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.