Happy Halloween!
Only in Ghana can Halloween inspire the disturbance it truly intends to create. Yes. This first celebration of Halloween in Twimia Nkwanta has created a stir, and by that i mean chaos/abnormal levels of doubt regarding the sanity of those ever-crazed 'obrunis' (which to be totally honest, was already under close scrutiny..) Costumes are only the tip of the iceberg. When my day to day dress usually constitutes 'costume' in the eyes of Ghanaians, it's saying something if my outfit raises more eyebrows than usual. I chose to dress up this years as: Brady's worst Ghanaian Experience to date... waking up to discover that during the night she had been joined by 12 VERY friendly bed mates, easily excitable... all cockroaches. Needless to say they were not invited, and as a result did not receive any breakfast offers (unless they requested excessive amounts of RAID, which I understand was freely offered). My family delighted in helping me make paper cockroaches, but pandemonium ensued when I began to glue them to my skin. Adding to the confusion, I should mention, was my previous attempt to explain Halloween as "a day to celebrate those who have died." It is, in retrospect, perhaps difficult to connect the concept of honoring the dead with the act of glueing paper roaches to ones body. The resulting cultural disconnect was only widened by the arrival of two additional volunteers underneath a box they had cut to resemble a tro-tro: public transport mini-van.
In addition to being the source of amusement that i am, I've actually been quite busy. For the last week or so, fifteen of us traveled to the Eastern Region of Ghana, visiting current volunteers and getting practical training. We learned such things as how to graft fruit trees (which is done to ensure that the resulting seedling is of equal quality to the one it is drafted from, and also to mix species and make different types of fruits) care for bee hives, make clay ovens (entirely from natural materials that we gathered) mate and care for a host of different animals, the list goes on. Now that I'm back in Twimia Nkwanta, I've resumed my normal schedule: four hours of Twi in the morning, four hours of technical training in the afternoon. Today we learned methods of inter-cropping. (Technical training tends to be a very broad type of training covering everything from community mapping techniques to agriculture, to alternative livelihood projects such as beekeeping.) Twice a week we get together with the trainees from other sectors (Small Enterprise Development and Health and Water Sanitation) to talk about things like, "How do you distinguish bacterial from amoebic dysentery?" (One causes a fishy smelling diarrhea, the other induces extreme fatigue. Guess which is which!)
The things we are learning are generally pretty basic, this is not rocket science. The idea is to simply acquire the skills necessary to identify the existing resources in a community, and then help organize those resources according to the wishes of the community. As I understand it - my role is not to teach so much as to network. I will help take people through the process of going to the government agencies or NGOs dispensing training in the hopes that when I leave this process will be repeatable. It's an ideal situation for me, I get maximum exposure to a ton of different activities without actually needing to become an overnight expert.
In my spare time (ha ha) I have been working with a group of trainees to implement a small teak nursery at the Primary School in Twimia Nkwanta, kind of a practice mini-project kind of deal. The idea is that in five years time the school can sell the wood to buy supplies, but in the meantime they can continue planting more seedlings for the future. I planted 150 teak trees to help feed African schoolchildren today... What did you do? (Is that a logo on one of Bono's shirts? It would be a good one.)
You all cross my mind more than you'd think. Happy Halloween!
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