A week in Savelugu

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To debuy!

Time fort another update, I’ve had a really good week so there’s lots to say!

I have been working in Savelugu/Nanton district, out of their office in Pong-Tamale. Pong-Tamale is a small community about 30km north of Tamale. They have been very good about trying to get me to experience as much as possible. This week I was working directly with agricultural extension agents (AEAs) on some projects as well as with other members of the district development office staff.

AEA’s are the front line workers who actually implement all the programs run by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. They work directly with communities and farmers to help them increase their agricultural productivity. One of these activities was setting up and distributing resources for demonstrations to be carried out by each of the AEAs in the district on improved maize seed. Each AEA in the district is going to be running one of these demonstrations (there’s 24 in this district). They will select a farmer that they trust and is dependable and will provide him or her with all of the required inputs (seed, fertilizer etc.). The farmer than grows the crop according to the AEAs specifications and the AEA will arrange several field days for other farmers in the community to come and see the results of improved practice. This method has been shown to be pretty effective at introducing new practices to an area, hopefully these ones will go really well too.

The second activity I participated in with an AEA was attending “Farmer Field School” I think by far this has been the highlight of my time here so far. The farmer field school, is run in one of the district’s operational areas by one of the AEAs. There are two field schools in the region, the other being in Tolon. This weekly school is a participatory approach to let a group of farmers see first hand the effects of improved practices on agricultural outputs. They meet each week for ½ a day to work on a plot of land together that has been divided in half - one half for traditional farmer methods/one half for improved practice methods. They make decisions as a group on everything from when to plant/harvest, what type of seed to use etc. They are also given workshops in various technical (importance of compost, etc.) and non-technical (group dynamics etc.) areas. This school is not only increasing the knowledge of the farmers but also creating a sense of community and relationships amongst themselves. This was extremely evident and really, really good to see. The farmers worked really well together, even singing and hoeing in unison as they ploughed the field! It was pretty amazing. In addition, the group totally took me in - I felt adopted. They even gave me a Dagomba name of “Adissa” (it’s a traditional muslim name around here, and surprisingly similar to mine!) I was out weeding with them, which they found absolutely hilarious. They’d be working along beside me, and then just turn and look at me and crack up! It’s a little funny to explain, but here, the more people laugh at you, the better it is - it means they appreciate your efforts to learn about their culture. When we stopped for a break, I had a bunch of burrs on my pants, as soon as I sat down, despite my protests I had a flock of about 7 ladies and the AEA descend upon me and start picking them off for me. They also found me trying to speak dagbani as absolutely hilarious - practically anything I said would cause them to crack up. And at the end, they wanted to know if and when I was coming back and I had about 5 offers of cooking for me next time I came back, there’s not much that beats Ghanaian hospitality! Unfortunately as I’m moving off to another district, it doesn’t really look like I’ll be back, but I’m going to try to get out there at least once more before the end of the summer because it went so well.

Finally, also under community participation, this week we held a community meeting at the Bunglung small scale irrigation rehabilitation project. This was to give the community and update, and to find out their thoughts and opinions on how the project was progressing.

In the office I have been working with their MIS officer (Management of Information and Systems) to develop some worksheets to help him with his annual farmer/crop/livestock surveys for the region and some other information management . These surveys are used to predict/calculate a lot of the statistics for the district and are quite indepth/involved. They are important for monitoring and evaluating the effects that MoFA is having at increasing the productivity of local farmers. At the present time he had been doing all of the tabulating/calculating and interpretation by hand for each of the 24 operational areas in the district. We believe that by creating this spreadsheet it will save him a lot of time and effort!

Outside of work, the rains have finally started to come - they were pretty late this year and the farmers were starting to get worried. I can’t complain because even though I’ve got pretty soaked a couple times - it definetly moderates the temperature a lot! I got caught in the rain coming to town the other day and when I soggily arrived at the internet café, they (the owners/workers) started apologizing to me! That happens a lot here, I thought Candians were big on apologizing, but Ghanaians have us beat hands down. If anything even slightly goes not according to plan, you get about 20 apologies from people who have nothing to do with it! Another interesting thing about the rainy season is how it affects some things completely, that you wouldn’t even think of. The whole city practically shuts down when it rains. Granted when it rains, it rains hard! But stores close, taxis stop, the streets are empty! Twice now, I’ve tried to catch a taxi in the rain - this is not an easy task! A lot of this probably has to do with how much of the business here takes place out of doors (stands etc. instead of stores). On the other hand tho, things that would affect us sooo much at home, don’t have much effect at all over here. For example, now that the rain has started the power goes out quite abit, sometimes for extended periods (12 hrs or more). When this happened in N. America two summers ago, everything shut down. Here, you can barely tell when the power is off. The Traffic lights don’t work a lot of the time anyway (I think I’ve seen the lights at the main intersection in Tamale function properly twice since I’ve been here), work doesn’t depend on computers nearly as much (ie in the Savelugu office we had 2 computers for about 40 people), so that goes on without interference. We cook on gas or charcoal, so you can still cook. Really the only noticeable inconvenience that I’ve found is that I can’t have my fan on at night when I sleep!

I’ve had a busy weekend as well, visiting friends, getting chores and errands done that I can’t get done during the week (ie laundry). Sunday was Navid’s sisters birthday, I went over for the afternoon, she was having a party in the evening but I couldn’t stay for that but we had a bit of a party in the afternoon for the kids. It was lot of fun, Navid set up his computer with some speakers they had so we were all dancing. It was hilarious tho, after a bunch of Ghanaian music, he put on some “Canadian music” and the dancefloor cleared! By Canadian music, I pretty much mean anything that’s not dance or hip hop/r&b, after a couple songs they got used to it tho and started dancing again. I’m definetly bringing some Ghanaian music back with me -its pretty happy stuff.

Ok, I’ve gotta wrap up now, or I’m going to be late for work. This week I’m in Tolon, which is about 24 km out of Tamale, but takes about 1hr to get there because of the bad roads. I enjoy the ride tho, the scenery’s great and when I was coming home yesterday I was thinking, it’s a bit like a ride at a midway, you have to keep yourself from sliding into the person next to you! Hehe, who needs the CNE when you have that. The mornings its pretty packed tho, so I won’t have to worry about that too much.

Ok, have a great day everyone, talk to you soon!

Alyssa

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Photos

Ploughing the fields by hand
This was at farmer field school, the farmers ploughed about 1/2 an acre in under an hour by hand! They formed a line and went along ploughing in unison while they sang... amazingly hard work - but pretty cool to see!

Birthday Party
The kids are dancing at Navid's sister's birthday party. they cleaned out a room and turned up the music - lots of fun! Kofi is the one in the purple shirt eating and dancing at the same time - it looks like he's not having fun, but that totally wasn't the case!

Farmer Field School
The field school takes place under a mango tree. here we're just going over the days schedule before we get started. I thought this was the one with me in it but apparently not - i'll have to bring my camera next time and switch it up.

Comments

[Anne Tipler]

Hi Alyssa!
I finally got around to reading your latest - school is over for us and vacation has started! but you are workng hard - it was really interesting to read about the low impact of electrcity over there! Keep up the interesting journals!