Projects Galore
*****
I’ve had a rash of great news regarding projects as of late - and then, of course, the usual setbacks. But my great mood cannot be dashed!
I’ll do everything in bullet points because I can’t be bothered to make transition sentences from one paragraph to the next. I apologize ahead of time for the length, but great news necessitates waxing, even in the not-so-poetic manner that I possess!
• Rabbit Rearing - I’ve officially closed the paperwork part of the program, but things are still progressing. I’ve gotten almost all the people for the next phase and we’re going to hold a meeting in the next two weeks to discuss all the details (before they receive the two free rabbits from the first group, Group B needs to build local structures, which we’re going to do an example of at someone’s house - but we have to wait until the rains stop because it’s made of the local mud bricks). After that phase is completed, I’m going to move the program to the other three villages I’m working in, hopefully, with minimal outside financial assistance. Everyone else is all ansty to get started, but it’s one of those things that I wanted to make sure was running smoothly in one place before moving it around. Too many times I’ve been pushed and guilted into doing projects everywhere when I’m not ready and don’t have enough resources and I end up falling flat on my face and blamed for not preparing well enough. Not with this one. So far, out of the ten pairs, we’ve had nine births. Five have died in the first few days, but twenty-three have reached a few weeks old, so it’s a safe bet to say they’ll mature and can be sold. - Can I just interject and say how incredibly adorable baby rabbits are? Their heads are huge and their ears are tiny! - The market price is five cedis, so that’s a total of one hundred and fifteen cedis that can be made off of the first round of births. I think the tenth rabbit will be due any day now. She’s starting to pull out her fur. Because of this success, one of the members went to the district agric office and talked to the officer in charge. They’re very interested in the program and are going to host the Farmer’s Day Celebration in my village to showcase the program! It’s a national holiday and every district does its own thing, but I don’t think the ceremony has ever been held here before. I’m excited - it’s going to allow the rabbit breeders an advertising platform via radio and television. Hopefully that will translate into demand and sales. It’ll also be good publicity to get basic information about small-animal rearing out to the public, which helps with food security, one of the main goals for the project.
• Soccer Camp - myself and two other volunteers who are working with the mango farmers are going to hold a soccer camp in December for World AIDS Day. It’s Lizzy’s brainchild that grew out of some fantasy she had about having the Black Stars (the Ghana national football team) come and work with us. The Stars most likely won’t be in presence, but the Tamale AAA team will! It turns out the mango company we work with are the sole sponsors of the Real Tamale United and, according to one of the managers, there will be “absolutely no problem” in getting a few, if not all, of the players to come and help out with some drills, put in face time with the kids, be good role models, etc. The idea is that we take a junior high age boy and girl from each of the villages where the farms are located and bring them to a central location for a three-day soccer camp. Soccer is the draw, but the main goal will be doing health and life skills education in the afternoons. They do a lot of camps called G/GLOW (Girls and Guys Leading Our World) in Peace Corps and it’s a get-together of a few dozen young people where they can discuss issues they face (especially regarding abstinence and sexual health), learn ways to cope with them and find support in one another. We’re going to be doing the same thing, but adding soccer in the mornings. It should be pretty fun. We’re going to enlist the help of some nearby PCVs and do a whole Blue Team, Orange Team, Green Team thing with the kids. We should have close to one hundred, so they’ll keep us busy. We were also looking for an ideal place to hold it and we found one - with some more good news attached. Our supervisor with the mango company is good friends with that district’s headmaster and the senior high school would be the absolute perfect place to hold it. We’re making the dates after school has closed for the term and there’s a good chance we’ll have use of the facility so the kids can have somewhere to sleep, bathe, and have classroom and football field access.
• School Roof Project - I’ve also been working on this project for about eight months now. I’ve done all of the legwork, the proposal was written and I was waiting until the next fiscal year (October 1st) to submit it. Only problem is that the budget the roof was coming out of isn’t going to be replenished this year. That’s…no good. But, after talking with some of the Accra folks, I think I can tailor it to fit another budget and do it in several phases. It’s going to create a lot more work for me and drastically increase the timeline, but I’m game if, in the end, the roof gets put on the school and the people have an increased water supply.
• Village Bicycle Project - as hair-pulling of a this thing has been, I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s coming up on a year since I submitted the request for bikes - one full year of no less than four people a day asking me “When are the bikes coming?” Some days it’s the same person who asked yesterday and I want to smash my face into the trunk of a Nim tree. They’re in the Upper West Region right now doing a few more volunteer’s sites. They were supposed to be here, but I won’t fault them - several of the volunteers they’re working with right now will be finishing their service next month, so they obviously get first dibs. But, apparently the bikes we ordered are here…? And we (the Northern Region group) are next…? Hoping…? I’m too scared to hope anymore. If it weren’t for the fact that my little buddy Mohammed is finally going to get a bicycle to go to farm and school with I would’ve thrown in the towel months ago and told everyone that the project folded. Well, that and the fact that everyone would know I was lying when VBP showed up at the other two villages with bikes and word started to spread.
• SHEP Teacher’s Workshop - this is something I’ve had cooking in my mind for months now, and it’ll still be on hold for a while, but things are looking hopeful. Health volunteers teach in the schools sometimes under the School Health Education Program. It’s one of my favorite - and most exhausting - things to do, but, in the end, it’s not very sustainable. Me coming and teaching a lesson is really just providing a teacher with a thirty-minute break and the kids with some fun activities and a little bit of knowledge. In talking with a few of the teachers who seem interested, I’ve gleaned that at least part of the problem is that they don’t actually have the information at their disposal. Health hasn’t been taught in the schools in Ghana, so they don’t have a lot of the basic foundations necessary to carry out lessons on basic health topics. Catholic Relief Services is working on and has put out several teacher’s manuals that show how to design a health lesson framework for the school year, as well as gives basic information about the most common health issues for the children in this area. I want to get my hands on those books and see what I can do with them. It started off with just the teachers in my area - there are six schools, four primary, two JHS - and, in my head, grew to a district, then possibly region-wide workshop we could hold. I’m thinking two or three days, two teachers from interested schools (most of them from villages with a PCV, but not necessarily so) and a crash course in how to design health lesson plans as well as teaching them how to utilize a lot of the tools that we as PCVs are given. I hope to provide each school with an education kit so that the teachers can use them when they go back to their posts. It’s something that the Ghana Education Service should already be doing (and maybe they are, but I’m not hearing about it and neither are my teachers), but it’s a way for us as Peace Corps Volunteers to help support where things are lacking. People really seem to like workshops here and I remember when my counterpart and I attended my in-service training in Kumasi last year - both of us returned motivated and anxious to start utilizing all that we’d learned. I’m hoping this might have the same effect with my teachers.
• 50th Anniversary Celebration - as some of you may or may not know, Peace Corps is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary in August of 2011. Ghana was the first country to host volunteers, so we’re planning on a big to-do in Accra. We’ve got a lot of people working on fund-raising ideas, product development and marketing and various bits of history and media we can present to the public. Hopefully a logo will be decided on soon (apparently they need a Congressional Committee to decide on it - tax dollars at serious work here, people. Serious.) and we can get the go-ahead for a website where the general public can purchase some of the things we’re hawking. Since my bottle cap earring-school fund idea with my kids has fizzled (they like the idea of it, it’s just getting a bunch of fifteen year olds organized to actually work on it with regularity that’s been the hard part), I’m making a bunch of my own to raise money for the celebration. We’re also working on t-shirt designs and cloth print, some brass and wood figures (bookends, keychains, Christmas ornaments, etc.) and jewelry. Most of it will be Peace Corps related at first, but we’re hoping that the groups we’re enlisting to work with us over here can translate their products into something less specific so that they can have a broader market overseas. Or something. I don’t know. I’m not a businessy person, I just drum up sales and get people excited. So look for more advertising soon and think about purchasing some things. We’re not really getting any money to hold this event, so everything is being raised by the Volunteers. And we’re not thinking of it as so much of a party (it’s gonna be awesome and very party-like, yes), but more like a thank you and commemoration event. Fifty years is a long time to have worked with someone non-stop and we want to showcase all the positive work that’s happened because of this relationship.
• GLEE Boat Trip - (yes, that’s the name - the Ghana Longboat Educational Expedition) we’ve been working on this project for the better part of this year and it’s finally going to happen, no matter what forces in the Northern Region conspire against us. The first problem, after we got the go-ahead from the PC office, was that there were now only seven available villages to stop at in the district we’re going to cover instead of the original ten. There’s one that would be incredibly ideal - extremely isolated, only reachable by a tiny boat and leads to several other smaller villages - but the navigator didn’t seem keen on going there for whatever reason. So, we (the five of us who are working on this project) shrugged and said, let’s go a little further down river into the next district. There’s a volunteer there in the capital so we’ve petitioned him to talk with the Ghana Health Services in that area to see which villages would be ideal. Problem One: boom! SOLVED. Then Problem Two arises (and it’s sort of humorous - I wish others could’ve been there to see mine and Julie’s faces). We’ve been talking to everyone on God’s green earth about this river - how wide it is, how deep it is, how far apart these villages are, who knows the river best, what dangers could possibly arise, what the villages can provide for us in the way of shelter and food, etc. In all of this time - months now - no one has ever mentioned this, but Julie got a phone call from our navigator the other day that went something like this:
Ben (the navigator): So, you know how the boat drivers are somehow unsure about any of the water after Daboya?
Julie: Yes. That’s why we’re hiring you as a navigator because you know that side of the water very well.
Ben: Uh-hnnnnh. It’s like…there is somehow a bridge at Daboya that makes it impossible for boats to cross. I’m thinking that’s why the drivers do not know our places.
Julie: A bridge? Can we just drive under it?
Ben: You know, it’s something like a footbridge so it’s very low and it makes it very difficult for anything to go further north.
Julie (covering the phone, to me): Was there a bridge in Daboya last year?
Me: A bridge? Wh-there’s a…no. Just a bunch of boats. There was no bridge last year. Is this a new bridge?
Julie: Is this a new bridge because we are somehow not remembering a bridge there from our last visit to Daboya.
Ben: Enh, well, it disappears in the rainy season - it’s very low to the water.
Julie (to me): He said the water covers it! Why has no one told us about this bridge?!
[Side note: the Northern Region is very dry, not a lot of need for boats other than small canoes to go from one side of the river to the other. The reason it’s taken us so long to get this project going was finding a boat. This boat is the only one we’ve found on this half of the country that would meet PC safety requirements - it’s massive. And it’s located on the wrong side of this recently remembered bridge. The bridge is in the last village we would be hitting on our excursion and since we’re bringing the boat all the way up river to start from the top and work our way down, we now have a major obstacle in visiting even one village that we’ve made arrangements with.]
Me: Umm….I’m still a little skeptical about this bridge. No one’s even mentioned this so far. I vaguely remember some sort of dock-like thing sticking out of the water when we went there, but it wasn’t…well, yeah, I guess that was rainy season last year so the water was high…this is not good. I don’t think this is good at all, Julie.
Julie: This is definitely not good. Ben, so…how do people go from one side of the river to the other?
Ben: They don’t.
Julie: Oh. Okay. We’ll call you back in a little while. Thank you. (hangs up)
Me: Dude! We can just…organize a minga!
Julie: A minga?
Me: Yeah. A work party. I…think? I can’t remember my anthropology class, but anyways, some strong guys in the village come stand on the bridge and either we’ll lift the boat out of the water and over the bridge or we can push it onto the bank and carry it…what? How wide is this footbridge? Like eight feet? Surely we can manage that.
Julie: Do you remember how big this boat is?
Me: I don’t care - these people are strong.
Julie (skeptical but hopeful): Maybe…I wonder how much it would cost to put it on a bus…?
Me: This boat’s huge. I don’t even want to think about how much it’d be. The proposal’s in - there’s no more room for adding money or upping anything.
Julie: Yeah, but most of the fuel money was going toward driving the boat up river, against the current. If we put it on a bus, then we’re not using even half as much of the money we’ve budgeted for fuel.
Me: Maybe. Mpaha is really far and on a horrible road. It’ll probably take no less than eight hours for a truck to get in there, get it loaded, then get to Nawuni. It’s just gonna be so expensive.
Julie: Well, it’s either that or we can’t do this project.
Me: I really think people could lift it… Idon’tunderstandwhynoonehaseversaidanythingaboutthisbridge! We’ve talked to dozens of people about it.
Julie: I’m slightly worried.
Me: I’m more than slightly worried - I’m somehow anxious. What if we -
Julie: Hold on. (answers the phone) Ben. Hello. Yes, we were just discussing our options. What? Are you sure? Positive? Okay. Okay. This is very good to hear. Thank you. Good-bye.
Me: What happened?
Julie: Ben said… ‘The bridge is somehow broken and it does not fully cross the river so we can just drive around it.’
Me: You’re kidding, right?
Julie: No.
Problem Two: SOLVED.
Yesterday I get a call from another PCV who’s working on this project, Kim. She said - and this is great in that it’s so incredibly typical - the first leg of our trip is during the National Immunization Day Campaign so all of the nurses that had been committed to doing the HIV/AIDS Voluntary Testing and Counseling in each of the villages can’t come. The NID campaigns are generally around the same time each year, but nothing is set in stone. Last year they happened the last week in November, if I remember correctly. Regardless, this isn’t exactly something we could have planned on and it’s one of those things that’s extremely frustrating because, coming from our perspective, this is something that the Ghana Health Services should have A) known about and/or planned long before now and B) informed their outposts about so they wouldn’t commit to our program.
We’re in a tight window - we have the end of rainy season and there’s only a few weeks that the river is high enough so we don’t run aground and low enough so that we can actually bank the boat and get into the villages. Our window is about three weeks and our trip is planned for two of them. No wiggle room.
And three of the five of us have the Village Bicycle Project coming to our sites right around that time so it’s going to be Chaos City. We’re working on some solutions to Problem Three, but as of now: UNSOLVED.
So that’s what I have going on right. It seems like a lot, but I’m strangely…not busy. Downtime drives me nuts and makes me feel like a worthless volunteer. I’m one of those that always needs to be doing, doing, doing and I’m never actually doing enough. I’m aware of my problem and the dilemma it puts me in. I even sometimes try to fix it, but that’s how I am with everything in life, so I’m not under any illusion that it’s going to change any time soon.
For instance, if I have to leave to go to town for a few days to work on paperwork and whatnot, I feel like I should be at site doing…something. I don’t like not being at home. I don’t like living out of a bag, I don’t like staying away for more than a few days because I hate hearing “You kept long” from everyone when I get back. But then, when I’m at site and not working on things, I feel like I need to be somewhere that I can work on things (which almost always involves electricity and a constant line of communication). My work ethic and compulsion to always be in action is a double-edged sword, especially in this type of environment.
I woke up at dawn with a torrential downpour with the compulsion to make more bottle cap earrings and cracked groundnuts today like a fiend. My hands are incredibly sore, but I equate soreness with accomplishment. Well, soreness and the fact that I have a bucket of shelled peanuts and five shiny pairs of earrings on my table.
I’ve had a rash of great news regarding projects as of late - and then, of course, the usual setbacks. But my great mood cannot be dashed!
I’ll do everything in bullet points because I can’t be bothered to make transition sentences from one paragraph to the next. I apologize ahead of time for the length, but great news necessitates waxing, even in the not-so-poetic manner that I possess!
• Rabbit Rearing - I’ve officially closed the paperwork part of the program, but things are still progressing. I’ve gotten almost all the people for the next phase and we’re going to hold a meeting in the next two weeks to discuss all the details (before they receive the two free rabbits from the first group, Group B needs to build local structures, which we’re going to do an example of at someone’s house - but we have to wait until the rains stop because it’s made of the local mud bricks). After that phase is completed, I’m going to move the program to the other three villages I’m working in, hopefully, with minimal outside financial assistance. Everyone else is all ansty to get started, but it’s one of those things that I wanted to make sure was running smoothly in one place before moving it around. Too many times I’ve been pushed and guilted into doing projects everywhere when I’m not ready and don’t have enough resources and I end up falling flat on my face and blamed for not preparing well enough. Not with this one. So far, out of the ten pairs, we’ve had nine births. Five have died in the first few days, but twenty-three have reached a few weeks old, so it’s a safe bet to say they’ll mature and can be sold. - Can I just interject and say how incredibly adorable baby rabbits are? Their heads are huge and their ears are tiny! - The market price is five cedis, so that’s a total of one hundred and fifteen cedis that can be made off of the first round of births. I think the tenth rabbit will be due any day now. She’s starting to pull out her fur. Because of this success, one of the members went to the district agric office and talked to the officer in charge. They’re very interested in the program and are going to host the Farmer’s Day Celebration in my village to showcase the program! It’s a national holiday and every district does its own thing, but I don’t think the ceremony has ever been held here before. I’m excited - it’s going to allow the rabbit breeders an advertising platform via radio and television. Hopefully that will translate into demand and sales. It’ll also be good publicity to get basic information about small-animal rearing out to the public, which helps with food security, one of the main goals for the project.
• Soccer Camp - myself and two other volunteers who are working with the mango farmers are going to hold a soccer camp in December for World AIDS Day. It’s Lizzy’s brainchild that grew out of some fantasy she had about having the Black Stars (the Ghana national football team) come and work with us. The Stars most likely won’t be in presence, but the Tamale AAA team will! It turns out the mango company we work with are the sole sponsors of the Real Tamale United and, according to one of the managers, there will be “absolutely no problem” in getting a few, if not all, of the players to come and help out with some drills, put in face time with the kids, be good role models, etc. The idea is that we take a junior high age boy and girl from each of the villages where the farms are located and bring them to a central location for a three-day soccer camp. Soccer is the draw, but the main goal will be doing health and life skills education in the afternoons. They do a lot of camps called G/GLOW (Girls and Guys Leading Our World) in Peace Corps and it’s a get-together of a few dozen young people where they can discuss issues they face (especially regarding abstinence and sexual health), learn ways to cope with them and find support in one another. We’re going to be doing the same thing, but adding soccer in the mornings. It should be pretty fun. We’re going to enlist the help of some nearby PCVs and do a whole Blue Team, Orange Team, Green Team thing with the kids. We should have close to one hundred, so they’ll keep us busy. We were also looking for an ideal place to hold it and we found one - with some more good news attached. Our supervisor with the mango company is good friends with that district’s headmaster and the senior high school would be the absolute perfect place to hold it. We’re making the dates after school has closed for the term and there’s a good chance we’ll have use of the facility so the kids can have somewhere to sleep, bathe, and have classroom and football field access.
• School Roof Project - I’ve also been working on this project for about eight months now. I’ve done all of the legwork, the proposal was written and I was waiting until the next fiscal year (October 1st) to submit it. Only problem is that the budget the roof was coming out of isn’t going to be replenished this year. That’s…no good. But, after talking with some of the Accra folks, I think I can tailor it to fit another budget and do it in several phases. It’s going to create a lot more work for me and drastically increase the timeline, but I’m game if, in the end, the roof gets put on the school and the people have an increased water supply.
• Village Bicycle Project - as hair-pulling of a this thing has been, I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s coming up on a year since I submitted the request for bikes - one full year of no less than four people a day asking me “When are the bikes coming?” Some days it’s the same person who asked yesterday and I want to smash my face into the trunk of a Nim tree. They’re in the Upper West Region right now doing a few more volunteer’s sites. They were supposed to be here, but I won’t fault them - several of the volunteers they’re working with right now will be finishing their service next month, so they obviously get first dibs. But, apparently the bikes we ordered are here…? And we (the Northern Region group) are next…? Hoping…? I’m too scared to hope anymore. If it weren’t for the fact that my little buddy Mohammed is finally going to get a bicycle to go to farm and school with I would’ve thrown in the towel months ago and told everyone that the project folded. Well, that and the fact that everyone would know I was lying when VBP showed up at the other two villages with bikes and word started to spread.
• SHEP Teacher’s Workshop - this is something I’ve had cooking in my mind for months now, and it’ll still be on hold for a while, but things are looking hopeful. Health volunteers teach in the schools sometimes under the School Health Education Program. It’s one of my favorite - and most exhausting - things to do, but, in the end, it’s not very sustainable. Me coming and teaching a lesson is really just providing a teacher with a thirty-minute break and the kids with some fun activities and a little bit of knowledge. In talking with a few of the teachers who seem interested, I’ve gleaned that at least part of the problem is that they don’t actually have the information at their disposal. Health hasn’t been taught in the schools in Ghana, so they don’t have a lot of the basic foundations necessary to carry out lessons on basic health topics. Catholic Relief Services is working on and has put out several teacher’s manuals that show how to design a health lesson framework for the school year, as well as gives basic information about the most common health issues for the children in this area. I want to get my hands on those books and see what I can do with them. It started off with just the teachers in my area - there are six schools, four primary, two JHS - and, in my head, grew to a district, then possibly region-wide workshop we could hold. I’m thinking two or three days, two teachers from interested schools (most of them from villages with a PCV, but not necessarily so) and a crash course in how to design health lesson plans as well as teaching them how to utilize a lot of the tools that we as PCVs are given. I hope to provide each school with an education kit so that the teachers can use them when they go back to their posts. It’s something that the Ghana Education Service should already be doing (and maybe they are, but I’m not hearing about it and neither are my teachers), but it’s a way for us as Peace Corps Volunteers to help support where things are lacking. People really seem to like workshops here and I remember when my counterpart and I attended my in-service training in Kumasi last year - both of us returned motivated and anxious to start utilizing all that we’d learned. I’m hoping this might have the same effect with my teachers.
• 50th Anniversary Celebration - as some of you may or may not know, Peace Corps is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary in August of 2011. Ghana was the first country to host volunteers, so we’re planning on a big to-do in Accra. We’ve got a lot of people working on fund-raising ideas, product development and marketing and various bits of history and media we can present to the public. Hopefully a logo will be decided on soon (apparently they need a Congressional Committee to decide on it - tax dollars at serious work here, people. Serious.) and we can get the go-ahead for a website where the general public can purchase some of the things we’re hawking. Since my bottle cap earring-school fund idea with my kids has fizzled (they like the idea of it, it’s just getting a bunch of fifteen year olds organized to actually work on it with regularity that’s been the hard part), I’m making a bunch of my own to raise money for the celebration. We’re also working on t-shirt designs and cloth print, some brass and wood figures (bookends, keychains, Christmas ornaments, etc.) and jewelry. Most of it will be Peace Corps related at first, but we’re hoping that the groups we’re enlisting to work with us over here can translate their products into something less specific so that they can have a broader market overseas. Or something. I don’t know. I’m not a businessy person, I just drum up sales and get people excited. So look for more advertising soon and think about purchasing some things. We’re not really getting any money to hold this event, so everything is being raised by the Volunteers. And we’re not thinking of it as so much of a party (it’s gonna be awesome and very party-like, yes), but more like a thank you and commemoration event. Fifty years is a long time to have worked with someone non-stop and we want to showcase all the positive work that’s happened because of this relationship.
• GLEE Boat Trip - (yes, that’s the name - the Ghana Longboat Educational Expedition) we’ve been working on this project for the better part of this year and it’s finally going to happen, no matter what forces in the Northern Region conspire against us. The first problem, after we got the go-ahead from the PC office, was that there were now only seven available villages to stop at in the district we’re going to cover instead of the original ten. There’s one that would be incredibly ideal - extremely isolated, only reachable by a tiny boat and leads to several other smaller villages - but the navigator didn’t seem keen on going there for whatever reason. So, we (the five of us who are working on this project) shrugged and said, let’s go a little further down river into the next district. There’s a volunteer there in the capital so we’ve petitioned him to talk with the Ghana Health Services in that area to see which villages would be ideal. Problem One: boom! SOLVED. Then Problem Two arises (and it’s sort of humorous - I wish others could’ve been there to see mine and Julie’s faces). We’ve been talking to everyone on God’s green earth about this river - how wide it is, how deep it is, how far apart these villages are, who knows the river best, what dangers could possibly arise, what the villages can provide for us in the way of shelter and food, etc. In all of this time - months now - no one has ever mentioned this, but Julie got a phone call from our navigator the other day that went something like this:
Ben (the navigator): So, you know how the boat drivers are somehow unsure about any of the water after Daboya?
Julie: Yes. That’s why we’re hiring you as a navigator because you know that side of the water very well.
Ben: Uh-hnnnnh. It’s like…there is somehow a bridge at Daboya that makes it impossible for boats to cross. I’m thinking that’s why the drivers do not know our places.
Julie: A bridge? Can we just drive under it?
Ben: You know, it’s something like a footbridge so it’s very low and it makes it very difficult for anything to go further north.
Julie (covering the phone, to me): Was there a bridge in Daboya last year?
Me: A bridge? Wh-there’s a…no. Just a bunch of boats. There was no bridge last year. Is this a new bridge?
Julie: Is this a new bridge because we are somehow not remembering a bridge there from our last visit to Daboya.
Ben: Enh, well, it disappears in the rainy season - it’s very low to the water.
Julie (to me): He said the water covers it! Why has no one told us about this bridge?!
[Side note: the Northern Region is very dry, not a lot of need for boats other than small canoes to go from one side of the river to the other. The reason it’s taken us so long to get this project going was finding a boat. This boat is the only one we’ve found on this half of the country that would meet PC safety requirements - it’s massive. And it’s located on the wrong side of this recently remembered bridge. The bridge is in the last village we would be hitting on our excursion and since we’re bringing the boat all the way up river to start from the top and work our way down, we now have a major obstacle in visiting even one village that we’ve made arrangements with.]
Me: Umm….I’m still a little skeptical about this bridge. No one’s even mentioned this so far. I vaguely remember some sort of dock-like thing sticking out of the water when we went there, but it wasn’t…well, yeah, I guess that was rainy season last year so the water was high…this is not good. I don’t think this is good at all, Julie.
Julie: This is definitely not good. Ben, so…how do people go from one side of the river to the other?
Ben: They don’t.
Julie: Oh. Okay. We’ll call you back in a little while. Thank you. (hangs up)
Me: Dude! We can just…organize a minga!
Julie: A minga?
Me: Yeah. A work party. I…think? I can’t remember my anthropology class, but anyways, some strong guys in the village come stand on the bridge and either we’ll lift the boat out of the water and over the bridge or we can push it onto the bank and carry it…what? How wide is this footbridge? Like eight feet? Surely we can manage that.
Julie: Do you remember how big this boat is?
Me: I don’t care - these people are strong.
Julie (skeptical but hopeful): Maybe…I wonder how much it would cost to put it on a bus…?
Me: This boat’s huge. I don’t even want to think about how much it’d be. The proposal’s in - there’s no more room for adding money or upping anything.
Julie: Yeah, but most of the fuel money was going toward driving the boat up river, against the current. If we put it on a bus, then we’re not using even half as much of the money we’ve budgeted for fuel.
Me: Maybe. Mpaha is really far and on a horrible road. It’ll probably take no less than eight hours for a truck to get in there, get it loaded, then get to Nawuni. It’s just gonna be so expensive.
Julie: Well, it’s either that or we can’t do this project.
Me: I really think people could lift it… Idon’tunderstandwhynoonehaseversaidanythingaboutthisbridge! We’ve talked to dozens of people about it.
Julie: I’m slightly worried.
Me: I’m more than slightly worried - I’m somehow anxious. What if we -
Julie: Hold on. (answers the phone) Ben. Hello. Yes, we were just discussing our options. What? Are you sure? Positive? Okay. Okay. This is very good to hear. Thank you. Good-bye.
Me: What happened?
Julie: Ben said… ‘The bridge is somehow broken and it does not fully cross the river so we can just drive around it.’
Me: You’re kidding, right?
Julie: No.
Problem Two: SOLVED.
Yesterday I get a call from another PCV who’s working on this project, Kim. She said - and this is great in that it’s so incredibly typical - the first leg of our trip is during the National Immunization Day Campaign so all of the nurses that had been committed to doing the HIV/AIDS Voluntary Testing and Counseling in each of the villages can’t come. The NID campaigns are generally around the same time each year, but nothing is set in stone. Last year they happened the last week in November, if I remember correctly. Regardless, this isn’t exactly something we could have planned on and it’s one of those things that’s extremely frustrating because, coming from our perspective, this is something that the Ghana Health Services should have A) known about and/or planned long before now and B) informed their outposts about so they wouldn’t commit to our program.
We’re in a tight window - we have the end of rainy season and there’s only a few weeks that the river is high enough so we don’t run aground and low enough so that we can actually bank the boat and get into the villages. Our window is about three weeks and our trip is planned for two of them. No wiggle room.
And three of the five of us have the Village Bicycle Project coming to our sites right around that time so it’s going to be Chaos City. We’re working on some solutions to Problem Three, but as of now: UNSOLVED.
So that’s what I have going on right. It seems like a lot, but I’m strangely…not busy. Downtime drives me nuts and makes me feel like a worthless volunteer. I’m one of those that always needs to be doing, doing, doing and I’m never actually doing enough. I’m aware of my problem and the dilemma it puts me in. I even sometimes try to fix it, but that’s how I am with everything in life, so I’m not under any illusion that it’s going to change any time soon.
For instance, if I have to leave to go to town for a few days to work on paperwork and whatnot, I feel like I should be at site doing…something. I don’t like not being at home. I don’t like living out of a bag, I don’t like staying away for more than a few days because I hate hearing “You kept long” from everyone when I get back. But then, when I’m at site and not working on things, I feel like I need to be somewhere that I can work on things (which almost always involves electricity and a constant line of communication). My work ethic and compulsion to always be in action is a double-edged sword, especially in this type of environment.
I woke up at dawn with a torrential downpour with the compulsion to make more bottle cap earrings and cracked groundnuts today like a fiend. My hands are incredibly sore, but I equate soreness with accomplishment. Well, soreness and the fact that I have a bucket of shelled peanuts and five shiny pairs of earrings on my table.