An extremely boring post in which I outline community goals and long-term projects
*****
As I texted a few of my friends earlier in the week, it’s now been one month straight that I’ve been healthy. I think that’s a record since entering the country and no doubt a miracle. I feel as if I’ve been fairly productive during this time period, but that depends on the standard you’re holding it against.
I’ve had a consistent week of teaching health in my four communities, yet another miracle considering the distances I have to travel and the means in which I travel by. The farthest community is about twelve miles away, one way. So I can get lucky (and wake up ridiculously early) and hop on a tro-tro and just get out along the way OR, I can hope to get extremely lucky and hitch a ride in a truck or some other car that’s going that way (I got a ride back in an air-conditioned truck yesterday with some guys working for the district I live in - it was, in a word, amazing). The ever-ready go-to, of course, is the bicycle. I can do it in the morning, when the air is cool, but by the time I finish, the sun is high overhead and it’s simply brutal. There’s no shade whatsoever and the last leg of the trip is uphill in very sandy dirt, which is never fun unless you’re training for the Tour de France - and even then, I’m sure it isn’t actually considered fun.
I’ve had some development in the projects my community is interested in starting and I hope to get a lot of work done toward that goal on this trip into town. We’re thinking of starting some rabbit breeding stations and snail rearing beds as income generating projects. These would fall under secondary projects of mine since they don’t exactly fit under health and water sanitation, but, in the end, it will be for the benefit of the community, so it’s entirely supported by Peace Corps (read: as a pat on the back; I have to find funding on my own for the most part). During our workshop we had last month, we learned about some easy ways to get projects like these started with almost no capital. You can do it, for the most part, using only local materials, which is a plus for the farmers who don’t have a lot of extra income to begin with. That way, if the project fails, it won’t be at any loss but labor and during the dry season, people are sitting around twiddling their thumbs for the most part.
And now that I’ve been working more solidly in the other three communities that I’m supposed to be involved with, I’ve found it a lot easier to identify the needs that the people are having. In two places, it’s water. There aren’t enough boreholes (or any) to support the water needs of the people but it takes a lot of work (and money) to get a borehole dug in this area. The water tables are low (or very, very deep - and the tools to reach it aren’t available) and the boreholes that have already been dug have run dry. In an area where it doesn’t rain for over one hundred days (we got our first rain a few weeks ago - 108 days without it, and apparently to have gotten it at all was amazing, it usually takes longer), it’s crucial to have a consistent water source. In the village I live in, we’re lucky to have a large dam that was constructed by the mango company - it helps to irrigate the trees year around and also serves as a watering hole for the people. I’m trying to work with World Vision (who digs the boreholes) and New Energy (who, if there’s enough water, taps into the borehole and pipes water to different stations in the community which turns one borehole into four places for women to get water from). So, that’s the goal right now for those two communities - increase water supplies.
For the community I live in, it’s to finish the clinic. I’ve been made aware of several places I can apply to in order to get the funding to finish everything, so I’m pretty excited about that. There’s a guy in Tamale that’s from my village who’s been spearheading the whole thing, so I’m meeting with him soon to get an idea of the resources we’re working with on our side.
For the other community, I’m not really sure. They have adequate water, there’s a clinic, their school is very nice compared to the surrounding places. On top of that, no one has really voiced anything to me about what they would like me to do there. I’ve been working with the clinic quite a bit - the nurses are pretty great resources for me. When women come to weigh their babies, I’ll do nutritional or sexual health education, basically anything relevant to them at that point in their lives. I was thinking about a youth center, but that might be a little too big at this point in the process. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.
Sometimes I think it’s too early to start thinking about things like that, but then I realize I’ve been at my post for almost seven months out of the twenty-four. I’m over a quarter of the way finished. My summer is going to be packed. Me and about five other volunteers have decided to do a trip down the White Volta River doing HIV/AIDS education to hard-to-reach communities along the shores. It’s a total rip-off of some volunteers who just did one on Lake Volta with the island communities, but we figured it worked and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. So we’ll pick ten communities along the river, starting at one volunteer’s site and ending at another’s, and we’ll do HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, prevention education and family planning sessions. There are a lot of misconceptions about family planning (and, of course, HIV/AIDS) among the more isolated communities, so the idea is to reach them via the river and present the information in a non-invasive way.
After that (or maybe before, depending on timing), another volunteer and I are going to do a sort of campout with her HIV/AIDS club and my health club. Her kids are going to come here and show my kids their AIDS dramas (something my kids want to do but I have no idea how to go about teaching them) and my kids are going to work with hers on doing some informative HIV/AIDS murals. We’ll probably camp out at the school and play a soccer game or something that night, then her kids’ll head out the next morning.
In the middle of all that will be a video me and the PCAV (Peace Corps A/V club) guys will be working on. It’s a video for staging for the new trainees while they’re still in Philadelphia to introduce them to Ghana and what they could possibly be involved in during their service. It’s a good idea and almost a necessity as I know I had no idea what to expect once I got off the plane. The first half will be done solely as an introduction to Ghana itself, then we’ll do some volunteer interviews from each sector and then we’ll introduce the staff. It’ll only be like twenty minutes and with the team we have working on it, I think it’ll be pretty fun. If it’s a success, then the group gets to continue on and do further videos for anything Peace Corps Ghana wants (instructional videos on how to grow groundnuts, marketing, language, etc.). It’ll be a nice side project if it goes through.
But the big thing will be training in June and July. I’m hoping to get selected, but I’m not going to hold my breath. I think they’ll take only two people from each sector and we have like thirty people in ours. If I’m not a technical trainer, there’s also the option (or so I’ve heard) of a cultural/language trainer. That sounds more appealing to me and I know it’s something I would’ve appreciated having during our training. I think it’ll be a volunteer who has a good grasp on the culture of the area certain volunteers are going to (for instance, the northern culture is a 180 from the south, but all the training is done in the south, so it’s a slap in the face once you get up here). I feel like I can fit into that, but of course, there’s always someone who knows more and you never know as much as you think you do. Some of my friends say I do well at the language, but I don’t feel like I do. At any rate, I think it’d be a fun, given my educational interests, to teach people about the culture of my area.
By the time all of that is finished, it will be the middle of August and I’ll no longer be a ‘freshman.’ There will be a new group of people to pull rank on and I’ll make sure I don’t do that. I think it’s ridiculous and there are plenty of people here that do it at every chance they get. High school was seven years ago, but I’m not sure they got the message. It might be just me, but if someone has done the work and has done it well, then they should reap the benefits, not someone who hasn’t done the work but wants to hop on the train at the last minute and claim seniority. /rant
Other than that, things are peachy here. :) I got to help build a house over the last few weeks, and in a few more I think I’ll have new neighbors. Their house has increased the distance to my latrine by a few yards, but they’re nice, so I’ll forgive them. I got to plaster walls with mud, pound the floors with more mud (and cow dung, a…surprise to say the least) and took a lot of pictures in the process.
My break is over. There are fourth graders anxiously awaiting my lesson on keeping fingernails short and my horrible songs and singing to go along with it.
As I texted a few of my friends earlier in the week, it’s now been one month straight that I’ve been healthy. I think that’s a record since entering the country and no doubt a miracle. I feel as if I’ve been fairly productive during this time period, but that depends on the standard you’re holding it against.
I’ve had a consistent week of teaching health in my four communities, yet another miracle considering the distances I have to travel and the means in which I travel by. The farthest community is about twelve miles away, one way. So I can get lucky (and wake up ridiculously early) and hop on a tro-tro and just get out along the way OR, I can hope to get extremely lucky and hitch a ride in a truck or some other car that’s going that way (I got a ride back in an air-conditioned truck yesterday with some guys working for the district I live in - it was, in a word, amazing). The ever-ready go-to, of course, is the bicycle. I can do it in the morning, when the air is cool, but by the time I finish, the sun is high overhead and it’s simply brutal. There’s no shade whatsoever and the last leg of the trip is uphill in very sandy dirt, which is never fun unless you’re training for the Tour de France - and even then, I’m sure it isn’t actually considered fun.
I’ve had some development in the projects my community is interested in starting and I hope to get a lot of work done toward that goal on this trip into town. We’re thinking of starting some rabbit breeding stations and snail rearing beds as income generating projects. These would fall under secondary projects of mine since they don’t exactly fit under health and water sanitation, but, in the end, it will be for the benefit of the community, so it’s entirely supported by Peace Corps (read: as a pat on the back; I have to find funding on my own for the most part). During our workshop we had last month, we learned about some easy ways to get projects like these started with almost no capital. You can do it, for the most part, using only local materials, which is a plus for the farmers who don’t have a lot of extra income to begin with. That way, if the project fails, it won’t be at any loss but labor and during the dry season, people are sitting around twiddling their thumbs for the most part.
And now that I’ve been working more solidly in the other three communities that I’m supposed to be involved with, I’ve found it a lot easier to identify the needs that the people are having. In two places, it’s water. There aren’t enough boreholes (or any) to support the water needs of the people but it takes a lot of work (and money) to get a borehole dug in this area. The water tables are low (or very, very deep - and the tools to reach it aren’t available) and the boreholes that have already been dug have run dry. In an area where it doesn’t rain for over one hundred days (we got our first rain a few weeks ago - 108 days without it, and apparently to have gotten it at all was amazing, it usually takes longer), it’s crucial to have a consistent water source. In the village I live in, we’re lucky to have a large dam that was constructed by the mango company - it helps to irrigate the trees year around and also serves as a watering hole for the people. I’m trying to work with World Vision (who digs the boreholes) and New Energy (who, if there’s enough water, taps into the borehole and pipes water to different stations in the community which turns one borehole into four places for women to get water from). So, that’s the goal right now for those two communities - increase water supplies.
For the community I live in, it’s to finish the clinic. I’ve been made aware of several places I can apply to in order to get the funding to finish everything, so I’m pretty excited about that. There’s a guy in Tamale that’s from my village who’s been spearheading the whole thing, so I’m meeting with him soon to get an idea of the resources we’re working with on our side.
For the other community, I’m not really sure. They have adequate water, there’s a clinic, their school is very nice compared to the surrounding places. On top of that, no one has really voiced anything to me about what they would like me to do there. I’ve been working with the clinic quite a bit - the nurses are pretty great resources for me. When women come to weigh their babies, I’ll do nutritional or sexual health education, basically anything relevant to them at that point in their lives. I was thinking about a youth center, but that might be a little too big at this point in the process. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.
Sometimes I think it’s too early to start thinking about things like that, but then I realize I’ve been at my post for almost seven months out of the twenty-four. I’m over a quarter of the way finished. My summer is going to be packed. Me and about five other volunteers have decided to do a trip down the White Volta River doing HIV/AIDS education to hard-to-reach communities along the shores. It’s a total rip-off of some volunteers who just did one on Lake Volta with the island communities, but we figured it worked and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. So we’ll pick ten communities along the river, starting at one volunteer’s site and ending at another’s, and we’ll do HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, prevention education and family planning sessions. There are a lot of misconceptions about family planning (and, of course, HIV/AIDS) among the more isolated communities, so the idea is to reach them via the river and present the information in a non-invasive way.
After that (or maybe before, depending on timing), another volunteer and I are going to do a sort of campout with her HIV/AIDS club and my health club. Her kids are going to come here and show my kids their AIDS dramas (something my kids want to do but I have no idea how to go about teaching them) and my kids are going to work with hers on doing some informative HIV/AIDS murals. We’ll probably camp out at the school and play a soccer game or something that night, then her kids’ll head out the next morning.
In the middle of all that will be a video me and the PCAV (Peace Corps A/V club) guys will be working on. It’s a video for staging for the new trainees while they’re still in Philadelphia to introduce them to Ghana and what they could possibly be involved in during their service. It’s a good idea and almost a necessity as I know I had no idea what to expect once I got off the plane. The first half will be done solely as an introduction to Ghana itself, then we’ll do some volunteer interviews from each sector and then we’ll introduce the staff. It’ll only be like twenty minutes and with the team we have working on it, I think it’ll be pretty fun. If it’s a success, then the group gets to continue on and do further videos for anything Peace Corps Ghana wants (instructional videos on how to grow groundnuts, marketing, language, etc.). It’ll be a nice side project if it goes through.
But the big thing will be training in June and July. I’m hoping to get selected, but I’m not going to hold my breath. I think they’ll take only two people from each sector and we have like thirty people in ours. If I’m not a technical trainer, there’s also the option (or so I’ve heard) of a cultural/language trainer. That sounds more appealing to me and I know it’s something I would’ve appreciated having during our training. I think it’ll be a volunteer who has a good grasp on the culture of the area certain volunteers are going to (for instance, the northern culture is a 180 from the south, but all the training is done in the south, so it’s a slap in the face once you get up here). I feel like I can fit into that, but of course, there’s always someone who knows more and you never know as much as you think you do. Some of my friends say I do well at the language, but I don’t feel like I do. At any rate, I think it’d be a fun, given my educational interests, to teach people about the culture of my area.
By the time all of that is finished, it will be the middle of August and I’ll no longer be a ‘freshman.’ There will be a new group of people to pull rank on and I’ll make sure I don’t do that. I think it’s ridiculous and there are plenty of people here that do it at every chance they get. High school was seven years ago, but I’m not sure they got the message. It might be just me, but if someone has done the work and has done it well, then they should reap the benefits, not someone who hasn’t done the work but wants to hop on the train at the last minute and claim seniority. /rant
Other than that, things are peachy here. :) I got to help build a house over the last few weeks, and in a few more I think I’ll have new neighbors. Their house has increased the distance to my latrine by a few yards, but they’re nice, so I’ll forgive them. I got to plaster walls with mud, pound the floors with more mud (and cow dung, a…surprise to say the least) and took a lot of pictures in the process.
My break is over. There are fourth graders anxiously awaiting my lesson on keeping fingernails short and my horrible songs and singing to go along with it.