Village Life

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So the biggest highlight of my week (and perhaps my time here in general) was the three days that I got to stay in the village of Naglogu just north of Yendi. Naglogu is a village of about 500 people (give or take). I stayed with Baba Abdulai and his family (12 in total including his wife and two of his three children). The purpose of my stay was to get a better idea of exactly what the needs of farmers are (first hand experience is always best), and what the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) is doing/ could do better to help them more - its more helpful to do that when I’m not following around a member of the MoFA staff and actually get to spend some time with the communities by myself. In reality what I got was indeed some of this information, but a lot more lessons in rural livelihoods, the outlook of these communities on various issues in including poverty and development.

To set the stage a little bit, our compound was at the edge of the village and was average size - about 7 buildings/rooms surrounding a central open area where most of the cooking and other daily activities took place. You can see some of the buildings in the pictures I’m posting with this entry (I’ll get them up soon, I promise!). Water came from a borehole that was about a half-mile walk from the village, and was fetched by the women twice a day (morning and night). Naglogu doesn’t yet have electricity although the neighbouring village does and it is farther from Yendi, so they are hoping soon (when I asked why the other village had power and they didn’t, the reply was “the government likes them better”). The two main activities in the village at this time of year are farming and shea butter processing. A lot of my time was spent visiting/meeting members of the community (I think I was introduced to every family in the village by the end of my three days) but this was neat because I got to meet a lot of people and see a variety of daily activities (although most were focused on the two I mentioned above). I can’t go into details about everything that happened so I’ll have to just outline some of the highlights

When I first arrived there were a couple of women heading out to farm, Baba asked if I wanted to go with them, so off I went. The farm land for the village surrounds the community, and can be anywhere from a 0-5km walk from the edge of village. It started as the four of us (two women, one baby on the back of one of the women and myself) but as we walked along, every time I looked behind me, we had added several children to our procession. I’m not exactly sure where they all came from because it was all farm land but I think by the time we reached the field we were a party of about 18-20. It pretty much set the stage for the rest of my time there - I don’t think there was every more than 5 minutes of waking time that I did not have at least a couple children watching me. Our job was to clear some land, plough and then transplant some pepper plants they had brought along. Of course everything I did brought rounds of laughter - it was good laughter though : ) Baba told me later that one of the women said I was a hard worker - Can’t ask for much better praise than that! Especially from one of the women there - I had been told that the women were the back bone of the community but here they really amazed me - in addition to cooking, taking care of the children, processing shea butter, and cleaning, they also went and fetched water, farmed their own land and did various other jobs along the way. I’m not exactly sure how she got that I was a hard worker when you compare what I did to that!

On my many visits to all the different compounds I learned a ton about shea butter processing. It was pretty interesting because in the past there have been a lot of development projects (some successful, some not so much) focused at shea butter processing. I eventually convinced them to let me try mixing some, as you can see the pictures. It takes about 45min to an hr (closer to an hr for me :P) to mix the ground shea nuts by hand from a brown chocolate syrup like consistency to a whitish lardlike consistency. This is just one of the many stages of processing - in total a batch takes about 3 days to make completely and from this they will make about $3-4 cdn profit. So next time you’re using a beauty product using shea butter, keep that in mind!

I was never at a loss for company. There were always kids around ready to watch whatever I was doing (even if it was just sitting and writing in my journal). I taught them how to play stella ella ola, doggy doggy who’s got your bone (definitely the biggest hit) and tic tac toe. They taught me various clapping games and perfected my ampe skills (as described in one of my earlier entries). One thing I really noticed was the difference in the quality of education between the village and the city. It’s a real challenge that Ghana is facing - teachers in general don’t want to go to the village meaning theres often shortage. They are also often not able to find accomadation in the village and therefore they often commute from nearby cities making schools irregular. For example, on my second day there we went to visit the school, the teachers there bike from Yendi each day (about 10km) school is supposed to start at 7:30 but that day the teachers couldn’t get there until after 9. I could really see the difference between in the level as well between what my brother in Tamale and kids in the same grade/age in Naglogu had learned.

What I enjoyed the most was the sense of home, security and community I felt while in the village. There’s something incredibly calming about the sounds of pounding Coco (breakfast porridge) for the next morning echoing through the village at twilight. Its amazing how the kids take care of each other and everyone looks out for everyone else. I love how it takes small things to make everyone there really happy. Simply taking a picture, or playing games or attending the “video show” The first night there, after we had finished dinner, Baba asked me if I wanted to go to the “video show”. Not really knowing what that was, but having not much else to do, I agreed. It turns out that one of the families in the community has a generator and a tv and every night (providing its not raining), they show movies for a cost of 500 cedis (about 7 cents). There were about 50 people crowded in the compound watching movies -it was really neat to see. They switched the movie 3 times while I was there; an Indian film with no subtitles, an “American” film (although it was in an unknown language to me, so I’m not exactly sure where it was really from), and finally a dagbani film (taped on the streets of Tamale!). They weren’t high quality films, most of the people there couldn’t really understand them (well except for the dagbani film) and we never saw more than about a third of any of them before they stopped working - but everyone was laughing histerically, gasping in fright and generally enjoying themselves immensely.

I think that brings me to the biggest lesson I learned during my stay there - and that was the realization that poverty and unhappiness don’t go hand in hand. This was something that I knew in my mind, but became so obvious over my time there. This community had so little materialistically, but I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in a long time! A lot of things didn’t even occur to me that they were missing until I came back to Yendi and realized how developed it looked. It was the exact same feeling I had felt returning to Tamale FROM Yendi the week before. It will definitely be interesting to see how returning to Canada feels in just about a month!

Ok, I think I’ll leave it there for now, hope you’re all having a great week and I’ll talk to you soon!

Alyssa

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Photos

finished stirring
here you can see the white lumpiness of shea butter after an hour or so of stirring

Almost done
this is what shea butter looks like during the final stages of processing

Clowning around
Proof that making farting sounds with your armpit is fun times no matter where in the world you are :)

Comments

[Mom]

Wow!
I think I have to come to Ghana and learn some time management skills from these amazing women. Love mom xo

[Ann Lorenc]

Cream of the Crop
I'll never look at cosmetics in the same way! Thanks for showing the Shea Butter process. I found it enlightening. The kids in your photos are so cute, I could just hug them all!