A Good Field Visit / A Bad Field Visit
Monday, June 26th, Day 53 - The trainees were coming from that far away place where the inauguration had been, which was at least four hours away. We expected them in the early afternoon but apparently their bus broke down ("their lorry got spoiled") and they ended up not arriving until late late like 8 or 9pm. I mostly sat at the dais working on my computer. You see my hotel doesn't have wifi ... well it DOES have wifi, I can see the god damn network and the signal is strong but all the staff profess no knowledge of it, when asked they say vaguely a guy is coming soon to fix the wifi. I think just none of them know the password and can't be bothered to figure it out. This hotel is a bizarre surreal place, in the early evening when lights would be on in occupied rooms there's often no other room with lights on or maybe one. On a boomin night there might be three others. And its a big fancy hotel. Anyway I digress, since it doesn't have wifi but if I stay in the training hall I can use the wifi server my support people have I wantede to stay there. Plus my hotel has an uncomfortable little desk but sitting at the lecture hall dais is comfortable and the kind of office I could get used to.
So that was Monday.
Tuesday, June 27th, Day 54 - Started relatively early in the morning with the lectures. The original plan was to go to the field in the morning this day but we rearranged it because I didn't think it would be practical to have the field visit first before anything else at all. They'd be like "brood? whats brood? Drone? Whats a drone?"
This group seems to be the youngest yet, I think there's at least half a dozen that look under 16 even (most are still around 20ish I think). This morning they were very quiet, often having no questions at all after a section, though by now I'm finding that's relatively normal before we've had a field visit to loosen people up. Once or twice when I called for volunteers ("okay who can point to the drone in this picture") no one volunteered even after a minute or two, which has never happened before. In this case it's not a matter of being worried about going to fast --we've already lost Monday and Sam wants to finish Thursday morning so we're trying to cram what was originally a week long program into essentially two days now-- but just about people being engaged in the material.
In the afternoon we had a field visit, to the farm school just outside of town where we had gone on Friday. "Mr Odonku," the president of the regional beekeeping association, seems to oversee these hives and they're well tended. As mentioned last week, he both already is very knowledgeable and never contradicts me, in fact immediately taking up and repeating things I vaguely suspect he's only just hearing from me for the first time, which I appreciate!
We had a very productive afternoon, he really helps me as we try to cycle through letting every trainee get a chance of hands on in the hive, and helping them along. And the trainees for their part, they seemed if anything more engaged than previous groups, they were really into it.
We also had an unusually useful experience in that we were able to split a hive, which we had done last week, but also! There's checks you need to do a week later on a split hive, and having split one last week, this week we could not only split a hive but do the week-later check as well.
There was a bit of a mystery because the one side of the split had a capped queen cell, which should take 8 days, or maybe a minumum of six, but this is four days later. So its good the hive has a queen cell but it shouldn't be so far advanced in so short a time. I can't remember if it was there last week but it must have been? This is where it helps to have a log book.
That evening I sat on the steps in the breezeway for awhile in the evening, tooling aorund on my phone which is all I'd have done in my room anyway. Technically I was waiting for one of the guys (ie Williams or Sam) to take me in a yellow-yellow back to my hotel -- it's only about 100m literally, but there's no sidewalk on the road and it does seem a bit dangerous ... though I could probably manage to take a yellow-yellow myself. But as I said it was nice out and I had no particular reason to hurry back to the hotel. I could hear the laughter and ruckus of the trainees running around the halls of the hostel buildings and thought to myself how much fun they were probably having, young people on a rare multi day trip to another town. Probably having a great time, making memories, misbehaving. I fondly recalled my college conference days and wondered when I got so old.
Wednesday, June 28th, Day 55 - Another relatively early start on the lecturing. As predicted they're more engaged now that they've had that field visit. And another field visit in the afternoon this day. This time we were at the other place we'd gone to last week -- where the hives were located in thick jungley brush, they had been notably badly tempered bees. And the owner, "FM" had been a bit overenthusiastic about doing everything himself. So let's see how this visit goes hey. "FM" btw, last week I didn't know what he looked like outside of the bee suit, I have since learned he's actually an stocky grey haired older man.
As usual we divided into two groups, the first group suited up and we headed into the bush to the hives. Start working on the first hive, and even though I began the process, knocking on the topbars to find the one to open and opening the few, and then handed the hive tool to a trainee to pull one out, as soon as the trainee had taken the topbar out FM took it from him. I could see he really wanted to harvest it, it was entirely uncapped honey, but I had already announced it as uripe unsuitable for harvesting so he reluctantly put it back and then took out the next comb, which was capped, and harvested it. As he reached for the next one I said "please let a trainee do it" but he ignored or didn't hear me and took the next topbar himself and harvested it. As he reached for the next one I said more emphatically "LET . A . TRAINEE . DO . IT" and he used his knife to separate the topbar, let the topbar lift it, and then took it from her. Which is about what he'd done last week. He went through that charade with one or two other trainees before giving up the pretense and doing it all himself while everyone watched.
Then this group of trainees trudged back to the village, while FM, a friend of his and myself stayed by the hives. He went to go prepare the area around the next hive we'd look at, cutting back the brush with his machete, and I wasn't paying much attention until I heard some loud thumping -- he was thwacking right against the hive. And then he roughly lifted the lid without any smoke jsut to I guess see how many bees were in there. Then he picked up an empty hive, roughly dumped it on top of the occupied hive, using the latter as a table, and proceeded to bang around with it cleaning it of the wax moths that had infected it. It was at this moment that I completely checked myself out I think. He had been inconsiderate of the trainees in not giving them opportunities to be involved, him roughly abusing the hive now was a further act of inconsiderateness, stirring the bees up thoroughly! No wonder the bees here had been remarkably badly tempered last week, lord knows what he had done to them before we arrived!! And, I try not to be sentimental about bees, but that kind of rough abusive attitude towards the bees themselves does also piss me off.
Then the next group of trainees arrived. Fm immediately took off the lid from another hive that was there that was empty and began lifting the topbars. It was full of comb but empty of bees, and he started roughly cutting the wax out and throwing it on the ground. I would recommend leaving the wax in there to attract future bees and give them a head start, and definitely not just discarding it onto the ground, but he was getting into it with gusto and I was already kind of in a state of having proverbially thrown up my hands.
Someone asked him why the bees had absconded from this hive and he said he didn't know, he hadn't checked on them in a year (my training emphasizes you should inspect your hives no less than once a month)
Then he opened the one occupied hive in this place (he has a lot more hives around, though I don't know how many are occupied, but I mean in this immediate little corner there were two that had absconded and one still occupied). He didn't even give me the chance to start, tapping hard along the topbars with his large knife ("cutlass" as they call it here), as it happens the bees in this case had made their brood nest in the middle rather than in the end as usual. So where he'd normally be inclined to start at the back end and harvest all the honey and stop at the brood, he ended up having to lift all the brood frames as he went through looking for honey. Which he did roughly and quickly, laying two down on hte neighboring hive to make space. I was mostly standing back but feeling like I should try to participate and seeing this as clearly wrong I stepped forward and asked why they were laid out like that, pointing out that bees were getting crushed, but I didn't get a clear answer from him. I could see some of the trainees looking a bit confused, that they'd been looking forward to participating like yesterday but today they were just watchign this guy roughly hurrying through the hive. This hive didn't end up having any honey to harvest and FM put it back together, no one else from this second group having had a chance to participate.
As we walked back to the the village I was fuming. What a god damn waste of everyone's god damn time. I don't know why FM had volunteered to be involved if he didn't intend to let anyone else participate and didn't seem particularly interested in learning anything new himself. Maybe he thought he'd be showing off how great a beekeeper he is. Well I wasn't impressed. As we walked back I searched my mind for what kind of diplomatically nice thing I could say about the field visit and I really couldn't think of anything.
On the bus on the way back to town the women in the back were clapping and singing for a significant portion so that was nice at least, cheered me up a little bit.
Even though it was 18:00 when we got back to the training center we went back to the lecture hall to cover some more topics so that we can finish tomorrow as soon as possible. Normally I always begin after a field visit by recapping it, both having the trainees recap it, then giving my recap, and then taking questions. And I really couldn't think of anything nice and diplomatic to say about it, not only had FM pissed me off but if I was going to honestly talk about it I'd be saying not to do a lot of the things he had done -- but he's an older and presumably respected member of the local beekeeping community and I don't want to cause drama. So instead I just began the lecture with absolutely no mention of the field visit.
I did get one subtle dig in, we actually covered two topics, honey harvesting and wax processingly, and when I said that because wax is valuable you shouldn't, if you have an empty hive, cut out all the combs and just throw them on the ground, making more or less the exact motions FM had done while doing so, I think there were some knowing smiles.
Anyway, that was the last field visit of the project. Tomorrow we wrap up with this group and return to Accra, and Friday, after nearly two months in Africa I depart. It's bittersweet. I'm ready for Western food and the Next Thing (USA for the first time in four years!)but I'll be sad this is over -- being paid to do development is what I've always dreamed to do, as long as I'm here doing this I'm literally living the dream. But now it must end at least for the foreseeable future
Bonus: here's the trainees singing during a brief break in lecture to get their blood flowing again.