The Week in Review

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Happy birthday America. Yeah, I'm a day late, but I was toasting you last night with a few other Americans, celebrating my return to Kumasi, so let's call it close enough

The field work concluded yesterday with a successful visit to one last town, Wenchi. Spirits were high, as the students get to return to awaiting moms and home-cooked fufu (one of them claimed yesterday he gets his "big muscles" from a life of mashing the cassavas for his mom's fufu, I'll have to try that workout on for size and see what happens), and my co-worker gets to spend a weekend with his wife and kid for the first time in a month. As for me, I got to go to a decidedly expat-centric restaurant last night and have a hand-made veggie-burger. Tonight I am going to eat pizza. As you can tell, I was getting sick of a strictly Ghanaian food diet by the end of two weeks in Brong Ahafo, so this weekend is all about breaking routine.

Speaking of burgers, we were able to effectively neutralize our embezzling loan officer from Monday's blog post by cutting him out of the money-handling process as I had planned. It seemed to get the message across, as on Tuesday morning he noticed my co-worker paying for all taxis and writing down fares on a tally sheet, while I told him not to bother getting the refreshments, and handled it myself, which brought a quizzical look to his face. By the time we got to the next village I found the loan officer had started his own tally sheet, pursing his lips and frowning over numbers of taxi fares, telling anyone who was interested how we could get a really good bargain by seeking out a mini-van instead of a regular taxi. As they say, only the guilty catch offense, so there you go.

So now what? We are keeping one student from each team around to work on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with us to organize and summarize the data, which there is a lot of. Our group, only 1/3 or the total research team, did 200 individual interviews, and held about 40 focus groups of an hour or so each, so I can only imagine the pile of papers and audio tapes awaiting me when I check in with the four Kumasi teams later today.

I know things have been a little work-heavy lately, but I've been soaking up a lot of other cultural observations/anecdotes over the past two weeks as well, so expect more of those rapid-fire entries now that internet is a daily thing again.

Speaking of culture, the guy sitting next to me is blasting "Hit 'em Up" by Tupac off YouTube at full blast, and a nun just walked in as the first line to the song (not appropriate to retype here) kicked in. Amazingly enough, he is not stopping the video, but replaying it, in case maybe she missed the line about 'Pac sleeping with Biggie's wife the first time around. Even I am embarrassed right now.

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Comments

[kjell]

Nuns Love Pac
Under those nun outfits they wear t-shirts that say "God Loves Rappers Too"

[Buko]

god bless . . . what is the name of that country again?
A day late is not a worry. I celebrated Canada Day on July 1st instead of the 4th (well only on the exterior, on the interior the stars and bars will always hold true). The funny thing is, and probably just to be a pain in the ass, i barbed the locals as to whether Canadia was 26 years old or over 200. Nothing like ruffling the feathers of locals. As for your embezzler, you should get him back on the payroll - you have smoked him out and now he can hook you up with some deals as long as you leave a small profit to grease the wheels.