Kumblingo-Ayeobisi. Our new home

Kumblingo-Ayeobisi!

After quite literally years of anticipation, we finally know precisely where we will be serving in the Peace Corps. Accompanied by our two supervisors and two counterparts, we left the comforts of our training area and made the 17ish-hour journey up to our site in the Upper East region of the country. Most of it was pleasantly spent in the confines of an STC bus, which is equipped with both air conditioning (mmm…air conditioning…) and movies. I guess usually they are Nigerian movies, but we had an American movie which involved Val Kilmer battling lions, which was pretty entertaining.

We didn’t arrive at our site until about 11 at night, and the first thing we noticed was a large pedestal with a man atop it, sitting on a chair completely still, which seemed really bizarre until we realized it was a statue. This man for whom the statue was made had eight wives and his family (at least 40-50 people, one of which is our counterpart) lives in what we later learned as Molika Yire (the Red House). They built us a house in this compound and so Molika Yire is now our home!

I’ll take a few moments here to complain and then I’ll move on to all of the awesome things about our site. The first 12 hours or so in our new home were pretty rough. It began with me taking a bucket bath by candlelight in the bathing room. After a few minutes I turned around and was rather surprised to see that the walls were swarming with giant ants! The water had flooded out an ant hive and so they all came swarming out of the drain. Fortunately, they were not out for my blood and I didn’t get any bites, but it was not the friendliest welcome to our home for the next two years. Then it was time for bed. But there was no bed (or any furniture for that matter)—only one small sleeping mat and a rug. And it was really really hot in there because there isn’t really any cross-ventilation. But the 17 hour ride had really worn us out, so after ensuring that the mosquito net would keep the ants from devouring us in our sleep, we passed out. We were awakened a few hours later by footsteps outside our window. A radio began blaring and a man’s voice said “Hello? Hello?” The Ghanaian concept of both privacy and quiet hours are clearly a bit different than ours. We ignored this interruption and went back to sleep.

We awoke to the sounds we have grown accustomed to these past few months—roosters, goats, sheep, blaring radio, sweeping—and a few new ones—donkeys, cows, and people conversing loudly right next to our window. It was time to see our new home by the light of day. We have come to agree that this house could best be described as a fixer-upper, although technically it is a brand new house. With its small size and its mud plaster walls and floor and burglar-proof windows and complete lack of any furnishings whatsoever it feels well, kind of like a jail cell. We’ll be painting the walls (maybe a mural on one!) and putting some flashy linoleum down, and adding our own personal touches to turn it into a home. Our “yard” is dirt and dead crops and is visited by every domesticated animal known to this area and so is covered in animal feces! There’s also a nearby cesspool! Nothing a fence and a rocky drainage pit can’t solve, right? The other major issue is privacy, as we are right in the middle of Molika Yire and have no fence or curtains.

Okay. Whew! Now onto all of the awesome things. Our supervisor Sylvester is an amazingly motivated and inspirational human being. He does so many things to help his community that it took us the whole week we spent with him to get a decent grasp of all the things he does, and I imagine there’s more we don’t even know about. He was an orphan and so is working to help the orphans in the community. Apparently in this area if a child’s parents die, it is thought that the child is somehow evil and responsible for their deaths and so even though they’re usually taken in by relatives or friends they are not well taken care of and often are malnourished and uneducated. So Sylvester is hoping to start an orphanage where the kids don’t necessarily sleep there but will be fed and educated and cared for. Also, because of the lack of job opportunities in the area, there is a high prevalence of young, poor, and uneducated women moving down to Kumasi to be prostitutes. Sylvester is helping them become apprentices in trades like weaving and fabric dying, and would like to train some of them to be teachers for the orphanage. He has formed seven women’s groups in the area (he says that men are not as responsible or hard-working as women and so he only works with women) who are hoping to work together to generate some income through things like tree products (like cashews, mangoes, oranges, mahogany, and moringa), shea butter extraction, livestock rearing (they want me to help them start a piggery!) and beekeeping. His day job is as a security officer for the forestry commission, where he “protects the forest”. He talks at length about how much he loves trees.

My role in all of this will be primarily to help connect these groups that he has formed with government and non-government organizations who can help provide the money and the necessary training to these women’s groups so that they can improve their livelihoods. As far as the environmental aspect of all of this goes, by starting these alternative livelihood projects, fewer people will be prone to deplete the resources in the bush. I will also be helping the community plant lots and lots of trees, and I will also hopefully be promoting the use of organic fertilizers, compost heaps, and fuel-efficient stoves (that you make out of termite mound mud!). I’m also hoping to start an environment club at the junior high school here as well.

JJ’s role is a little less clear, but he will have no problem finding things to do here. As a health, water, and sanitation volunteer, his main goals are to help prevent diseases by educating people about how diseases are contracted and to help people maintain healthy diets. Seeing as our latrine might possibly be the only one in the community—people “free range” here, there are a lot of sanitation issues that he will be able to deal with. Watsan volunteers also do a lot of HIV/AIDS as well as family planning education.

The people in the community seem to be really nice and wonderful and they are definitely really glad to have us there. They seem to be really motivated to get to work and make some positive changes in their community. There was a ceremony for us which involved a lot of singing and dancing and drumming and speeches. These women—of all ages—are amazing dancers. I don’t think I can put into words how impressive their dancing is. I hope we manage to get some pictures up. We were told that our site was in a traditional area, and there are a lot of elements of this, like the music and the prevalence of facial scarring on just about everyone, including many children, but there are also a lot of Christians and a few Muslims. It was really nice to finally be in a place where Guruni is spoken all around us. We can’t say too much yet—mostly just greetings, food, and buying things—but hopefully the immersion will work some wonders on our abilities.

The area where we will be is really quite beautiful. Everything is really spread out and dry and relatively flat and this openness kind of reminds me a little bit of New Mexico and eastern Washington. My favorite part of this area is the baobab trees—they are huge and they are everywhere! I can easily imagine spending many hours under the shade of a baobab tree reading or drawing or playing the guitar. Parts of our community have electricity, but there really is hardly any light pollution so the stars are pretty amazing, though I think the dust of the harmattan season makes them a little muted.
We are about a thirty minute bike ride from Bolgatanga, which is great. We will be going there pretty frequently because our town doesn’t have much by way of food supplies. Thankfully there is a spot (the Ghanaian word for bar) about a mile from us, where we can get an ice cold Coke or Fanta or beer when the need arises. We can also get cosi, which is kind of like a nutritious doughnut (it’s basically beans ground up and fried-really tasty), whenever we want. There is a gigantic market in Bolga every three days, which incidentally is also the only time that cars go to and from our community. I really like that we can be so close to the comforts of a big town (we can get pretty much anything we need in Bolga) and still feel pretty isolated from the rest of the world when we are in our community.

We have another week and a half of training. We have a swearing in ceremony on December 12th, where we will perform a Ghanaian dance, and we should be at our site by the 14th or so. Training has really been a lot of fun. It’s a little like summer camp or freshman year of college in that we spend a lot of time with a small group of people and a lot of silliness ensues. It’s going to be a pretty major adjustment to not be surrounded by Americans all the time once we are at site, but we’re looking forward to it.