Amoja

Just to clarify about my electricity situation...they havent made the house into a cold store yet so they have only been turning the generator on to watch football matches. The under 20 world cup was going on last week so they were turning it on every day but now the tournament has finished so they havent been watching anything, and also no power in my house. So, its occasional, not a constant thing. I didnt explain it very well. 

So about my farm…my farm looks awful right now, it is an embarrassing sight to see. It was raining a ton and I was busy doing other things, and now all of the places I had weeded are covered in weeds again. Ive decided that it is not something I can do by myself, Im gonna suck it up and ask for help. If I ask a couple guys to help me it can be done in like an hour. If I try to do it myself it will probably take two weeks. I haven’t given up though, and my carrots, watermelon, garlic, and green peppers are still alive!

Im trying to remember what I was so busy doing to neglect my farm…lets see…my mother came to visit me so there was preparation for that, there was a media training in Kumasi that I attended, a meeting for all the eastern region volunteers, building my mushroom cropping house. That doesn’t seem like much but the time is really flying by for me. Most importantly I have been hanging out with my Ghanaian family and the people in the village. I also read all the books in the Harry Potter series.

This weekend I am going to Techiman to the permiculture institute, where I will be getting bags of compost inoculated with oyster mushroom spores. The people in my area are interested in growing mushrooms, and I am interested in promoting the health benefits of eating the mushrooms. Also I am excited to eat them myself. Basically what you have to do is build a house to contain the moisture, then you put the mushroom bags inside and you water them. It seems to be pretty easy but Im going to go see in person the people who are the experts on it.

Now: Story time!

There is a certain man in my village who is one of the people who cuts down trees. First he was my friend, one of the people who would talk to me in the beginning of me living here. He speaks English fine, hes at least above 50 years old but im not sure how old. As our friendship continued I realized that he is the kind of person who likes to tease everyone and tries to push peoples buttons. I didn’t know his name for a really long time and when I asked my little sister she said his name was Amoja. The next time I saw him and called him Amoja my mother thought it was HILARIOUS. It turns out Amoja means “stop that”. The name suits him. My baby sister, the two year old, always runs away from him but I think she secretly likes him. So as I found out he was a chainsaw operator, I had several discussions with him about making sure he plants trees, and reasons why you should leave trees next to the stream.  There was a fairly large tree next to my house that he was always telling me he was going to cut down. I thought he was trying to provoke me, because I kept telling him not to cut it. When I came home the other day he had cut it down. He was very proud of this and it seemed like he was trying to make me angry by saying it was because of me that he cut it down because it was close to my house and he didn’t want it to fall on my house. He also said it was close to the well and so it was bad if leaves fell in the well so he had to cut it. I was pretty tired at that moment and he actually was making me angry, but I told him I didn’t agree with his reasons and that he needed to show me the trees he has planted to replace the ones he has been cutting down. He said he would take me on Friday. When I went out the next day to count the rings and see how old the tree was, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t very old. My mother and father both said the tree was very small when they moved here about 8 years ago. It looked so big I thought for sure it was older than that, but it turns out that type of tree is a soft type of wood that grows really fast if it has a good water supply. If I had known that before I would have been more understanding about the situation. It appears I still have a lot to learn here. I was looking around at the ruins of the tree and noticed seeds everywhere, so I collected some so that Amoja and I can plant some together. Instead of being the irritated tree hugger I am, I will use him to create chainsaw operators who make sure that the tree populations are being replenished. Also I actually need wood to build my fence for my garden so he thought that was pretty funny when I asked him for some. He said he wouldn’t give me some because I didn’t want him to cut down the tree.

heres a picture of the cut down tree, im looking for the before picture