Some Frustrations

I am happy to report that my chickens are very well behaved now. They have not pecked me in a long time. They even stopped following me around (most of the time). They look for food on their own when I let them out of their cage. They are pretty much ready to eat, but if I wait until it is closer to Christmas I can get more money for them.

I am unhappy to report that I been facing difficulties in my mushroom project. We held what was supposed to be our first official meeting and only four people came. The group consists of people from three villages, and I had appointed two people who were basically supposed to be in charge of telling everyone when we were meeting. One of the leaders didn’t get the message out, and didn’t make it to the meeting himself until we were just about finished. His contribution there at the end of the meeting was that we should hold cook the mushrooms in a bunch of Ghanaian dishes and have a tasting event for the mushrooms. We said okay and gave the job of organizing it to him. He said he would tell the queen mother and a bunch of women would come to the next meeting and cook while we were working. He is the chief of his village and we had a really good relationship before. He speaks English really well and I have visited him a lot of times. Which makes it even worse that he is dropping the ball on this project. I went to his house to talk about the low attendance problem and how we can fix it. He said what had happened was that he had to attend another meeting at that time, which is why he was so late to ours. I told him that in the future it is important to tell me if there is something going on instead of just saying yes to the meeting time suggested by the community where I live. When I asked him why no one else from the ten people who had written down their names form his village had come to the meeting he said they must have not got the message. But it was his job to make sure they knew.

So. All week long I saved and dried the mushrooms coming from the cropping house, and didn’t eat any myself. When the day of the next meeting came, the men from my community arrived and started building the cropping house that the group will collectively use. We were looking for women to come, but weren’t seeing any. So my ‘mom’ and I had to cook a random, spur of the moment meal with the mushrooms for people to taste. As the morning went on the chief and people from his community were not present so I called to see what was up and he was in another meeting. He was the one who had set the time for the cooking etc to be at 10am. The men who were building ate the food we made, and then we actually had a successful meeting, discussing how to proceed with plans and electing leaders and positions of the group. I think we concluded the meeting around 1pm. My supervisor from my partner NGO had come and helped to discuss everything and help me, and he said things had gone well and were looking up. Then 3:30 rolls around and the chief from the other community, along with everyone from the meeting that HE came from, show up at my house expecting a mushroom buffet. I really don’t know what im supposed to do at this point. I really want to just say forget him and work with the people who actually come to meetings and don’t disrespect me. Things here work in way different from home though, and im not sure how to proceed. If I disrespect the chief that would be bad, I might risk any future projects with that community. But I cannot continue having this guy waste my time. And obviously talking to him directly doesn’t get the message across.

Its definitely not an easy job. There are more obstacles in this project going on; they say they don’t know how to cook this mushroom but they have a local mushroom that they know how to cook. And they have never seen oyster mushrooms before and express disappointment/bewilderment at what they can do with this one. But no worries, life goes on.