Whats Up

My current mission is meeting all the communities in my area to see who wants to learn about keeping bees, growing moringa, taking better care of their livestock, and if anyone is interested in starting a tree nursery of any sort. I am using a new counterpart to do these meetings. His name is Jaba. He is from Bosotwi. He agreed to help me meet the communities so I came up with the plan of what the message of the meetings would be and went to see him. Bosotwi is not a community that I will ride to on my bike. First of all I would be extremely tired because it is up a really long big hill and secondly the cars go really fast down that hill and don’t slow down til the end. I have never tried to ride on that part of the road because I think it would not be safe and would be pretty scary. Not taking my bike means when I finish what I am doing there, there is sometimes long time standing by the road waiting for a car back home. I went to meet Jaba to tell him about the plan for our meeting and make sure he was free that week. When I arrived it seemed that they were doing the end of a funeral, it was Monday though so I knew all the big days were over. I told Jaba the basic message we would give the communities and he said since there were a lot of people already gathered we could start our work that very day by asking permission to give our message when they were done with what was currently going on. The funeral was over but what was going on was a family discussion/judiciary hearing/idk what to call it. There was a mother who had insulted her son in a fight by saying that he was not her son. The village elders, the mom, dad, son, son’s friends, mom’s friends, and people im not sure how to identify were all gathered around. Each side made their case and then everybody started arguing and shouting. There was a moment when the son stood up and was shouting, the mom answered by standing up and taking off her flip flop as if she was going to hit him with it. At this point I asked Jaba if they were going to fight and he said No, that they were human beings and know how to control their tempers. The shoe coming off was the climax of the fight but it was interesting to see old ladies and twenty year old boys yelling at each other, with everyone else yelling at them too... Not something I have ever seen in North Carolina. Following this heated discussion was very odd for me, but it was the largest turnout of people I had ever seen in Bosotwi so I went with it. I told them simply that I was running out of time for people to work with me, and gave them the four suggestions of what we could do. Three people saw me after saying that they wanted to do moringa. One came and said he wanted to do a poultry farm. As we were discussing how to proceed, it was decided I would come back on Friday and we would have two meetings for these two topics. I came back on Friday and no one came for chickens, but the moringa meeting went really well. I am really excited for this moringa project. The farmers can sell the seeds to a buyer from Accra, and they can eat the leaves for numerous nutritional properties. A lot of farmers hesitate when planting new things, because they have tried it before and the buyer never comes to buy what they told the farmers to plant. This situation with moringa is different. They will definitely be around for at least the next four years. The guy will come to meet and train my farmers too which is awesome. They will make more money in their first year with moringa than they do planting maize. That amount will more than double in the second year. They don’t have to use any fertilizer or buy inputs for the farm. It’s the greatest project everrrrr!

This may be way too much and not too exciting to read but you guys wonder whats going on with me so there you go. The planting of moringa should be done in about two weeks so the next two week are going to be devoted to meeting as many communities as I can. Which is not as easy as it sounds. Most of the time they only have one day a week that is good for meetings, based on their market days, and that day is the same for everyone. So at least Ill be busy.