Busunu Love!

This past week I spent in Busunu and had an amazing experience! It was wonderful to get perspective on different lifestyles of Ghanaians and appreciate the hardships of the rural clients of REP.
While in Busunu I split my time between participating in the activities of the women around the house (cooking, sweeping, processing shea nuts, etc.) and walking around the village interviewing clients who had received one of three trainings over the past year, beekeeping, batik tie and dye, and soap making.
I was incredibly fortunate that the family/compound I was staying with was so amazing and friendly, and I had a community leader who spoke English fluently to help guide me around to the various clients.

Busunu is a very interesting community that has had many different development projects passing through it, from various water installations to renewable energy to sponsorships from the Body Shop. It was good to see the impacts of the projects and the different approaches to development. For instance, you can have a private company like the Body Shop sponsor a women’s group who process shea nuts, you can have a government sponsored project like REP training people in new skills to start businesses, or you can have partnerships between universities and churches to fund pilot energy projects, or huge NGOs like World Vision coming in and supporting children through feeding programs and schools. This community had it all.

(this women's group says below, it is hard to read, "sponsored by the Body Shop"!)

And the community was developing and changing. The project that had the biggest noticeable impact was the renewable energy project. Over the past 6 months a large number of houses in the community were set up with electricity, consisting of 2 light bulbs. This has changed a lot about the community already. It has changed the dynamics of the family at night, they are able to cook later, and socialize more, there is a sense of security and safety, they are able to have cell phone because they can now be charged, and new businesses will be able to be started up (welders, more machinery, etc.). The price is better than the national grid and way better than kerosene that would be used for lamps.
Let me tell you a bit about it, because as an environmental engineering student, I found it incredibly interesting.
The main source of power is solar, but there is a naturally occurring plant in the area, jatropha, whose seed contains oil that can be used as bio fuel that powers the back-up generator when the sun is weak. The electricity lines are all underground, and the houses are metered to keep track of usage. The project is encouraging people to be growing the jatropha on their farms and around their homes as a fence, and then the project buys the seeds from them. They can use the seeds as their payment for their electricity, or just to make some extra money.

The energy facility with the solar panels and generator

Sakara, my guide and friend, showing the Jatropha plant (seeds below)The project is still just starting up, so they are still running the backup generator on diesel, but soon hope to move to the bio-diesel soon. Overall the project seems sustainable, and is being implemented slowly over a couple of years, with the aim of being self-sufficient. If it is successful, then they will implement it in other areas. The classic problems remain with projects like this...if a part of the machinery for the solar panels breaks, they have to send it to Germany to repair it. The idea of the project came from some pilot projects that were done in Kenya with the Jatropha plant, if you are interested in further research (which I definitely am, so if you get a head start, let me know!).
The family that I stayed with was wonderful, in particular my friend Gifty. She’s a couple years older than me, but intelligent, friendly and just such a beautiful person! She had an adorable 5 month old baby who you couldn’t help but love, and she let me help her out and get to know the way she was living in Busunu. She grew up there, but has since moved to Tamale for seamstress training and will leave Busunu in a couple months when the baby, Johnson, is older. I was sad to leave, because I learned more from her on what it means to be an African woman in a week than I have in the 6 weeks I have been here. Here are some pictures and I hope to be able to visit Busunu again to say hello to my friend again, I don’t know if she will ever know what an impact she has had on me.

Shea Nut Madness!

Walking around the Busunu in the morning is like walking through a ghost town, taken over by packs of 2 year olds and the occasional granny watching over. Why? Because of Shea Nuts! All of the women in Busunu (and most of those in the West Gonja District) are out in the Bush before the sun rises to collect shea nuts.

Do you happen to have, or know of someone who has, any skin care products that contain shea butter? I sure do, and how much do we know about this ingredient that is so desired in skin care and makes our skin smooth and supple? Here is some info on shea butter, where it comes from and the hard work that goes collecting it.

So why are the shea nuts such a big deal? Because for the majority of those living in Busunu, this seasonal work will generate their income for the entire year. This year women are particularly serious about it because the price is high for selling and the fruits are growing well. So when it is shea nut season (it has been going on for maybe 3 weeks now, and will last for maybe 1 to 2 months still) everything else stops, and collecting and processing the shea nuts become the priority. Learning about how women (who are REPs main target beneficiaries) spend their time was amazing as I am beginning to better understand about the daily struggles and challenges they face, and how the intervention by the REP could potentially impact their lives.

So let me take you through the process:

1. Shea fruits grow on trees in the ‘bush’. They kind of remind me of avocadoes; they are green and have a pasty fruit on the inside with a large nut in the middle. They can be very sweet…but take care when they are that sweet (as you will see soon)…but mostly they taste like plain yogurt to me. The bush is the wilderness that exists outside of town. Since we are further north, it’s not as dense as a rainforest, but is just as green…check the picture:

2. Shea nuts fall from trees. This is where the women come in with their sacks and basins to come and collect them. I accompanied some of the women one day into the bush and what an adventure we had! It was HARD work! Cutting off the road and heading into the bush some times along paths, sometimes just cutting through randomly (I don’t know how we didn’t get lost) moving to one area, stopping and bending over to pick the fruits through the grass, putting them in the bin and moving on…again and again, hard work!

Furthermore, when I say fruit, you may think of a pleasant, firm, sweet smelling thing, but the majority of what we picked were hidden under grass and shrubs, rotting and covered in bugs. Another special treat was using your hand to push off the fruit before collecting the nut (because you only want the nut, expect for a few fresh fruits that you eat as you go, or take back to the house), and the fruit is being eaten by many maggots, which feel awful on your hand, squirming around, trying to bore into your skin! Ah! There are also hoards of fruit flies around the fruits…its all very natural, so you get over the bug factor pretty quick, but I just want to give you a sense of the work that goes into this, its not like picking apples.

Along our adventure we faced many challenges (personally my legs, oh god! African women are used to bending over and working, but I am not! The backs of my legs are still killing me, days later, from all that bending!), the rain…the rain came swiftly and viciously and made us finish our work early, and the forest cows, which apparently are mean and are very big with large horns and must be kept at bay with large sticks.

3. Once you have collected all that you can carry, you put it on your head, and take the long walk back into town. For me, my neck would break if I tried to carry that weight, but instead I carried my backpack wrapped up in a rubber bag on my head, emerging from the bush a little bit more African, but still very much a silly white girl.

4. Boiling. The shea nuts are covered in rotten fruit and flies, so all that gunk is boiled off in a big cauldron.

5. Drying. The nuts are spread out on the ground to be dried by the heat of the African sun. They are spread out and quite frequently have to be protected from hungry and relentless goats and pigs.

6. Cracking. The shea nuts are covered in a shell that needs to be cracked to extract the seed/nut that contains the precious oil. So women grab a stick or paddle and wack the nuts on the ground to crack the shells open.

7. Removing the shells. Now that the shells are cracked, the task of removing all the bits of shell is next. This requires taking one shea nut at a time, taking off the bits of shell (kind of like a boiled egg…sometimes it comes nicely, and sometimes you need to pick at little pieces). There are a few tricks to remove the shells, but one is not really that much easier than the next. You can sit for hours and pick through them, or you can combine it with dumping them from a height from one basin to another and letting the wind carry away some of the chaff, both methods are time consuming and hard work.

8. Drying. The exposed shea nut is laid out in the sun again to dry.

9. Extracting the oil. This part I was not able to witness. I am not sure how it is done, but I believe it involves boiling. I believe there is a press that can be used, but again, I am pretty sure that no machinery is used by the women in Busunu. Furthermore, the nuts can be stored this way for up to a year and can be traded and sold this way to those who will go on to process it for the oil.

I was excited to participate in all the steps of the process…but quickly learned it’s no game. Since everything is done by hand, and you have such large quantities of nuts to process…each task quickly becomes very tedious and blister inducing. I was fortunate to just have a taste of all the different steps, and I didn’t need to suffer every morning to get up and go into the bush if it had rained all night or if my muscles were aching. So I got a taste of it, but still I will never really know.

I have a better appreciation for rural livelihoods as a result of this trip for many reasons. First, the women had no choice but to be dragging their tough asses out to the bush every day and collecting these nuts. This isn’t a bonus income, this is it, the big deal, so if you don’t do it, you go hungry and your children suffer. There is no choice in the matter.

Everything is dependent on the weather. The reason the shea nuts are growing so well, is because of the weather, if it rains too much, it disturbs the picking, when it is sunny, you come back and spread your nuts out to dry. The weather dictates your schedule.

Everything is done painstakingly by manual labour. Each and every shea fruit that is produced passes through your hands many times before it is ready to be sold. There are no machines, nothing beyond a strainer and a stick to aid the process. But there is a sense of pride that I sensed among the women, a sense of camaraderie and respect that comes from sharing hardwork with someone else. They all understand the struggles they are facing, and for me, unlike what I warned before this village stay, I was not refused hard work, women were hassling me to come into the bush with them to get the nuts and disappointed on the days when I hadn’t gone! These women are so powerful, tough and hardworking, it blew my mind. The women I was collecting the shea nuts in the bush were maybe 50-60 years I think, and they were tough! They could carry more, bend over more and go on for hours like that…I felt pretty weak in comparison.

When I asked my shea nut picking partner whether she enjoyed it (I quickly knew it was a stupid question as soon as I asked it) she said no! she is old and if she had money to buy the shea nuts from someone else she would. All of the women who had received one of the three trainings were all out collecting shea nuts. When I asked what they do for income aside from the shea nuts, many of them said they were just in the house, or doing small selling of food in the market. For the most part the women were excited about having a new skill that could earn them money and give them something to do with their time. The biggest problem they faced was gathering enough money to start up. But they were all incredibly hard working and wanted to start up a business, not just because they had a passion for soap or tye and dye, but because it was a way to make money and be doing something productive with their time. Furthermore, it empowers them to have a skill and a means to be improving their lives that is mostly just dependent on themselves.

So, there has yet to be a positive outcome of the trainings that happened in Busunu, and there wont be more progress until this season is finished, and women will potentially have some income to contribute to their business groups (all the groups of people trained are working together to pool their money to buy resources). I hope that they are able to get started and get going. They are struggling now, but I can see their determination (and desperation) that will lead them to get these businesses started.

I think this village stay was very successful in helping me to better understand the clients, some of the struggles they face, and make that emotional connection, something to keep me working hard and accountable to those people I talked to, to bring about some change that will aid them in their first challenging steps in starting up.

Here’s a challenge for those of you in Canada who are eager to experience some of African life and investigate more into some of these matters.

1. take some time to investigate into the ingredients of some product that you use (whether it be from the Body Shop or otherwise) and try and find where the products come from. If it says a women’s group in Ghana, for instance. Think about what it means. What does it mean to be part of a women’s group. How does it impact their lives? Try and think about the work that goes into the product they are producing and take a moment to wonder at the crazy interconnections that exist in our world, so many of which we are unaware of.
2. do something really boring and tedious all day long. Feel the blisters that will form and the craziness you feel for lack of stimulation. Do this and appreciate the struggles people feel in undergoing work without the aid of machines to quicken the process.

3. take a bucket shower! Go ahead, its fun. Fill up a bucket and either use a cup or just your hands to splash the water up onto yourself. Its amazing how well you can clean yourself with less than 10 L, when the average person will take a 10 minute shower, having used about 100 L of water in the process.

More on the Challenges to Development in Ghana

Road conditions! As Eric Dudely discusses in his book the critical villager, there are many communities that are overlooked in development projects because of their inconvenient location. The village we traveled to this week is in the ‘overseas’ area of the West Gonja district because during the rainy season, it can only be accessed by canoe as the small bridge we were just able to squeak by gets flooded. There is the foundations of a bridge along the road, but its been sitting unfinished for some ten years, and instead, you veer off the road, down a steep slope, over a small concrete slab used as an improvised bridge, and up a steep hill and back onto the road. It was sketchy! And the road is terrible. People in Damongo are aware the road to it from Tamale is bad, but the road to the surrounding villages is worse, if you can call it a road. All those car commercials highlighting the durability and toughness of various trucks and SUVs should be shot along this road! It’s a physically exhausting trip, hence the isolation of the communities along the way.
Through discussions with clients and various other people, the general public does not have faith in the government to help them. A client told me that people are aware of the services of the district assembly and the BAC, but that they don’t feel comfortable going and asking for help because they feel like they will shame themselves by sharing with someone their bad situation, and then still not receive help from them. I feel there is a big disconnect between the government and the people, and the people almost don’t expect anything from the government, because they don’t deliver. Watching the Ghana news at home, all the development projects are going to the south instead of the north where they are more badly needed, so yet again, another reason not to trust the government, or at least, expect disappointment. It’s interesting now that there is an election coming up in December, to see these issues resurfacing.

Guelph Chapter Questions

Hey GEWBies, just wanted to address some of the questions you asked before we finished school. Hope everyone is doing well and the chapter is organizing itself and getting ready for the coming year! I can tell its underway from the emails in my uog account! Best wishes.

In what ways do you plan to grow during your JF placement? Just think of a few examples.
I hope to become more confident in myself, learn to make those big and risky decisions, and give them my all even though its scary as hell and I will likely fail, learn to overcome the mental limitations and frustrations brought on my health problems, and learn to stay open-hearted and open-minded in new situations. I hope by the end of the summer, I can look back and feel stronger and be proud of what I accomplished. It’s definitely the hardest thing I have ever taken on, but I know I will get through it, and I know that after it I will have the confidence and courage to take on anything!

Have you changed in any way yet thru your preparation?
Through the reflection on our priorities, in which ways we want to grow and learn, have been incredibly useful tools to help see where I want to go in live, and how I can take steps to get there. Through the trainings and preparations in Canada, I have learned a great deal about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, how I learn, and the role I play in groups. I am continuing to learn throughout this experience who I am and what makes me happy. What I am willing to change about myself and what I am not. Its interesting to find the fundamental things that make you happy. Like nature and bonding with people and playing with kids.

How comfortable do you feel with the concept of using your 'white privilege' while overseas? Or is it more just being aware of the concept that is important?
To be honest, I came in wanting to reject it left right and center, but when you are treated differently everyday, whether by children calling after you Cabruni! Cabruni! Or by people asking how much your laptop cost and asking you to marry them or take them back to Canada, it feels like you are taking an extra kick to the gut by expecting in other circumstances to be treated like everyone else…like waiting in line at the hospital, or catching a bus. I know it sounds awful, but its one of those things where you really need to pick your battles. Some days you have the strength to refuse the privilege, and some days you do not. Furthermore, people don’t always appreciate when you do it, sometimes they are confused that you are refusing their hospitality, and so on, so it is not always cut and dry.
On that note...Racism.
I think one of the hardest things to deal with has been the discrimination I feel. The amount of unwanted attention is overwhelming, though I am starting to get used to it, and the amount of conscious rudeness that I feel is upsetting, considering Ghana is supposed to be one of the friendliest places. So what have I experienced as racism…the feeling that all the little things that make me who I am become unimportant, and I am lumped together as the same as any other person with the same skin colour. I am just as easily European as Canadian, and there is no distinction between the two. It feels weird to represent what it means to be Canadian to so many people. Because even though I am Canadian, I am Kim Jusek! I am many things, aside from having white skin and being from Canada. One of the benefits of staying in Ghana for a couple of months is that people will know me for who I am, not for just being different. As hurtful and offensive as it is at times (most of the time), I know it is mostly rooted in lack of exposure to the rest of the world. I grew up in a multi-cultural city where it is offensive to point out peoples differences and I am used to and accept those differences.

Dorothy’s Perspective

This week and next I have am pushing myself to get out into the field to try and seek out Dorothy’s perspective and experience. There are two levels that I am investigating, just as I feel there are two levels of clients REP deals with: those who have already started a business and receive business training or financial assistance and those who are trained in a new skill or trade from which they can start up a business.

This week I was in Damongo talking with some of the clients and spending time with them to see how they do their work and the challenges they face and the challenges they have overcome. I spent the day with Rabi, my host mom, as she traveled to a far off village to help establish one of the girls who graduated from her centre with her own empowerment centre. She also was expanding her market by introducing and selling her soap in the villages and towns along the way. It was interesting to see how she has taken the training that she learned from the BAC and become the most dominant producer and seller of soap in the area (aside from the commercial stuff). Another client makes furniture, like the couches we have in our homes in Canada, they are very impressive, and another was a metal worker. I learned many things from these clients, through what they told me, but even more from seeing the amount of work that goes into their product and the quality that is produced with such basic tools.

I regret that I didn’t take any pictures, but the metal worker started with a single sheet of some rusty metal that used to be the lid of something, and had a model of what he wanted to create, and I thought, there is no way I can see how he will make it without some sort of machine. But, with skillful hammering of sharpened nails and molding around a big old engine, sure enough he had made it!
It was the same with the furniture. I have never seen a couch made before. I have never thought about how it was made, where the materials came from and how they were all connected together (which is shameful because I pride myself on my curiosity about thinking how things work). But to see how each piece of wood is worked to make the curved arm, the frame, how the material is sewn together, how the stuffing and the springs are attached, how all this work is put into a single couch set for a specific family, it blows my mind. I am so used to mass production, to making something that someone will surely need, but you don’t know who it is, and thousands of the same things are made.
It’s the same as the clothing. In Ghana, you go and buy your cloth that you like, take it to the seamstress, pick out a style, they take your measurements and some time later you return for a fitting and final adjustments, and after a few weeks of hard work, you have an original outfit…when in Canada you could buy a dress that many others have for triple the price. I don’t really know how I feel about it, it’s like in Canada we aren’t aware of how all the things we have came to be. I don’t know really what it means, but I know that I appreciate the skillful hard work that goes into just about everything I use in daily life here in Ghana. I appreciate that deciding to start up a business making soap isn’t something you can just half-heartedly decide to do because it will require hard work, commitment and perseverance, an investment beyond money. I feel it is like most things I have experienced in Ghana, life is just a lot harder. Your water isn’t just flowing out of the tap, you are working in 30 degree heat, you can’t just open up a can of soup to heat for dinner, and you wake up early to sweep the dust from your compound and hand wash your clothes…you are just that much more intimate with what you are doing. To help understand, you can think about it this way: think about how many appliances you use in the day, and how much more time it would take to do the things you do without the help of those machines. I am not advocating that one way of life is better or worse than the other, but its important to appreciate the difference.

One other thing that was striking about the businesses, was to see how they started up and built themselves up. All these three clients have been established for long enough to have seen their workshops expand, and have aspirations and goals for future expansion. I couldn’t get a sense though of how passionate they were about their craft. They worked harder than ever at them, into the night and over the weekends, but when I asked them if they enjoyed it, the impression I got was that they didn’t. Maybe it’s a luxury we have at home to choose something to do that we enjoy. Rabi is a good businesswoman, and she saw an opportunity in soap making I believe, and the others, they must have started because they had an interest, or maybe their circumstances led them there, and they became good at it, and you need to earn money, so why not this way?

Anyway, it was great to get into the community and meet some people. I wish I had done it weeks ago! To be honest, I was scared, and didn’t think I could do it. Obviously I can’t do it as well as a local could do, my counterpart for instance, but I think the people I visited were proud that I was interested in what they were doing and taking the time to appreciate their struggles and successes. I hope it made them, in some small way, sit back and feel some pride in their accomplishments.

So with this knowledge from the field, I hope to come up with a work focus that will best contribute to Dorothy, which is a lot harder than I thought it would be! There are so many things that I see could be different, but every idea is based on the information I have at hand, and my knowledge of what is happening changes all the time, the fog clearing bit by bit at its own slow pace to catch a glimpse of the momentary ‘real picture’. I hope that I can contribute something while I am here, at the very least I hope to better understand how development work influences its intended beneficiaries and to touch just a few people. The goal of major institutional changes in REP was quickly suppressed when I realized just how big the world is and how small I am. Not that I have given up on the idea on helping to improve the world, but I am reevaluating how that change can be brought about. I will work tirelessly to try and have impact here at the systemic level and grassroots level...but what can we do in Canada to improve the world? Some changes can happen here in Ghana, but here is not the only place to start the changes. Anyway, some food for thought…the fundamental question: what can we do in Canada to make the world a better place, not just soothe our guilty conscience, but really do to make a difference? It’s unrealistic to think the only place to change the world is in Africa, and unnecessary for all those who want to improve the world to travel here to do it.
This coming week I will be spending in a nearby village, Busunu. There have been three training sessions run there: batik tie and dye, soap making and beekeeping. The clients are in the process of mobilizing themselves, but have yet to start up any businesses. My goal for the week is to learn about their lives and their struggles and learn if and how the training sessions were useful. I hope to come out of it with more of an emotional connection to the clients and understanding of their lives.

Some of the Challenges of Development Work in Ghana

One of the topics I want to rigorously explore during my time in Ghana and when I return to Canada is: what are the challenges of development in Ghana. What is preventing all the development projects and aid money from being effective? What are the forces, internally and externally, that are keeping people impoverished? Alternatively, what is working well and why?

Now having one month experience working in an office that is both an NGO (non-governmental organization) and GO (government organization) I am experiencing some of these challenges. I will begin by explaining a bit more about what I have learned about the Rural Enterprises Project (REP) to give context on further discussions.

REP is funded by IFAD, the Government of Ghana, and the African Development Bank. It is divided into three levels, the Head Office in Kumasi, Zonal Offices, and Business Advisory Centres (BAC) in each of the participating district capitals. I am working in the BAC of Damongo for West Gonja in the Northern Zone.

The BAC works in a few areas, including business counseling and training, leadership and group dynamics, community based skill training (soap making, batik tye and dye, beekeeping, etc), and credit and financial services. The main role of the BAC is to act as a facilitator to enable the communities’ to access these services. For example, when a number of people come and request that they would like to learn how to make soap, then the BAC lets the zonal office know who then sets them up with a service provider, and the BAC helps the service provider get set up, and collecting fees from clients, arranges for a location for the session and so on. The BAC in Damongo has been operating for about 2 years now, as REP has expanded into its second phase of implementation, working off its initial success and expanding the project to more districts.

The aim of REP is to integrate the BACs into the local district government, the District Assemblies, to support good governance in the country, and reduce dependence on donor organizations for the project’s continued success. Overall I think that REP is a great project that has been well planned and executed. But, as I am trying to understand, one great project still doesn’t alleviate the many impoverished, but why not? What is missing and what can be done better to assist more people in a more effective way?

In my office, I work with four others. There is the BAC Head, the Business Development Officer (BDO), the Admin Assistant, and the driver. Everyone is really friendly, answers my millions of questions, and involves me in the work. I can tell that they are doing this work because they want to help people, even if the passion I was expecting is not immediately obvious. They have been very understanding of my poor health and have been very accommodating. There is a team mentality, though a clear hierarchy exists. So far I have found myself to be useful in making some insightful observations in reports, helping with computer training and professionalism in report writing.

My BAC is finishing up its 2nd quarter of activities for this year. Since I have been there, the work has been quite slow. One of the major reasons being they are waiting on funding to continue their activities. Its frustrating though because planning doesn’t require funding. Getting out into the community in which you live for the sake of letting people know what you do and giving informal support doesn’t require funding. Working to set internal goals in the office and having critical discussions doesn’t require funding. So when hours are spent not working in the office because of lack of funding, it’s frustrating. Furthermore, there is a culture of this mentality in offices, so its not just a matter of stepping in and suggesting a change in attitude, its quite a bit more complicated in execution, but I am trying understand the cause and to lead by example.

Over this past month we have been working on preparing four business plans of clients to be sent to the European Union for credit application. I have spent my time in the office assisting with these plans, learning about the BAC and where will be an appropriate and effective area for me to work in to help improve the organizations capacity to serve the rural poor. Having come up with some of my ideas on what areas I can focus in from the office perspective, I am now going to take to the field to get Dorothy’s perspective. This week I am going to be making preparations (physically, logistically and mentally) to go and stay in a village next week that the BAC has worked with to better understand the challenges that the rural poor, the people the BAC is aiming to assist, face in their daily lives. What do they need for the service to be more beneficial to them and achieve its purpose? Hopefully after this, I will be able to make a more informed decision on which area will be most beneficial to focus my time and energy over the remainder of the summer.

I think I will leave it at there for now, just some context on my work, and then I will get into some deeper thinking in the posts to come. As always, your questions and comments are always very welcome!

Update from Ghana

Today is market day in Damongo, it is as hot as ever, and for the first time I was able to walk through the market, enjoy the strange aromas and not be afraid. To be honest, as exciting and wonderful as the African market is, it is a scary experience your first couple of times! People yelling, you buy 12 avocadoes when you just want two, nobody has change, yelling cabruni! Cabruni! (white man, white man)…its scary until you know how to deal with it, who to talk to and who its ok to ignore, learn a few phrases, and so on. Some funny things I observed in the market today while sitting with Rabi while she sold her soap were people buying and wearing toques in 35 degree heat, I tried a ball of groundnut powder mixed with maize flour and ginger, very spicy and tasty, and I learned a few more tricks in greeting etiquette (of which there is a lot). Oh and the watermelon here is the best I have ever tasted, dark red and full of flavour!
My health has been rocking me since I have been here, but I am trying hard to get my body adapted to the food (it needs transfats and other crap from home!), which is a frustrating endeavor, but well worth it since I ain’t got much weight left to lose! On a trip to Tamale to take out some money and meet up with some other JFs, we enjoyed some ‘white people’ food, including apple pie and some beer! One thing that I am definitely missing is my sweets, I will have to find substitutions in the foods here…I am on a mission.
Here is a picture of some of the street food that is delicious, and is decently safe I would say if you see them fry it in front of you and take a sizzling hot one, watching its journey from the fryer to your bag. The boy standing there is Rafiu, the driver at my office.
Here is one of my horses! They make me so happy on my way to or from work when I see them. Here is my first African outfit! I have 2 more on the way and can’t wait to buy some more cloth for other outfits.