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.