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.