Kirsent and I spent a day on an island off the coast of Zanzibar. It is a nature reserve and only open to a small number of visitors each day. We snorkled and hiked, saw the elusive coconut crab (large nocturnal crab that climbs trees and eats coconuts).

stonetown

zanzibar

how beautiful is Kirsten?

Kirsten looking all elegant in Zanzibar. Mike and Mara gave us a dinner at an amazing restaurant on a rooftop in the middle of stonetown (stone town being the main town on zanzibar, called stonetown because it is super old and made of stone/coral. The town is intersting because of it is very old and well preserved and also because of the diverse cultures that have coalsced there (omanie, indian, african).

Puppies!

Kirsten looking super-fine in some Tanzanian fabric.

I had a neighbor of ours weave this smock for Kirsten for Xmas. It is a traditional dress that women wear for special events.

Me and my new buddy Morgan Gama-Lobo!

So our cat is like 9 months pregnant now (or the equivalent in cat months) and she looks ready to burst. She barely moves these days, she wakes from her near constant napping to drag herself over to her food and then back to napville. This is a pre pregnancy shot. We will get out photos of her post birth with her babies when it all goes down. We also need to get a picture out of our dog with her puppies. We just discovered that she has five puppies, we thought that only three survived (she keeps her puppies tucked away in a small crevice where its hard to see them).

Just down the beach from where we stayed with the fam was a super old slave castle in the midst of a fishing village. (These pics are a bit disjointed - sorry)

Kirsten celebrating the Nabayeska (harvest festival) with some of our neighbors.

Does it get any better than hanging out on a beach and playing in the waves?

Mom and dad look happy here, mom's enjoying her pre-sickness time.

Mo seemed to enjoy Kirsten's company, specially when he was grabbing her necklace and her cool hat.

I was glad to meet my new nephew. I think we had a good time, except for when I made him cry.

Yay!

I think Morgan is the most well travelled baby I have ever met.

Hanging out at the market.

Walking the road to the small market that is near us. We often go there to hang out and get some local cuisine, drink some millet beer.

Garden shot

Garden shot

Our dog Kalulu hanging in our garden with a gaggle of Guinea Fowl in the background. Every so often a flock of Guinea fowl come tromping by, they often jump up on our roof with a loud thunk, about twenty of them .... thunk thunk thunk.....

Kirsten helping our cucumbers to grow big and mighty. Our garden was a lot of fun this rainy season (and continues to be, although it is slowly dieing from lack of water now).

July through Now?

So I guess it’s been awhile since we’ve posted anything. The past few months have been filled with…well, er, let’s see, tomatoes and basil in the garden, rain glorious rain that brings cool(er) weather and fewer buckets of water needing to be carried on my head and tall tall millet that gave us some privacy for a few months. In August we went to Mole National Park and hung out with some elephants while working--I'm trying to start a girls environmental camp there and I needed to do some "research", right? The camp progressed a long way and then it got derailed but I'm still hoping to make a version of it happen). September was filled with trainings—one on how to help groups function better, one on HIV/AIDS, and one for my environment group—so lots of traveling and socializing with other volunteers, including a really fun surprise anniversary party they threw for us. The Gama-Lobo’s came for a visit and while it was really awesome seeing them and meeting our new nephew, illnesses and other misfortunes sadly turned the visit into a bit of an fiasco and we spent most of their trip in Accra, instead of actually coming to the part of Ghana we know and love and live in. Accra meant tasty food, swimming pools, hot showers, air conditioning, a little wine, and some live music sprinkled in, all of which are very rare treats for us Peace Corps volunteers! Especially when in the company of family you haven’t seen for so long. If anyone else out there wants to give Ghana a try, you’re invited! We miss you all!

A few days after we got back to site we received the sad news that JJ’s grandma Rose had just passed away. She was 96. We tried to figure out a way to go to the funeral but ultimately, we’re just too far away. Instead we looked at pictures of her and listened to some voice recordings JJ had taken on our last visit to Chicago. She will be missed.

Last Sunday was the biggest festival of the year, called Nabayeska, and it’s a little like Halloween, and Thanksgiving and Groundhog’s Day all squished together. It falls at the end of the harvest and people cook and eat a lot, which makes it like Thanksgiving. Before the event, all of the women cook rice and meat while the men wander from house to house eating plate after plate after plate of rice and meat (I saw one man eat seven plates). They say that anyone, even a stranger, can go to anyone’s house and demand that that person make them happy by giving them food or drink or money or whatever (there’s the Halloween bit). Its like Groundhog’s Day in that it’s the day when the chief of the village emerges after a two month-long house arrest. He’s not allowed to see bean flowers during those two months and if he does then next year’s harvest will fail. So he emerges and the whole village comes out in their finest new clothes and celebrates.

For us it was an exciting day because it started with a rain storm! The rainy season ended about a month ago so we thought we might have to wait until next May to see some rain but low and behold a gust of wind blew and all of a sudden there was torrential downpour, which was exciting news for us and also for our tomatoes that had stopped producing since they were so thirsty.

Meanwhile, our dog Kalulu, who had in the past few weeks grown so pregnant she resembled a goat, had been missing all morning which worried us a little. After the rain subsided we discovered that she had given birth at our counterpart’s house next door (where she stays when we travel)! We went for a visit and attempted to peer into the little hole that she had chosen as her birthing place and we could see a few slimy little pups wiggling around. We later got a better view and learned that there were five, but only three survived. A friend took us to bury the two and we were encouraged to pour some pito, the local millet beer, over the ground as an offering. Another ritual that they have here is that whenever someone (a human) gives birth, for two months the mother can only eat sagabo, which is the staple food here that’s made from millet flour, and nothing else. Since Kalulu gave birth, it was necessary that she eat sagabo as her first meal so our counterpart’s mother prepared some specially for her to celebrate the occasion.

We had planned a celebration for when the Gama-Lobo’s came to visit and had arranged for someone to make a big batch of pito and another of a nonalcoholic beverage called zonko (also made from millet—are you sensing a theme here?) but since they didn’t make it up here we decided to do it for Nabayeska since the ingredients had already been paid for. I prepared a giant pot of jollof rice (basically rice with tomato paste) and boiled eggs in case friends or strangers came by asking for food. Which they did. It was fun. Then we went awandering with two of our local friends and were given some bowls of rice and some pito and eventually made our way to the chief’s house where there was a mob of people gathered. There was a singing group that promptly welcomed us by singing an “Amalatinga la Ayintara” song (those are our local names), which was fun. People were all watching a bunch of men in smocks doing something but it was loud and they were speaking Guruni and so it’s hard to say what was really going on. Finally the drumming started and there was a dance party until dark when it got, well, too dark to see anything, so we went home. And that was our Nabayeska.

Some things in store for us:
1. Kittens! Our cat is starting to look kind of goat-like and could pop any day now!
2. Thanksgiving! We’ll be spending Thanksgiving with a bunch of other volunteers in Tamale, where we’ll cook a feast. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
3. Tanzania! For Christmas we’re going to visit Mike and Mara and Morgan and giraffes and lions and bushbabies!
4. Work! We’ve got lots of little things going, the most noteworthy maybe being an HIV/AIDS Know Your Status Campaign which will likely happen in January.

As many of you know we got an invite to a semi-exclusive event with Obama. He was in Ghana for about twenty-four hours and in that time managed to stir up a mighty typhoon of a Obama frenzy. Everyone seemed to be talking about Obama, songs were written about Obama and played over and over on the radio (one chorus goes Barack Barack, Barack Obama - and that is pretty much the entire song. I think he must have thought Ghana a little crazy as they played this song wherever he went and everyone around him was wearing traditional looking african dresses made out of fabric with Obama's face all over it. We even enjoyed Obama cookies, the packages of which had the american flag and Obama on them (However, in my opinion, they did not taste quite Obamaee enough).

It was actually quite a big deal in for Ghana that he chose Ghana as the one country that he visited in Africa after Eqypt. It is a testament to Ghana's prosperity, peacefulness, and the growing strength of their democracy that he made this visit. He gave two speeches, one we saw at the airport and the other was at the parliament building. His speech to parliament was long and interesting and can be found on the internet. The speech we saw was much shorter but was meant for a specific audience of american development and embassy workers in Ghana. Obama thanked us Peace Corps volunteers a couple of times in his speech, which was very cool. He also visited the cape coast slave castle for a couple hours --- I guess Anderson Cooper did a special on this visit to the castle and also some expose on modern day slavery, I have yet to be able to check it out, but I imagine you all can find it on the internet.

So the event we went to was at the airport with air force one as the backdrop. Barack and the fam entered dramatically on big military helicopters. He was greeted by traditional music and dancing and then Ghana's president introduced Obama. He then gave a short speech praising Ghana for their commitment to democracy, talking about Peace Corps long history in Ghana and how he wants to continue the partnership etc. We were very close to him (about 30 feet away) where he spoke and then we were within a couple of feet when he shook hands with the crowd. Unfortunately we were a couple people back from the front and didn't get to shake his or michelle's hands. Some of our friends shook their hands and were thanked personally for their service.

The whole event was very cool, but super tiring. We travelled 14 hours to get down there and then of course needed to stay up most of the night reuniting with friends. The day of the event most of the major streets were shut down so we had to walk and walk and walk to get around. Then we had to wait for hours at the airport waiting for him to show up. But it was totally worth it.

Then K and I spent a night at a beach near Accra, you know since we were down there and all.

IT'S ME! and airforce one.

The man himself.

Can you find Kirsten?

This pic is to show how close we were to the podium where Mr. Prez spoke.

It seemed that most every Ghanian at this event was wearing some kind of Obama fabric.

The after hours party when our enviro event was finished. It turned into a giant dance party with our huge speaker booming for the whole village to hear.

This is the regional director of EPA speaking during our enviro event. We had a good line up of speakers from local government and environmental institutions. Unfortunately there are not too many women in high ranking positions here, so it was nice to have her there as a role model.

This was part of a drama entitled "Trees are life" that the school kids performed at the event. They did a really good job with the drama, the crowd loved it, and the song they sang throughout the performace I kept being heard sung by random people over the next couple weeks.

Yeah, so these guys are as awsome as they look. They are a men's acapella singin group. They struted around working the crowd during one of the many musical interludes at our environment event.

Another women's group we work with performing some songs and dances at our enviro event.

One of the Women's groups we work with on their way to our environment day event. These ladies usually make a dramatic entrance to any event they attend by gathering together in matching shirts singing, clapping, dancing. They are a sight to behold.

The storms come in fast and crazy intense here. This a statue of the patriarch of the compound house we live next to.

Trees, Hippos, and Stars

We’ve now been in Ghana for over nine months and life seems somehow normal. Being stuffed inside dilapidated cars like clowns, carrying a bucket of water on my head, and brushing past a leg of cow while grocery shopping are all a part of my everyday existence here. We’ve had a few noteworthy events this past month so I’ll recount them.

Sherigu Environment Day 2009!!! On June 20th (the same day as my cousin’s wedding which I sadly missed) we held an event at our local school to raise environmental awareness. We worked with the primary school, the junior high school, and the two community-based organizations that brought us here to make it all happen. The Municipal Chief Executive, the Regional Directors of the EPA and the Ministry of Forestry, the Chief Fire Officer, and a moringa farmer were our guest speakers. The primary school put on a drama entitled “Tree is Life” which was really adorable. We held a poster contest and an essay contest for both schools and awarded someone the title “Environmentalist of the Year” for planting a lot of trees in the community. The headmaster at the primary school, Asoeh, has been an amazing person to work with these past few months. We worked with the students to nurse about 500 seedlings so far, and hope to nurse about 1000 more before the season is finished. The students will take them home and plant them. Using the internship program I worked with at the Mercer Slough as a model, my Environment Club at the Junior High went into all of the primary school classes and taught them a fun lesson about the need to preserve our natural resources and plant more trees. We had the Ministry of Forestry donate 500 seedlings for our event, some of which we planted at the school and the clinic, and others were given away as prizes. We had local groups sing and dance.

The event had a few glitches, like when the chairman didn’t show up and we started two hours late, but overall the event went well. We’ve really become quite the tree enthusiasts and it seems that maybe just maybe the enthusiasm is spreading through the community. We had some other volunteers come to stay with us for the event which was a lot of fun, especially when it started pouring while JJ and I were sleeping outside and the house leaked all over most everyone inside.

While trying to print certificates in Bolga I felt stress for the first time in a very long time, and as I went from copy center to copy center while my friends were all meeting for dinner, I realized how much I love my “job”. I honestly had not felt work stress since coming here. I never have to hear an alarm clock, I set my own schedule and activities for the day, I spend a lot of time outside, I work with really nice people, I have enough free time and enough to keep me occupied when I want to be productive. Life is good.

Having invested so much time and energy into this event, it seemed appropriate to take a vacation. Or friend Nicole came to our event and then convinced us to go back to her site in the Upper West with her. I was planning on going to Accra in a few days but we decided I could easily do that after visiting her. We stayed with Nicole for one night, and her accommodations made me realize how nice our house is. She was given one small room for sleeping, cooking, and living in, and she had a leaky roof with no ceiling, and a lot of biting ants. She’s an admirably positive and tolerant person and seems pretty happy despite her conditions.

Another volunteer, Sinae, has a site 20km from the Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary. Many people in her community have never actually been to the sanctuary so she organized an event for a few schoolchildren and community members to run to the sanctuary and then take a boat tour and sleep at the guesthouse there. And that’s how we saw our first real live hippo in the wild. I know you’re all gaping right now at the idea of us running 20km. But alas, we have not changed that much since coming to Ghana and so we (and a bunch of other PCV’s and participants) biked it. The bike ride was beautiful. It seems greener and more savanna-like in the Upper West. The grass is always greener… The path was a bush path and at one point the ride got so bumpy we had to walk the bikes. The culprit? Hippo tracks. We also saw some monkeys off in the distance. The boat tour was pretty cool. We boarded a 6-person canoe and set off into the Black Volta River (which separates Ghana from Burkina Faso) in search of the elusive hippopotamus. Hippos are said to be the most dangerous animal in Africa, and the river is also home to crocodiles, snakes, and who knows how many microorganisms that want to make my insides do weird things, but we were ensured that this was a perfectly safe thing to do and that the hippos here are actually very friendly. They took us out for about 15 minutes or so and then we saw in the distance the head of a hippo! Apparently a lady hippo! We watched her disappear into the water and emerge a few times and then we headed back.

The next day we headed to Wa (the capital of the Upper West Region) and spent the day wandering and sitting and drinking and eating with some friends. We went to a fancy hotel restaurant where we ate Chinese and Indian food(!!!!) and then watched a soccer match that I hear was an important one between the US and Brazil. I’m trying to learn to like watching soccer. We’ll see how that goes…

The next day JJ headed back home and I began my 12-hour bus ride to Accra. The purpose of this ridiculously long voyage was to visit a planetarium. It’s the first planetarium to open in sub-Saharan Africa, and my PSC/Zoo friend Kyle told me about it and put me in touch with Jacob, the founder. He insisted that I come down for a visit to see if I could offer any assistance to their project. I’m pretty sure he tried to convince my Peace Corps supervisor to move my site to Accra to help him, but we compromised on a couple visits per year. After my 12-hour ride, Jacob insists on picking me up from the bus and taking me out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. For someone who makes about four dollars a day and has a hole in the ground for a toilet, this is very exciting. Jacob is a 73-year old Ghanaian who splits his time between London and Accra and is very passionate about science education. Over the next two days we ate pastries, pizza, mashed potatoes, and grouper, and brainstormed ways that I could maybe assist them on a small level. The planetarium is digital, so nothing like what I worked with at the Willard Smith Planetarium in Seattle, so I couldn’t really offer much assistance there, but they also have a portable planetarium, which I have worked with, so I’m going to develop some programs that they can take to schools. Jacob also wants a science center and some hands-on activities for kids to do, so I’m going to start a small science club in my community to test some activities out. He might be able to get me some telescopes for my community and we can start an astronomy club.

I left Accra and went and visited my friend Casimir in the Eastern Region. He took me on a grand tour that involved seeing an eco-friendly model home, a six-fingered palm tree (a botanical oddity), and a failed attempt to find a Deep Deep Well. The next day we went to the bead market in Koforidua which is always a dangerous place when you only make $4 a day, and then I went to my friend Lisa’s site, also in the Eastern Region. She made me some delicious homemade pizza and took me into a bamboo forest, a moringa farm, and a tiny snail farm! The next day we went to Kumasi and stayed at the Peace Corps sub-office.

There’s 67 new volunteers in training now and ten of them (the environment group) were heading to our site for a field trip, so I hitched a ride with them. It was great meeting the new volunteers, especially Ama, who will be moving relatively close to me in about a month and is therefore my new best friend. We spent the night of fourth of July at a drinking spot which was fun despite the appalling lack of fireworks or even a sparkler. The next day we took a surprise trip to Paga, home of the sacred crocodile pools. I got to sit on a 78 year old crocodile who, like the hippo, was very friendly. Then we went to our site where I was reunited with JJ, Kalulu, and the Moose (the cat’s name these days). We brought the trainees to the garden and showed them what we’ve been up to and we held a meeting with our supervisors and some of the women from our women’s groups. It’s nice having visitors.

So that’s been our excitement lately. Now its time to get back to work. We’re working on helping the school get a computer lab and resource center and next week we have someone from Trees for the Future coming to our site to do some agroforestry trainings for our groups. It seems like a really good organization to be working with, and our site was selected to receive seeds and tools and trainings from them. Hopefully we can keep the tree-planting craze that we’ve started alive.

Kirsten is super awsome as you all know, but you may not know that she is a badass. She carries heavy containers of water on her head a couple hundred yards to our house. I use my bike to carry water, but I aspire to be as badass as Kirsten someday.

This is our wonderful wall that we spent a few months constructing. It bends around the side of the house and encloses a nice garden area. The cool looking grass wizard hat looking things is a house for our dog to hang out in when it rains. We began gardening in earnest a couple of weeks ago. We have planted about twenty tomato plants, many soy beans, peanuts, squash, sun flowers, and peppers. We plan to plant a bunch more in the next couple weeks.

God bless the rainy season and all the greenery that it has brough us. The landscape has really transformed over the past month. The tall crops that look like corn are actually millet (the staple food here). Kalulu, our super cute and awsome dog friend, is featured in this photo. She has taken to following us everywhere and protecting us by barking at strangers. The other day she followed me on a lengthy bike ride into the bush, comically ambushing unsuspecting goats and chickens all the way.

Scenery around our house.

The millet has grown up all around our house, cloaking us in glorious privacy. We only now have to greet a few hundred people outside our house, and not the usual few million.

Funerals and the war dance

It’s funeral season here, in the Upper East region of Ghana. Everything seems to have its season in this part of the world, and they are all new to us. There’s rainy season, dry season, harmattan season (when cool winds blow on down from the Sahara and bathe us in their cool glory), sowing season (many different ones for different crops), growing season, harvesting season, festival season, a season for raising guinea fowls, mango season (a particularly delicious season), and on and on……

So funeral season is not a particular time of the year when everyone decides to drop dead, it’s actually a period of time during the dry season that everyone puts on their funerals. Burials and small ceremonies happen immediately after a death, but then you need to follow that up with a lavish, several daylong eating, drinking, dancing, singing, sacrificing – sleeping very little – and then drinking, dancing, dancing, drinking party. Some families need to save money for years before they can put on a proper funeral for their loved ones.

The people we live amongst just put on a funeral for a man who was the oldest community member. It was a fulneral-palooza lasting over a week, full of dancing, drinking, and soothsaying, you know – everything good in life. I collected music and pictures from the funeral and I interviewed a couple people about the rights and traditions of the funeral. So, what follows is that collection. You only have to read a little more before you can watch the slide show and listen to the music below.

After attending a couple of funerals I still don’t really know what’s going on fully. There are traditions o’ plenty, and unfortunately we are usually unable to communicate well enough with those around us to demystify the whole process. The most conspicuous part of the funeral is the war dance. People come from different communities and perform the old old traditions involved in the war dance you will see in the pictures below. They dress in animal skins, wear traditional helmets, carry bows and arrows and they go to war in the style of their ancestors. There are drummers, singers, and then the warriors and they dance in the style of warring, fighting. And I forgot to mention that most of these warriors had been drinking for a couple days at this point, serving to inject a large dose of mayhem into the scene. During and after the performance of the war dance the other people at the funeral join in, and the drumming and dancing will go on all night. They will light fires, roast goats, donkeys, and cows. They will shoot gun powder into the air and drink pito (local alcohol drink made from fermented millet – kind of tastes like beer). Hundreds of people come from all around to honor and to celebrate the life of the deceased. The funerals are kind of like weddings in the states (but with more animal sacrifice). We would wake up in the morning and the funeral faithful would still be awake, taking some morning drink.

The origins and meaning of the war dance were explained to me: Generations ago the people of this area were scattered into small tribes, and deaths during these days were more often a cause of a tribal conflict than natural causes. And after such a death the tribe would ready themselves for war and the act of retribution. As generations progressed tribes became more intertwined and with this twining peace laid its roots into the foundations of life. The war dance was an extension of that warring tradition, a way to honor the bravery of the deceased.

In the midst of all this celebration, there are many traditions and rights performed. We have caught glimpses of many of these, but they still remain a bit shrouded in mystery. We saw the widow of one man being enclosed in a small thatched area with various objects and her children. We were told that she needs to spend the night in this enclosure. At the funeral we just attended in our community we witnessed the part of the funeral ceremony when the family consults the soothsayer. A family member sits with the soothsayer surrounded by various ceremonial objects. The soothsayer holds a stick, fashioned from wood from a particular tree, and the family head holds the other end. The family asks questions concerning the death of the family member, and the questions are answered by the motion of the stick they are both holding. If the stick falls on a particular spot the answer is yes, if on another spot the answer is no, etc. Neither person is supposed to direct the motion of the stick, the movement is supposed to be a result of the spirits involved in the consultation. The soothsayer is mainly consulted to find out the cause of the person’s death, and to find out what precautions they should take to protect themselves from further suffering. The soothsayer will make recommendations about what animals should be sacrificed to ensure the strength and health of their family. An interesting part of the soothsayer consultation is the testing of the soothsayer. The family will test the soothsayer by taking a small object and placing it near a random tree, and the soothsayer will need to divine the tree. If the soothsayer fails at this they will know that he doesn’t speak the truth, apparently the soothsayer we saw picked the right tree. (How embarrassing would it be to pick the wrong tree?)

So I will let you get on to the slide show now. I have also included a small portion of an interview with a local fra fra man (fra fra = the name of the tribe in this part of Ghana). The man is talking about the soothsayer’s role in funerals and in general. It may be a bit hard to follow, but the info from above will give you an idea of what he is talking about. At the end of the interview is an audio recording of the soothsayer saying his soothe (the soothsayer shakes a rattle throughout the ceremony, supposedly it has the eyes of a bird called a kite in it to help the man see far….. Enjoy.

War Dancing

Kirsten decked out in her funeral dress (I got a shirt made out of the same material - it was chosen as the fabric our community would wear to the funeral).

Kirsten and Kalulu! I picked up our new puppy from a friend when I was traveling down south. The dog was found abandoned in a pile of bricks and was in need of a home. The nine hour bus trip with her was not nearly as bad as one might imagine. Kalulu seems at home now and has even started barking at strangers that come over. She is extra cute when trying to play with the cat (who wants no part of her), and when she interacts with the goats and chickens that stop by. She is not so cute when attack our feet while we sleep.

Work party building our wall outside our house. Unfortunately the wall still isn't finished, but we are getting there. So this is the same process that most people use for building their houses and the same that built our house. You roll mud into balls and stack them up and mush them together (its actually really hard work and more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.) When its finished we can start work on a garden and get chicken to live in the chicken houses.