years of seeing my little sister poop in the yard.

Two years of having a phone doctor.

Two years of freedom.

Two years of time.

Two years of no craft beer.

Two years of no hugs.

Two years of being itchy.

Two years of dirty feet.

Two years of fufu.

Two years of spicy hot food.

Two years of bad smells.

Two years of no new music.

Two years of being the minority.

Two years of being looked at.

Two years of eating with my hands.

Two years of sunshine.

Two years of funny children.

Two years of effort.

Two years of challenge.

Two years of the little things that count.

Two years.

In other news I am really disgusted with my morning oatmeal these days. First I bought a bag and it had obviously been stored next to mothballs. It smelled, and tasted of moth balls. It was all I had for breakfast though and tried to drown it out with cinnamon to no avail. I was committed enough to air it out with several bowls and it actually lost the smell and flavor by the time I reached the end of the bag. Yay! But then I bought another bag from a different place. When I opened it and poured it into a ziplock bag a lot of the oats stuck to the sides of the bag because of something that looked like spiderwebs. I threw those away but seriously these gross spiderweb things are all up in my oatmeal and it is all I have for breakfast until I go to town again and so this morning I tried to pick them all out and eat the oats that don’t have that on them. Ghana has really taught me how disgusting I can be in terms of what I eat. Maybe this is a sign I should switch off the oats for a while…

Ok lastly I want to elaborate on something I posted as a facebook status. Pregnancy in the village. So many women have been pregnant since I've been here. This isn't like the million people in my news feed posting pictures of babies and baby bumps. This is different from back home. The people I went to high school or college with posting pictures of babies is not shocking because they are at a point in their lives where it is normal to be doing that. Those pictures make me feel like I’m in the minority, because I am nowhere near ready to have children, nor do I even have a boyfriend. People are posting pictures showing clever pregnancy announcements with their faces shining brightly with anticipation for this next part of their lives. They’re posting pictures of their baby bump, showing it off with their hand tenderly placed on the womb. Now here’s the contrast: Women in the village do not plan their pregnancies. I have seen 17 year olds bring forth and I’ve seen old ladies nursing. Getting pregnant is just a part of life here, for a woman. So many babies have been born in the village since I’ve been here. I keep seeing more new pregnant women. It is shocking to me. They don’t use any type of birth control. They don’t tell anyone when they are pregnant. They wear their clothes differently and some can even hide the fact that they are pregnant up to the time they give birth. I am pretty sure my host mom is pregnant right now and my feelings are a little bit hurt she hasn’t told me. That is where I can see our cultures colliding. I don’t know the appropriate way to ask. What makes me wonder even more is that her husband had said that three children was enough for him, when I asked him a long time ago if they wanted to have more. (At that long time ago She had said that adding a boy would be nice). I guess the shocking thing is the short time that I have been here and how many of my friends and neighbors have been pregnant, old and young. They can’t even go two years without having a baby. Is that what it means to be a woman in Ghana? I just can’t imagine going through life getting pregnant all the time with no second thoughts. It seems as though they don’t even have control over their own bodies. I don’t mean to sound like its bad to get pregnant. They see every baby as a blessing and probably like getting pregnant. I am just blown away by the lack of planned pregnancies. And I’m writing this to try and capture the moment when it really hit me. You can read that people here get pregnant at inconvenient times in their lives and don’t plan their babies, but you don’t fully realize the extent of it until you see it yourself. At least I didn’t. 

I am now back in the village for the final stretch of my Peace Corps existence. Our COS conference was weird. I thought it would be more helpful with preparing us to get jobs. Guess I'm on my own for that.
What was fun was going to hike Wli falls after the conference.  Almost everyone from our group went. It was a six hour long hike and was really hard for me because I have not been doing a lot of steep hiking.

Now that I'm back at site it's a bit melancholy. I don't have much to do but its weird to think that I will be leaving so soon. I am trying to look around me and figure out what I have gained from this experience.

A Low Cost Vacation

The Peace Corps benefit of twenty four vacation days a year is really nice. If you have money, you can venture away from volunteer life and do something fun. I've seen other volunteers take vacation days to go to Spain, Italy, Morocco, South Africa, and Tanzania. Those of us who came home for Christmas used our vacation days to visit the U.S. A lot of people use vacation days when people from home come to visit. These vacation days accrue throughout service, and after our close-of-service (COS) conference we are no longer allowed to use them. My group's COS conference is coming up soon, which prompted me to use up all my remaining vacation days while I still could. I wanted to go to the beach, but I had no money and no one to accompany me. The inflation in Ghana now has me scraping by right before we get paid each month. I needed a vacation that would pretty much be free, so I came to stay at our house/suboffice. The suboffice is like a luxurious palace compared with my village life. It has wifi. It has showers with great water pressure. It has a real kitchen. It has electricity, which means fans and the ability to stay up past eight. Best of all it has other volunteers constantly passing through and staying there. It is used for volunteers to have a place to stay when necessary, and a place for them to have meetings and do work. Everyone passing through laughs when I tell them I'm taking vacation here (I mean, I laugh too) but honestly this has been a great vacation. I've seen a lot of my favorite people and had many laughs. This vacation couldn't have come at a better time either, my home life was getting a little weird before I left. I don't know if I was imagining it but it felt like my host family was not happy with me. It could just be that they are so busy we don't communicate well. The mom is always stressed out trying to keep the provisions store well stocked, and cook the family dinner. She is always yelling at the kids. She always cooks late, which is terribly inconvenient for a place that does not have electricity. Maybe the problem started this one night when she was cooking really late. It was about nine oclock and I was tired of waiting for dinner to be ready. I wanted to go to sleep. So I told them I was going to bed. She said "OH! No won't you eat? It is almost nearing to finish." I said it was okay I would just sleep. She said "Oh! Can you sleep like that? With no chop?" and I was like like "Yeah" and went to bed. I was hungry but it was so late. The next morning she made me eat the dinner leftover for breakfast. Maybe that offended her and caused some weirdness in the house, I don't know. What I do know is that the day before I left for vacation they harvested ALL the avocados from the tree in our yard, and she did not give me a single one. This may make me sound petty but you have to understand that Ghanaians, when they have an abundance of something, they ALWAYS give you some. They always offer to give you some and many times when you say no thanks they still force you to take some. The whole time I have lived with this family, when they harvest something they automatically bring me some of whatever it is. I was totally eyeing the avocados, she knows I love them, and she didn't offer any to me. That is why I think something was wrong. I eat her dinner that she cooks every night. Sometimes I feel bad because I am hungry and thinking thoughts like, "Where is my food? Why did they start cooking so late? Ughhh" when maybe I should just be grateful to have someone feeding me. When I came back from Tamale I told her I wanted to eat with them again she said she liked that better, but sometimes I feel bad like I am putting a burden on them. Ghanaians often say things to your face that they don't mean so I don't know if she really likes it or not. I know she tries to cook things that I like. She started cooking palm nut soup more often when I started talking about how much I liked it. I just don't know if it puts additional stress on her. Either way, when I go back I've decided to cook dinner for myself again. Not because of what I was just mentioning but because the Ghanaian diet seven days a week is not a healthy one. The second thing that happened where I felt hostility was with my host dad. I was working to get a truck driver to deliver the finished beehives. The original guy was trying to charge more than he had first estimated, so I asked John if he knew anyone that could do it. He knew a guy and arranged for him to come and do the job for a cheaper price. He said the driver would come, but on the day he never came. Again the next day he did not show up. Then I just went back to the first driver and begged him to reduce the price. The same day as I was delivering the hives, there were white people coming to visit our village and see where their donated money was going. It was a really big ordeal and everyone was in motion, getting ready to pretend like they cared and that they were trying their best. I specifically did not want to meet the white people, because they give the village free stuff which makes it hard to do Peace Corps work. I went out to deliver the hives. When I was finished with my work that day and got back to the house, I asked John how the white people's visit went. He said "It was fine. The driver was very sick. Very sick oh when you see him it is not good at all." I asked if he was vomiting and John didn't really answer or continue conversing so I left it at that. I didn't really care about what happened with the white people, I was trying to make conversation. The next day, or maybe two after that, John brought up how the truck driver who never showed up to deliver the bee hives for me was so sick.I said, "Oh no! Really? Sorry for him...I didn't know." and John said "I told you the other day" which really confused me, and John followed with "You were standing right there. I don't know if you weren't listening or what." and I just said sorry but I honestly did not remember him telling me about the truck driver. It was only the next day that I made the connection and remembered. But he didn't make it very clear when he told me. The tone of his voice when he said maybe I just wasn't listening was a very "I'm done with you, you suck" kind of tone.

Okay Sorry that was probably too much information but for those of you who really cared enough to read all of that, you understand where I am at right now. My house is not a happy place for me to be, and the two people closest to me seem to be annoyed with me and ready for me to leave.

On the work related front: my beekeeping group now has all the beekeeping equipment and they have hives in the forest! They are trained on how to monitor the bees and take care of the hive. Some of the first hives they put out are colonized. There are other people interested in joining the group. The group is going to start a savings account at the local microfinance bank. They are doing super well! They have room for improvement of course, but I am really proud of what they have accomplished. It is hard to work with people in my area because they just want things to be done for them, or given to them. I am glad that I kept true to my philosophy of meeting them only halfway, because I can see that they have more ownership over this group. They are doing it their way, and it is going well. I have high hopes that the group will not dissipate after my departure, but in order to improve the functionality of the group a bit more I have requested that the PC sends another volunteer when I leave. I am wrapping everything up and taking these last couple months to just spend time with the host country nationals that I care about. I think it'll be a good next couple of months.

Been Busy and Kickin It

For once in my Peace Corps experience I have actually been really busy the past month or two. In June I went up to the Northern Region of Ghana, to Tamale. The Northern Region is very different from where I live, in the Eastern Region. First of all it is a dry savannah climate, which is completely brown during the dry season. Secondly there are a lot fewer trotros driving around and more motos. The people in the north have a lot more animals: cows, sheep, goats. They have guinea fowl and donkeys, which you do not see in the south. The people seem to be calmer in the north, with less yelling at each other and white people. I’ve been told that the northerners are more likely to pull a knife in a fight though, and there have been shootings in the north. In the north when a storm is rolling in you see the sky turn orange, followed by dust blowing around in the air, getting in your eyes, nose and mouth if you open it. It only stormed twice while I was up there but I thought it was fascinating. I was up there for about two weeks and thoroughly enjoyed my time with fellow volunteers I hadn’t seen in a long time, watching the world cup, and cheering the Germans on as they won their games. The reason I was in the north was that we had a PCV Media Committee work session/training of new people. It was a lot of work but it was also a good time. All in all I was gone for about two weeks.

When I came back to site it was truly wonderful to come home. During my Peace Corps service I have had a lot of ups and downs, but coming back from Tamale has put me in an up that hasn’t gone away. Also while I was in Tamale my grant money came so I have been really busy getting everything for my beekeeping grant, but that is not the single cause of my happy state. Being away and coming back made me realize how at home I feel here with my Krobo family. Everyone knows me in the places I go, everyone is happy to see me every day, and although they do shout a lot and are very loud, I finally appreciate that they are so loud because that is the way that they are, and if no one ever shouted at me then it would mean that no one loved me here. All of the things that were annoying to me before became less annoying because they were sounds of home.

I have been enjoying my time, working on the beekeeping grant, playing with my little sisters, and doing my thing. I have finished getting all the equipment for the beekeeping group so now all that is left is training them and waiting until harvest time! I will not be around for harvest time which is unfortunate but I think they will send another volunteer here to help the group out. My mushroom farmers are doing really great. They are selling their mushrooms within the village, and also have talked to a restaurant about supplying them with mushrooms. I am working with them to get a sign outside the production site, and they said they want the sign to say “Nancy’s mushroom farm”. I really don’t want to take credit for it, I wish that they would have 100% ownership of the project. They explained it to me that they couldn’t agree on a combination of their two names but they could agree on my name. I guess I’ll let them do what they want. I will have definitely left my mark on the area then haha.

On a less happy but more cultural note, the third person that I personally knew and interacted with in the area died last month. His name was Tehteh. He was at my house joking around with me and asking me questions about America only a month before he died. He was making me laugh that day so I took a picture of him. Now he is gone. When I asked people what was wrong with him they just said Saturday he had complained that he didn’t feel well and then by Monday as they were on the way to the hospital he died in the car. That’s public transportation by the way. It’s scary to think of someone dying in the trotro…how traumatic. I kept trying to ask people what was wrong with him so that perhaps some prevention education could be done with the community. His friend said that when he went to visit him he was delirious. He had visited the local clinic and they didn’t know what was wrong, one of the nurses told me he suspected Pneumonia. At the funeral itself another story came out. It is widely believed by the people who knew him that his was a spiritual death. The story is that his wife owed someone some money. That person was not getting the money from the wife so they went to a juju man, aka fetish priest (I guess you could call it voodoo but idk if they are different), they wanted to do something to the wife since she wouldn’t pay the money. This juju guy is a guy whom everyone knows that lives among us. I actually don’t know who he is but apparently he has friends like any other normal person around here. The husband, my friend Tehteh, heard about this juju visit and also went to the juju man to try and convince him not to hurt his wife. So instead the juju hurt him. They say he was crossing the bridge next to his house and he felt something (invisible) hit his side, and that was when the illness started. This is the accepted cause of death. No one will ever know or even think of trying to find out what was wrong with him because they just name it a spiritual death. There is no arguing with them either. I don’t believe in stuff like that so I see it as a problem with the way people are taking care of themselves here. People die in the village all the time. I’ve been to more funerals in my two years in Ghana than my entire life in the U.S. They could be living healthier lives but they attribute death to magic. They think of something wrong that the person did, or that their spouse did, and claim that as the cause of death. 

Rain

It started on Thursday. I was about to go out riding my bike. I noticed that the clouds looked pretty awful, so I decided to get a Ghanaian opinion of the likelihood of a downpour. As I was discussing the chance of rain with the woman at the junction who sells yam chips, I was looking at the sky and making up my mind that I wasn't going to take her advice. She said the clouds had looked like that all day yesterday and it wouldn't rain. While walking back to my house I felt the first drops of rain. It was about 11 in the morning at that time. It rained until 9 that night. It also rained the next two days. It rained so much that the river is now HUGE. It poured over into the road on the third day. Cars could still drive through it but they were hesitant. When i had to go to town I was nervous about it too, and went so far as to locate all the nearest exits in case of a bridge collapse and submerged trotro. The huge river overflowed it banks into crops nearby including cocoa trees, garden eggs, and maize. The water has also flooded my neighbor's chilli pepper farm, and my counterpart/father's cassava. Today they are uprooting all the cassava in that area. If they leave it in the ground it will spoil. What do you do with an abundance of cassava? You make gari, of course! Apparently this is about to be such a big operation that we need to build a gari "frying" (roasting) station at our house, which was also constructed today. My counterpart doesn't miss a beat when it comes to his assets.

It is unfortunate that these people have to deal with this flooding though. They are just trying to get by, farming, and doing what they can with the available land. Then the river floods. Depending on the crop, they may have spent a lot of money on fertilizer,  insecticide, fungicide,  etc.

In other news the electricity for the entire village of Boti has been shut off. That is where I used to have access to daily charging of electronics when I liked. Now their electricity has been shut off by the power company because someone tried to illegally hook up their house to the power lines. It was an "electrician" trying to do it for someone. The power company wanted the name of the electrician so they could arrest him, but no one would give it to them. So they turned the power to the entire village off. I've heard it will be one month, or six months.

Great Balls of Fire!

Here is my horror story of the day.

I went to visit the schools to make sure everything is ready to bring books. Their libraries need a little work but they are ready and excited!

The mushroom group leader's house is beside the school so I stopped to say hi. As soon as I saw him I noticed his face, neck, and arms were burned. He had recently started a baking endeavor. He built a huge oven to bake bread in, and I gave him some recipes for different types of bread. His story was this:
He was powering his oven with gas. He lit the gas and closed the door to the oven. He could hear it running so he assumed everything was going on as it should. After some time he went to check on the bread, and when he opened the door,  the flame had gone out. He lit a match to light it again.

[Edit]
I forgot to mention that when I asked him what he was putting on his wounds he said kerosene. After a visit with Google I discovered that kerosene is/was considered a cure all. It was sold as a cancer cure before chemotherapy came out. Weird!

It's been a while, etc.

I guess I just got wrapped up in the day to day and just trying to get by. After buying a phone that allows me to whatsapp my friends and family back home, my blog felt less important. I want to see it through to the end though. I feel like I owe it to people who are trying to decide whether or not to join Peace Corps. The day to day consists of trying to eat three square meals a day, listening to the children in my household scream and throw fits, a million flies in the latrine, and keeping clean and washing things. The just trying to get by included a lot of getting out of the village in order to keep my sanity. Luckily I had work to do at the offices.

The timeline went like this: April 12: All Volunteer Conference. Four days of hanging out with other volunteers and having a blast. After returning home from this I was feeling kind of depressed because of the drastic contrast, being back in the village with no friends.  May 1: Then my region held a GLOW camp for JHS girls. This camp was so fun last year. This year it was exhausting. I think the girls got a lot out of it, which is the point, but it was so exhausting for the volunteers who were running it. After returning from glow camp I was working on my garden a lot. May 14: I worked of it until sheep destroyed my snow peas. Then I was so angry…I ended up deciding the whole thing was not worth it. I had tried before to repair the fence and the sheep still got in, and when I asked people to help me they said they would and never did. I was really upset about this at the time. May 19: I went to Accra to work on my Beekeeping grant and awesome volunteers were at the office who encouraged me back to health. Now I will invest my gardening energy into riding my bicycle around and greeting people.

There is a lot of success of the project front! I wrote a beekeeping grant, it has been approved, and this week we will receive the money to start the project (As far as I know). Reaching the stage of writing a grant means that the group has had many meetings with good attendance. I have let them talk through everything they want and how they would like to do things. Finally having a functioning group feels so great. They meet every two weeks so it’s not very hard for me to prepare and keep up. Finally I am working with a group in which I am nervous because the next steps are up to me. They are all coming to the meetings, and they are all participating in discussions. It has taken me eighteen months to achieve this. I am happy to see results. The grant will give them some free hives, a smoker for harvesting, and bee suits to share. They all made one hive themselves already and are trained up to the point of putting the hives into the forest. IT IS GOING WELL J The mushroom growers are also doing very well, almost better than the bee group. They are continuing their growing operation and do not even need my help. They used all their own money to expand their business. This time they’ve bought 400 compost bags. They told me bags are scheduled to arrive the first week of June, so they should be here soon. They have done all this without me, which I suppose technically means they are doing better than the bee group, but I get a stronger feeling of accomplishment from the bee group.

There is also failure on the project front, of course. The moringa training went so well but after a couple weeks people were telling me that their seeds did not germinate and were not good. I asked the guy from Moringa Connect what could have gone wrong and he sent new seeds. By now everyone seems to have lost interest, which really is a shame because it is a lucrative business, guaranteed for at least four years, and the work involved is very simple. I tried digging a bit to figure out what went wrong and the problem was that no one listened to the directions. You are supposed to soak the seeds overnight before planting and no one did. At this point I’m not sure if I am going to try to continue and redo it or not. I have to go around and find the people individually, and the ones I have talked to so far have moved on since they thought the seeds weren't good. I feel bad because the Moringa Connect people came all the way out to train them. On the bright side though there is one farmer, my neighbor, who kept asking about the seeds and he is going through with planting them. So at least I’ll have one moringa farmer.

Enough about me, lets talk about Ghana some. As I’ve said before, there is severe inflation happening in the Ghanaian economy right now. I have recently observed that I have not observed “suffering” caused by the inflation. I have heard people complain about it and say they are suffering, but I recently began to wonder how it is affecting households. I haven’t noticed any change in the behavior of parents toward  children i.e. buying them treats from market, buying them bofrot that is passing by on someone’s head. People are still buying fish, new clothes, and everything that they were buying before. Alright I will confess that I am not the most observant person. I observe the obvious. I am really curious to ask people what changes in their finances the inflation has incurred. After talking with a local mother, although it was completely in Krobo, I gathered that before the changes they had money to buy everything they wanted every market day. Now they have to choose which thing they will buy in a limited quantity. They also have to buy a less tasty kind of fish. During our conversation she said she couldn't afford tuna anymore. She was eating tuna at the time. I just don’t know what to think.