I've Ghana to Ghana

Day #3- It’s finished! (and I mean that in a good way)

It was lights out for a couple of days, so this is a bit delayed, but regardless…. We have SOAP!!  At least it appears to be soap.  I haven’t used it yet though.  Because of the caustic soda, you have to wait two weeks before using it, so I won’t be testing it out until then.  The soap came out a little more crumbly than I think it was supposed to be, but I checked one of those DIY soap making forum websites, and it looks like it might be because I didn’t stir it long enough.  http://www.millersoap.com/trouble.html (The “soap is soft and crumbly” part)

I went to Bolgatanga, the regional capital, this past week to buy the moringa powder since the trees here don’t have leaves yet.  One of the staff at the NGO I work with here said I could buy it from a woman that has a stand outside of the MoFA office (Ministry of Food and Agriculture).  So I made the trip down to Bolga, wandered around in the scorching heat until I found the ministries offices, then wandered around some more until I found the MoFA office.  And sure enough, sitting next to the gate there was a woman with a table.  I asked her about moringa, and she said, “it’s finished”.  Which is the typical response because things are always out right when you need them, and they sometimes say this when they just didn’t understand what you asked for.  In case it was the latter, I just stood there for a bit looking bummed out.  She then found someone that spoke English and told me that she had moringa seeds, but not the moringa powder.  I bought some seeds for the nursery (they grow RIDICULOUSLY fast), and then she took off on her bicycle and said nothing more than, “you wait.”  So I just sat down on a bench and waited for her… I had no idea where she went, when she would come back.  But in half an hour, she did come back- with a bicycle basket stuffed with fresh moringa leaves.  We then spent the next half an hour “plucking” the moringa leaves off the stems.  I am now attempting to dry them in a bucket in my room.  After they are dried, I’ll crush them in a bag or with a mortar and pistol.  If it takes this much work to get every ingredient, I’m a little worried about project sustainability.  But things like this are typical of Ghana.  And the women should be able to get it from their own trees next time. 

Soap: The important part

So here’s where the moringa-and-shea-soap-making magic happens.  I waited until the evening to do this, because, well, it’s been effing hot here and making it demands that I go into the kitchen with the stove on, which is even more effing hot.  I now have all of the material, including having the caustic soda already mixed with water and left overnight.  The rest of the materials: shea butter and palm oil.  When I make the soap with the groups, I’ll be including dried moringa and perfume, but I still haven’t figured out how to get those yet, so we’re just making a very basic soap for now.  However, I did include the fancy ingredients (moringa and perfume) in the directions for future use. 

Soap science- it’s just lye (caustic soda and water) mixed… usually using heat… with an oil or fat.  And then you can add fancy stuff.  So this evening, I started with the oil-part of the soap. 

1.       I took out the two bags (2 cedis worth, or ~1USD) of palm oil I had bought.  I measured four cups, and poured it into a metal pot.  It turns out that I only had three cups, so I replaced it with an extra cup of shea butter.  (The most important ratio is the one of caustic soda, water, and oil, so you have some freedom with the oils you use.)

Debrief= 3 cups palm oil —> metal pot

2.       The shea butter I had bought was more than enough, and I again measured out four + one cups of butter into the same metal pot.  I thought the shea butter would be difficult to get into the cup, but if you squish it down, I think it was actually pretty accurate. 

Debrief= 5 cups shea butter —> same metal pot

3.       Then I put it on the stove and stirred with a wooden spoon just long enough for all of the shea butter to melt.  I haven’t read anywhere about it having to boil, but I have read on some specialty-do-it-yourself soap making sites that the temperature does matter, so maybe this is something to play with at a later date.  Once it was heated, I poured the oil back into a plastic bucket.  It was sort of tempting, but don’t just pour it straight into the bucket that’s been sitting with the caustic soda in it overnight.  You’ll need a different bucket.  The caustic soda is still sitting in the corner your room you left it in.

Debreif= Heat the butter and oil until smooth.  Pour into plastic bucket #2.

4.       Ghost step for this round of soap making [it’s subset because I didn’t actually do it this time, but will for future times].  At this point, you would add perfume.  As the resource person said during our training, “you add it to taste”.   It looked like maybe around three cups of perfume for a large batch of soap.  You would also add the moringa powder here (either buy the powder, or just pick the leaves, dry them, and mash them with the pistol and mortar- the women will know how to do this).  Emily, another PCV a year ahead of me, said that the women put it in the oil and then sieve it out (option A).  But the soap expert at the shea conference said that you can leave it in and the powdered leaves will be a good exfoliator (option B).

5.       So at this point, you have Bucket #1 with water and caustic soda (in soap-jargon this is the lye), and in Bucket #2, you have shea/palm oil (and if you’re classy, it has moringa and perfume in it).  Pour Bucket #1 into Bucket #2, and stir with a wooden spoon.  It’s important that Bucket #2 be plastic because caustic soda and metal is a no go.  And wear your rubber gloves whenever you’re dealing with the caustic soda, and ideally eyewear (and by that I’m referring to plastic safety goggles, but in my case, I wore my ren bens, ray bows… ray bans?…). 

6.       For my first trial, I literally stirred for about a minute until it became the consistency I remembered seeing in training.  Because I used shea butter instead of two oils that are liquid at room temperature (you can substitute coconut oil for shea), I was a little worried that it would start to harden in the plastic bucket I was stirring it in, so within about a minute of stirring, I poured it into the basin I’m going to let it sit in. 

a.       Debrief= Pour bucket #1 into Bucket #2, stir, and pour into where you will let it sit. 

7.       I’m putting it in a bucket for now, but it should be in a wooden box (more like just a wood frame set on a sheet of plastic), and I’ll report back tomorrow.

Soap-a-Dope Day #2

When I first go to site, I was apalled at the lack of handwashing.  Global handwashing day was October 15th, and I read up a bit.  According to one observational study, about 3% of Ghanaians wash their hands with water AND soap.  There’s a lot of rinsing of the hands, but not much with soap.  I went to a few of the schools with a nurse from the clinic and we built tippy-taps and I taught the students a song.  A lot of the students now know me by this song, and though it was seven months ago, yesterday when I was at the nursery, the kids started singing it, “wash, wash, wash your  hands….” (to the tune of row your boat).  So that was a little feel-good moment and even more of a legitimization for this project (the focus of this grant is actually workforce development).  Here’s the rest of the song for your enjoyment, followed by some soap progress. 

“Wash, wash, wash your hands

Wash the germs away

rub and scrub and rub and scrub

the germs will go away”

The caustic soda has dissolved!  Well, just about.  And some sort of winged bug landed, and died, in the water, so I’ll be scooping that out with a plastic cup soon… and you thought I wouldn’t talk about quality control.  The soap expert at the shea conference told me that I didn’t need to leave the caustic soda sit overnight, but I remember them saying that we needed to both times we learned during training, and the soap expert also said it wouldn’t hurt if I did, so I decided that it was a good idea to leave it overnight anyway.  I don’t remember if I was supposed to stir the liquid periodically or not, so I didn’t, but I did slowly swish  the bucket around maybe three times total. I don’t think this did anything.

Side note- do not put the caustic soda in a metal bucket. It corrodes metal, not plastic. The metal part of the scissors I used to open the bag with appear to have clear blisters on them. 

I’m off to the regional capital, Bolgatanga, to buy more supplies for the project, so I’ll be making the soap this evening.

Moringa Soap Making… Day 1

For all you dirty people out there, specifically peace corps volunteers, I’ve decided to share the steps, stages, and screw-ups of the moringa soap making grant I’ll be working on these next few months.  This is the first month of implementation for the SPA grant (Small Projects Assistance Grant from Peace Corps) I received on behalf of my community.  And to remember my experience with it, I’m going to journal it as I go along.  More for my benefit than yours, but maybe a peace corps volunteer will find this helpful in the future, as I have with a few blogs from returned PCVs.  Today, I am going to test out a small batch of soap. 

But first a quick note on where to get some of the materials:

1.       Receipt book- any stationary shop (1 cedi/50 receipts)

2.       Caustic soda- in Bolga new market, there is a shop that sells the 25 kilo bags (55 cedi/bag), this shop is kind of a distributor looking store, so look for those and they might be able to tell you where to find the soap

3.       Plastic sheets- anyone that sells the plastic bags they use in the market will have them

4.       Moringa (http://www.moringa.com/)- I have yet to acquire this for the soap making, but since this is the community contribution part of the grant, we’ll cross that bridge later.  There should be somewhere in the regional capital that sells it dried, but I don’t even know where to start looking for it.  During the dry season, the moringa trees are bare of leaves, but the rainy season is just starting up and leaves are starting to show up on them.  So someone from each of the groups will be able to bring the moringa. 

5.       Perfume- I don’t know where to get this.  Apparently it isn’t good (at least a soap expert told me she wasn’t sure if it would work) to just buy a bottle of spray on perfume and put some of it in.  I need to find a bottle of fragrance, not perfume, as I was planning on doing.  And I want to find it in Bolga, the region the grant will be implemented, so that the women can actually get ALL of the material on their own (sustainability) and to keep the increased economic activity local (because that’s what macroeconomics tells me to do).     

Trial #1- Day 1

The first step of soap is making the lye.  This is the ingredient that cleans you, so it’s pretty important.  There are a few ways to make it, but the one I’m using is caustic soda and water.  As for the “parts per batch” directions I’ve found online, the standard seems to be one part caustic soda to one part water.  Since I’m doing a tester batch, I’m just using a one-cup measuring cup as a “part”.  (I haven’t been able to find soap making directions that use actual measurements instead of parts, but I’m assuming that’s because it isn’t really necessary to know the amounts.)  So after prying open the bag of caustic soda (it’s looks like large white sand and TRIPLE bagged in one of those woven plastic bag I’ve seen people transport corn in), I added the caustic soda TO THE four cups of water.  As they say online and random soap making blogs, it is very important to add the caustic soda to the water, instead of the other way around.  And I’ll leave it in a plastic bucket, uncovered, in my room overnight (I sleep outside, and I’m afraid that if I put it somewhere else, a kid will get curious, and well…).  I used rubber gloves (they sell red ones at paint stores) and wore my sunglasses.  I’m still left with a few questions- is it bad to inhale caustic soda as it mixes with water?  And do I need to somehow seal the bag of dry caustic soda for it to last until I start making soap with the groups?  These will be left TBD and I’ll let you know if my eyes are burning in the morning. 

Here’s a little tid-bit on the caustic soda, just to keep in mind:

“Caustic soda solution is highly toxic by ingestion and may cause severe burns of the mouth, throat, and stomach even with short exposure. Inhalation of caustic soda as a dust, mist, or aerosol may cause respiratory irritation that can develop into serious lung injury depending on the degree of exposure. Eye contact with caustic soda mist or solution usually results in immediate pain and can cause permanent eye damage including blindness. Skin contact may result in irritation, which may not be immediately painful.”

Source: http://www.ggc.com/uploads/100041_pss/100312.pdf

And then future planning for actual trainings- I’ll tell the groups this coming week that they need to figure out who will bring a pot, firewood, and moringa to the soap training the following week.  I’m just going to plan on doing the training after/before one of their VSLA meetings.  All of the groups that I’m doing the soap making with are participating in VSLA and have had at least two weeks of training on it, so they’re getting used to meeting more often, and honestly, I want to show them that making soap isn’t a huge and time-consuming process.

I’ve ghana to ghana, and then I was IN BenIN, but, of course, first had TO GO to Togo

Too far? =]

Bonjour!  Jem Benin!  I usually write about Ghana, but now I want to talk your ear off… write your eyes out?… about Benin and my little experience in Francophone Africa.  For those of you who don’t know, I attended the Global Shea Conference in Contonou, the economic capital of Benin late last month.  It was an amazing trip on so many levels.  First and foremost, I got to see, not one, but TWO new countries!  We drove to Contonou from Accra, so we went through Togo, all 60 minutes of it.  The road bordered the beach, so it wasn’t much more than water, boats, and a cement plant.  Granted, it was a very nice beach, and a very large fleet, but I didn’t get the chance to do much exploring, so my discussion on this country will be kept to that.  So on to Benin:  The majority of my time there was spent at the Global Shea Conference in Contonou.  PCVs from pretty much all of the countries in West Africa were invited to come and participate and volunteer.  I’ll talk about the actual conference in my next post.  But more about Benin.  There were quite a few novelties to speak of- instead of yelling out, “obruni, good afternoon” (you get the later part only if you’re lucky) they give you a cute little, “bonjour”.  It’s seriously darling.  And another novelty, we got to ride motos there!  (With a helmet of course.)  They call them “zims”.  We can’t ride them in Ghana—it’s fairly unnecessary—but in Benin it’s the only option, so zims it is.  And even another novelty- amazing food!  The British are unfortunately not known for their fine cuisine, so a big thanks to the French… French bread with breakfast, actual milk with coffee, COFFEE, chocolate croissants, and (thanks to the Lebanese) shawarmas.  We stayed in the nicest part of the Contonou (Hai-vive), and the conference hotel was in that area as well, so take this with a grain of salt, but the Beninese people seemed a lot more chill than they are in Accra and the city felt more relaxing.  Barely anyone was harassing us, there was less trash everywhere, seemingly less traffic, most of the buildings were finished instead of being dangerous construction sites, and the music was more subdued than you would ever find in a public place in Ghana.  It was great!  The trinket salesmen at the nicer restaurants are a bit more persistant, though.  They put the crafts literally on the table you are sitting at.  I bought a little frog from a guy that had emmigrated from Niger. 

We also got to spend the week with volunteers from other countries; Benin, Togo, Guinea, and Mali (however, Mali was recently evacuated, so these were volunteers in transition).  The Benin volunteers were super helpful in showing us around, and more specifically straight to happy hour and bon pasture.  (Did I mention Benin has different beer than Ghana?  I don’t drink much or often at all here, but the four-beer selection here does get a little old.)  It was great hearing about the other volunteers’ experiences at site.  They don’t seem that much different.  Similar projects, counterparts, latrines…. although—I don’t know the numbers at all—but I think the majority of volunteers have less electricity and worse roads to site (and I’m saying this after not having electricity at site literally the entire last week, and to get here, I had to take a 13 hour bus ride + 3 hour tro-tro ride + 1 hour taxi ride), so I can/can’t imagine dealing with worse. 

Alas, I’m now back at site (I liked Benin a lot, but it is nice to come back and have more familiarity).  And a little vacation time was apparently just what I needed.  This week, both the secretary at the NGO and my shea counterpart, separately, commented that I have come back ”looking refreshed”.  A comment I’ve never heard from a Ghanaian before.  And when I asked why, they both just shrugged.  So even they could tell I enjoyed Benin.

I’m Coming Home!

I’m coming home!!!!  Yayy!!!!  …………………………………………………   Ohk, so I miss American culture a bit right now, and that was my weak attempt at partaking in April Fool’s Day.  I’m not coming home, well not for the next year and a half at least…  

When some of the older kids come over, they ask me for pictures of America (I brought them out one time a while ago, and the news spread like wildfire).  Usually it’s the younger kids and they just look through and point at all the solemias (word for white person/foreigner), but these were older girls so they were asking questions and everything.  They were particularly excited about a picture of a cake my parents got before I left for here.  They immediately knew it was food, but their relative excitement over this compared to all of the other pictures surprised me.  I even had a picture of shamu!  Even though it was nice to show them pictures of a different place, that combined with my skipping church right now, (there’s usually about 500 people there, but today there is only one mass for Palm Sunday so it will be twice as many, standing room only, there’s one fan, and it will be well over 100 degrees by 10am…) has left me feeling guilty.  I’m thankful for being born in America, and it’s probably a good idea not to think about the things I cannot change, but it still prods at me sometimes.  So I guess I’ll just be thankful that I was born in America, thankful that there were so many things I didn’t have to work for growing up, and leave it at that. 

I’m watching Wall-E right now, with the kids from another compound nearby, and my love for Disney movies has expanded to a whole new level.  They pretty much defined my childhood, so it was pretty strong to begin with, but the fact that I’m sitting here with four kids that I can barely even communicate with (no matter how good my Fra-Fra gets, the language is a tonal, and my voice is so different that they just assume I’m speaking English that they don’t understand), and we’re all actually enjoying this movie for completely different reasons is astonishing.  The mix of subtleties and undertones for my enjoyment, and the basic cross-cutting humor for the kids, is pure creative genius.  The kids are glued to it, and they don’t even know what the things in it are- a robot and a spaceship… but some of the things in this movie they probably understand better than I do… the importance of new life (that little plant the new robot finds) and the pilfering of toys from things that have been tossed out.  It seems like everything is coming up trash lately (and I mean that positively), but I’ll be explaining that in my next post J 

Recently, I’ve been pretty busy at site.  Holding productive meetings, teaching, grant writing, paper writing, training holding, tree planting, material gathering… God willing, you get the picture.  It makes me feel good about having come here.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve been working hard at thinking one step at a time for all of my projects, and that’s going rather well.  It’s what the NGO needs, and it’s the only way that I’ll actually be able to achieve something without giving up and wallowing in the foreboding helplessness.  It’s a nice step up from thinking and living one day at a time at least.  However, now that I have something to focus on, I’m surprised how easily I’ll forget where I am.  And by ‘where’ I mean culturally and socially- it’s hot as hell but I think I have yet to be completely delirious.   

At the nursery site, we have started to plant trees (yay!), but on the big picture, it still isn’t going well.  The NGO has the resources and the knowledge to do it all themselves, but just hasn’t gotten it together.  They want me to manage it, which is a bad idea for a few reasons, it’s unsustainable, doesn’t build anyone’s ‘doing’ capacity, the existing resources are from funding they already had before I got here, and I don’t know the local resources (and none of them seem to be getting through no matter how many times I explain them), and on top of that, the farmers just want to grow trees on their own.  It’s been frustrating and has led me to focus on other projects.  But regardless, the two women that have been assigned to work on the tree nursery come every day and expect me to as well.  Tree planting or not, at least I’m sort of helping the NGO create and sustain jobs.  So as I’m thinking about all of this—while simultaneously focusing on one step at a time—I was forced to realize I had forgotten ‘where’ I was by a work story that came out of left field…   

It was 10am on a Wednesday and I’m riding my bike through the dirt, dust, and sand that constitutes the path between the Junior High School, the Secondary School, and finally the main road.  I had just finished teaching about digestion in animals.  And in a learning system founded upon memorization (and their big end-all-be-all test just around the corner), this tedious subject was turned excruciatingly boring.  My poor drawing of a ruminant’s alimentary canal had left my hands covered in chalk.  So much so that I end up feeling like one of those Olympian gymnasts you see powdering their hands before air-somersaulting on the rings as I grip the handlebars of my bike, and ride toward the rest of my day. 

When I get to the tree nursery, one of the women is there, Elizabeth, sitting under the shade on an upside down headpan next to a ceramic pot filled with water.  She greets me with a warm smile and wave as I put the kickstand on my bike and take a sip of the near-boiling water from my Nalgene.  She usually gets there first because she lives right near the nursery.  She also doesn’t speak a word of English, so I practice my shoddy Fra-Fra for a few minutes before we fall into the usual silence.  She’s been coming to the nursery for the past few months off and on, depending on if there is any work to be done.  The other woman, Lamissi, rides her back from a compound on the opposite side of the main road from mine and arrives shortly after.  Elizabeth has already fetched another headpan of dirt and mixed it with the rest of the dirt and compost pile under the shade.  These women are farmers, mothers, church-goers, and housekeepers.  They’re used to a physical level of work that most Americans have never experienced.

The needs of the nursery have lined up in a way I thought only capable of planets.  Starting on Monday of this week, we still needed everything- water, seeds, compost, sand, bags, a fence, a finished shade, despite having ‘started’ the nursery in November.  One of the barrels wasn’t working, and getting the guys from my compound wasn’t getting anywhere.  The first fence we are using is about four feet too short, and the fence we want to replace it with is half-buried in soil that has turned from mud into a rock in this 10% humidity.  My supervisor wants to use the compost we were using for a vegetable garden that’s still in the state of a recently cleared field.  The area has been completely depleted of usable sand from the wind, the building construction, and the bags we have already filled.  The only men in the area that know how to thatch straw for the shade roofing are nowhere to be found.  The need that was only just out of reach is the seeds.  And the most direct route to those is through Anthony, the third nursery staff.  He rides his bike from Kandiga, a village about 8km away on the long road to Bolga, where he lives and has worked on a nursery with other peace corps volunteers.  Over the weekend, I had called and asked him to come on Monday in hopes of actually planting seeds this week, but he didn’t show.  Over the weekend, the water problem had seemed to resolve itself and the women and I would move the fence.  But by the following Wednesday, these problems were still pending, so his not coming was no problem. 

But what I hadn’t expected was for him to give me an excuse for having missed a few days.  Usually excuses are limited to “I could not come” or “I did not go”.  Anthony told me he missed work because his son was sick.  About two weeks ago, his son fell ill.  He had taken him to the hospital in Bolgatanga, so it must have been serious.  “But Anthony, wasn’t that a while ago, or did he fall ill again?”  His son had been sick and wasn’t getting better.  They operated on him in the hospital in Bolgatanga, but afterward, “his body was getting bigger”.  The operation had left him with some sort of complication.  The doctor gave him medicine, but it didn’t help.  We continued to fill plastic bags with sand an compost as he told me the story—open the bag, fill handful by handful, shake it to remove air, poke holes with a rusty nail for drainage, and rest it against the other bags.  His son was in the hospital for another week, and the hospital couldn’t do anything for him, so Anthony brought him home.  People in his village, Kandiga, told him to go to the ‘traditional healer’.  Though hospitals and clinics are getting more dispersed, there is still a heavy reliance on the medicine man.  It’s exactly what I pictured while learning about Native Americans in middle school.  He uses local herbs and makes pastes of shea butter and keeps all of the knowledge a secret.  He remedies stomach pain by making incisions, like rays around the belly button that leave life-long scars, to put the paste in.  Anthony took the advice of his village, and brought his son to the traditional healer after the doctor couldn’t help him.  His son was given herbs to remedy his swollen body.  “Aha, did you take him there yesterday then?”  No, this had been over the weekend.  “The herbs, they made him better.”  Thankfully.  When someone is cured by the traditional healer, an animal must be sacrificed as a form of payment.  Depending on the illness, the healer will tell you what has to be sacrificed.  In this case, two guinea fowl and a goat had to be brought to him.  Anthony had the two guinea fowl, but had to buy the goat in the market (at no small price, they’re 40 Ghana cedis, about 26 USD).  On Sunday, he bought the goat to bring to the healer the next day, but overnight, the rope keeping the goat tied to a stake had come loose.  The goat had “got lost”.  Anthony then spent the next two days, the two days he missed, looking for it.  It’s the dry season this time of years, and because most people cannot afford to give or buy food for the animals, they roam free.  Losing an animal for a day or two is common, but the landlord has to spend time searching for it.  He found the goat after the second day, and brought it to the healer to sacrifice.  I’ve heard a lot of excuses in my life, I’ve even used a few, but THAT was an excuse I had never heard before… he couldn’t come because he was searching for the goat to give to the traditional healer to sacrifice.  My mind had been so focused on what we need to work on the tree nursery, hearing the hardship of this story put it back into perspective.

Going for the Greeeeen

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!  Tomorrow I’ll (somewhat unfortunately) be attending church and meeting with the Young Virgin’s Club instead of nursing a hangover, so I hope all of you are enjoying your irish carbombs and corned beef and cabbage.  :)

When you come accross anyone in the village (usually a person that you’ve had at least one interaction with, but not always, sometimes just a new person that wants to talk to the white person wandering around the market- and by ‘come across’ I mean anything from walking by their compound, actually crossing paths with them, or anything in between), it’s culturally appropriate to greet them. They, or you, start with (in the local language) “Good morning/ afternoon/ evening”.

Me: “Good afternoon”

Person: “How are you?”

Me: “I am fine, how are you?”

Person: “Oh, I am fine. How is your health?”

Me: “It is strong, and you?” (you can mix this one up a bit, but usually not)

Person: “It is strong, how is your house?”

and it goes on and on like this until every aspect of your life has been exhausted. The thing to note though is that the only response anyone gives to the first question is “I am fine.” You can procede with the questions and find out that someone in the family has malaria, died, or something else upsetting that you would assume would cause the person to answer with something other than “I am fine.” But no, you and they are always fine.

But anyway, to my point… I’m watching the Italian Job right now—because watching a movie is what I do when you have a bad day—and Mark Wahlberg walks up to the dad from Pride and Prejudice, the dad asks “how do you feel?”. To which Mark responds- “I’m fine.” The next step is what caught my attention. “Fine? Do you know what fine stands for? … freaked out, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.” ha! So I guess the “I am fine” response on my end is a lot more accurate than I initially thought, and I think a lot of other peace corps volunteers would agree.

Despite yesterday’s plummet, I had a big win earlier this week! Even though a lot of stuff falls through, and absolutely nothing goes how I think it will, I would like to share a bit of progress because they are so few and far between. I mentioned the local bank’s microfinance program, Credit with Education, in my last blog. And over the last two weeks, I met with each of the nine group the NGO I’ve been assigned to work with to tell them about the program and explain it to them. It’s been a great experience in finding out what the groups are looking for in a microfinance program, and there was a lot of back and forth between me and the bank. For example, the repayment period is too short for a lot of the groups (4 months total with repayment each week, I talked to the bank guys, and now they are letting the groups pay four weeks worth of payments every four weeks). And I figured out how to explain the loan to them, and a whole other set of challenges in that arena. For example, Ghana changed the currency over four years ago. But most people still don’t use the new currency, and have a really hard time converting between the two (1 cedi in the new Ghana currency is the euivalent to 10,000 old Ghana currency- both about 1.6USD). While going through a translator to explain the loan to the groups, the conversation would stop a lot when they were talking about the numbers and repayment amounts, and they would discuss what the amounts would be in the old currency and new currency.  The amounts we were talking about were very small, so I just took out what the amounts would be and the conversation was cleared up and they understood.  I did this at the first meeting, and by the fourth meeting, the translator/group facilitator, used money to do the example himself.  And now the success story- One of the groups decided that the loan meets their needs, and they came up with their own solution of how to use the individual loans in their best interest.  Each of the 15 women in one of the all women’s farmer groups will take a loan of 50 cedi (about 31USD) to buy shea nuts to be processed as a group.  AND the group initially asked me to get them a mill, but there is already a working one in the village that is maintained and owned by the NGO, AfriKids.  But I met with the AfriKids staff, and they said the women’s groups can use the mill (for a fee) to process shea, so now they are utilizing yet another resource in their own village.  The bank will have an initial meeting with the group on Tuesday, and they will start the weekly education so that the women can take out loans.  As for the other eight groups, one of the less organized ones has also requested to take loans, but the other seven have declined, so I’ll be moving forward with training the group facilitators to organize the groups as savings associations instead, which they are very interested in.  The one group of 15 women that have decided to take the loan will be a good pilot group for the bank to start promoting the program in Sirigu, but as with every step in every project, it might fall apart at any minute.  So right now I’m hopeful, and I’ll believe it when I see it.  With a little bit of St. Patty’s Day luck, these women will be money makers (hence the title of the blog) by the time the rain hits the farm.

Oh!  And that reminds me, one last thing- Thursday was a school holiday.  And want to know why?  March 15th is traditionally the first day of rain, and the rain is incredibly hard here and is capable of keeping any Ghanaian or American home from school, so I can understand the logic of just cancelling school the first day of rain.  But here’s the catch- March 15th is three months before the rain is expected to start this year.  According to the locals, it’s been starting later and later every year.  And with a village living off of strictly rain-fed agriculture, this moving target of a rainy season creates food insecurity.  Apparently climate adaptation is something that should be on everyon’e agenda.    

Networking illiterate farmers with what you probably thought they already knew about

Difficult? Yes. Possible? It’s looking good! Sustainble? I’ll pass on that question for now…

One of the Peace Corps goals of the sector I am in (the name is apparently changing, but as my awareness stands now, it’s still Natural Resource Management) is to boost organizational capacity by helping “organizations increase networks”. And while this sounds like a logically useful (and beautifully jargon-y) thing to accomplish, you might wonder—as I did upon first reading it—how is an American, someone with a dearth of local knowledge and an inability to communicate with most of the people in the village, ever going to do this?

This past week has completely changed my mind on this goal. Last week I stopped by the BUSAC grant fund office in Tamale and the staff there told me about an organic farming group based in Bolgatanga, (my site’s regional capital) that connects organic farming groups in the three northern regions, the Coalition for the Advancement of Organic Farming (CAOF). The NGO I’ve been assigned to work with, the Sirigu Ecological Initiative for Sustainable Development (SEISUD) had no idea it existed, despite both groups having been around for a few years and having offices within 40km of each other. By Thursday of that same week, I had setup a meeting and we were sitting at a spot (outdoor bar) in Bolgatanga talking about how SEISUD could become a member.

In the first month or two of getting to site, my NGO and I did needs assessments with eight farmer groups and one social group (Participatory Analysis for Community Action- PACA). All of the groups said they needed money to do business. I’ve been looking and looking for an institution that gives loans for less than 30% interest, because they said anything above that is impossible to do, and I have been completely unsuccessful in finding how to get them loans with low enough interest rates. (And no, Kiva doesn’t give interest free loans to village men and women, they’re free for the bank, but in Ghana, the bank to person interest rate is still averaging upwards of 30% interest. I’d like to see you turn at least a 40% profit on $100 in six months. I don’t think I could do it. I’m sure Kiva is working wonderfully at a lot of levels, but the interest is too high for my village. So anyway.) During training we learned about VSLA (Village Savings and Loans Associations). It’s a novel idea promoted by CARE International that basically sets up a way for groups to contribute ‘small-small’ (common Ghanaian term; means what it says) to a group savings box where they can take out a loan from the box instead of going through a bank that’s either interest free, or the interest collected goes back into the group’s money. I specifically remember asking if we had to pay for him to come and how much it would be, and the presenter just said that it would be a small fee, and didn’t give a number. After a couple of weeks of calling and emailing a few months after I arrived at site, I finally got in touch with him and found out his rate is 200 cedi/day (about 150USD) to get the group started with this, and the training on it would have to be at least three days. For a group that can only afford to pay 20 peswa/month (about 0.13 USD), and would realistically contribute only 1 to 5 cedi (about 0.70 to 3 USD) each week to the VSLA box, this is a ridiculously high fee. Upsetting. So how do I do it without him? After having presented this concept to the NGO staff, I took a shot in the dark to see if the local bank in the village could be of assistance. I had gone in there and told them about the groups and their need for money, but they said they don’t give loans to farmers for farming inputs and their interest rates are all around 34%. When I specifically said VSLA/su-su (su-su actually means small-small), low and behold, they do have a program called Credit with Education. It’s similar in that the group is able to take out a loan by using each other as guarantors, and there’s going to be a lot of details to work out. But as of now, it’s looking like a simple solution within the village they just hadn’t accessed yet.

And on Wednesday of that week, I stopped by AfriKid’s local office to ask about how their loan program was going. They give loans of 100-150 cedi to about 60 women in the village with 15% interest and a year to pay it back. When I was there, he mentioned that the women do shea processing. And just out of curiosity, I asked if they did this by hand and were able to make money from it (the existing shea group I work with says that if they process by hand, they won’t make enough money because the shea trees are depleted here so they have to buy the nuts). The existing shea group also has a mill, but it doesn’t have an electricity meter, effectively preventing them from using it. When I was at the bank with one of the women taking helping with some grant logistics, I introduced her to one of the AfriKids staff. She already knew him, but had no idea they already had a working mill and shea processing equipment that they allowed other groups to use for a fee. Big network step number three! It’s too soon to see any returns on these connections, but it’s amazing to me that they didn’t already exist given the close proximity of these resources to potential beneficiaries.

And the thing is, I don’t really know what to attribute this to. There’s no absence of curiosity when it comes to new things. When anything is going on, people are watching and staring. I suppose it’s a side-effect of the lack of communication. And the language barrier has nothing to do with this. The idea of providing someone enough information to carry out a task or completely understand something doesn’t seem to be a part of the culture. People have become used to working (or not working) with little information. They make me feel like I am forcing it when I ask questions. For example- the director of the NGO wants me to somehow build them a tree nursery. There seems to be existing funding, and some work on acquiring land has been done, but the director asked me to put a plan together for the nursery without any specifics on that information. And ideally, I would do this by sitting down with the people that want the tree nursery (the NGO) and help them with a plan instead of just presenting it to them without getting any information. I haven’t been able to make this happen yet, but either way, the progress of the tree nursery is prevented by the lack of communication with every step and every bit of information. Here is a typical conversation between me and the director of the NGO-

S: What is the next thing we need to do for the tree nursery?

P: Plant the trees so the farmers will have them.

S: Where do we get the seeds?

P: They will get them.

S: Who is they?

P: The this guy.

S: Who?

P: The guy that lives in the village there.

S: There are nine thousand people in the village, how am I supposed to know who you are talking about.

P: *chuckles in response to my why-are-you-doing-this-to-me-again expression*

P: You are not getting me.

And then it continues in this manner or similar ones until I am worn out and hope that something will get done even though I have no idea what and am pretty confident that ‘this guy’ has no idea either. Needless to say, we have no seeds.