Stakeholder Forum, Dry Season Farming, Kassem, and a weekend of reunions

This week began with a Stakeholder Form organized by MoFA on behalf of the Root and Tuber Improvement and Marketing Program (RTIMP).  MoFA had invited sweet potato farmers, processors, traders and transporters to come to Paga to hear about the details of the program. 

In principle, the idea to apply a value-chain approach to a particular commodity such as sweet potatoes is not new in the international development industry and several NGOs and Ministries have approached this topic from various angles.  This particular approach involved a cross-value chain dissemination of information with hopefully many synergies being created by the presence of various market actors in the same venue.  A man from RTIMP came from Tamale to talk about the program and many of the AEAs from the area were in attendance as well.   The project focussed mainly around encouraging the production of sweet potato in the area and helping farmers overcome challenges by providing them with financial assistance that was divided between a farmer contribution, an NGO contribution and a loan that the farmer would have to repay. The second aspect of the project was a micro-enterprise fund to enable ice-cream sellers who had access to electricity to learn how to make potogurt (yoghurt made from sweet potato) and to give them assistance in purchasing a deep freezer to store it. 

The other highlight of this week occurred on Wednesday when I joined the Director and an AEA called Wisdom to visit a Dry season farming site very close to the office.  Having seen only the dry and brown fields the view of green, lush vegetation was quite a surprise even though I had been expecting it.  This particular area had been fortunate to receive a dam a few years ago as a result of a communal project.  The dam stored rainwater during the rainy season and enabled farmers to do dry-season farming.  I saw Maize plants, Pepe, many other crops that I could not identify in the distance.  Having had first-hand experience with fetching water from a hand-dug well, seeing the irrigation channels that enabled farmers to irrigate large areas simply by opening and closing channel gates was quite astounding.  This is again contrasted with my experience when I visited Sirigu the past week and when I was told that even dry-season vegetable farming is not possible due to a general absence of water in the ground. These three levels and then obviously the large-scale mechanized irrigation that is prevalent in the developed countries being the spectrum of irrigation techniques it was quite stark to see the difference that this has for farmers. 

This weekend, I concluded my meeting with the Director in Navrongo and then went to visit Rebekah, who is a voluntary teacher at the primary school in Sakaa.  Her story is definitely inspirational as well and so I will just briefly digress from the narrative of the week.  

In a rural setting, there is generally a shortage of teachers.  Sometimes there simply are not enough teachers assigned to a particular school as is the case with Sakaa.  However, even when there are sufficient numbers of teachers hired by the Dep’t of Education, sometimes they do not come to school due to distance, lack of funds to drive, and a disinclination to teach in a rural setting which is more challenging than in more urban centres.  Sometimes in Sakaa, there were simply not enough teachers there and the children would go to school but some of the classes simply could not be taught.  In the case of Rebekah, she has volunteered to teach the kindergarden level of the Sakaa primary school.  Practically, this means that she takes her bicycle and rides it the about 30 km to Sakaa.  The trip takes her just over an hour.  She teaches the children and then returns to Navrongo to resume her job as a hairdresser.  I don’t know how or when she started teaching in Sakaa but regardless, I believe this is such an example of dedication.  Especially when contrasting this to the case of salaried teachers who do not come to the school. 

Returning to the narrative, I coincidentally met Tina when I was visiting Rebekah.  To any new readers, Tina is my host mother from Sakaa.  I had planned on visiting her later that afternoon in any case and so meeting her at exactly this spot in Navrongo was quite good indeed.  We left Navrongo and drove to Sakaa and I spent the afternoon sitting under the sun shade eating, playing with the children and talking to her.  Just spending time with her made me reflect about how almost luxurious my living arrangement in my village Navio is.  I also thought a lot about how to incorporate more of the rural realities that farmers face into the work in the office.  I felt such a disconnection between my days in the office and the challenges of farmers like Tina and even in more remote parts of the district.   I drove home full of energy and motivation to bring field realities back into the MoFA Office with initiatives.

That weekend in Navio, I got another taste of rural realities as I helped my friend Aaron repair the fence of his garden that cows had threatened to tear down the night before.  All herbivores such as cows, goats, sheep etc are significant threats to the farmer’s vegetable gardens and the maintenance and defence of the garden is a constant activity.  Throwing stones at the animals when they are close and keeping the fence in good condition are absolutely essential.  So, by noon I was quite tired but happy as I now knew how to repair the fence.   So, the reason why the fence needs to be repaired constantly is because it is not a wire fence as you might find around the garden in any developed country.  Rather, it is made of long relatively straight wooden sticks and the stems of the maize plant that the farmers collect after the harvest and then dry to be used as fencing material later.  Two sticks are driven into the ground next to each other after digging a hoe with a machete.  Then, the stems of the maize plant are woven through the space between the two sticks and tied to the sticks with bark rope that is also used for the roof construction.  The problem is that even these stems are palatable for the animals since they cannot find much food and so they begin to chew on the fence which can tear holes into the structure and leave the valuable pepe, tomatoes, okro, beans vulnerable to intruders.

That afternoon, I had an experience of quite a different sort.  I joined the local dance group as they were heading off to dance at a funeral.  My understanding of the ceremony is still a bit fuzzy but I believe that all the daughters’ families of the woman who had died had to bring a dance or music group to honour her death.   Having been at several funerals now ranging from quite small to medium, this was definitely an extra-large one.  This demonstrated the wealth of the family who was apparently quite influential.  At a funeral, the men usually sit outside and the women are inside the compound.  Mourners are invited by the family of the deceased, and are welcomed by each member of the family and thanked for coming.  Water is offered to the guests and then the members of the family come back to see the mourners off with a series of verbal exchanges.

In addition to the intricacies of the funeral, there was another interesting element to this which is the dance that the dancers performed.  The dance group, as I understand it, performed a series of pre-defined dance routines, with the head of the family in the seat of honour and everyone else standing around in a circle.  The dance movements are too complex to put to words and the music is also beyond description.  The adjectives that most describe this event are loud (the music was extremely loud), sweat (the dancers were performing a dance that quite obviously was extremely physically exhausting in 40 + degree weather), extraordinary (the skill of the dancers and the appreciation of the crowd in the forms of cheers and one-cedi notes and coins that people would press against the forehead of the dancer you wanted to honour and which often stuck there because of the sweat.)

The next day, after responding to several inquiries from various family members about whether I would go to church with maybe, I finally decided to go.  The length, heat and lack of comprehension due to the language barrier of the first two church experiences were quite strong deterrents but I finally decided to go and see.  We arrived a little after 9:00 to a kind of a bible study and the first question was, do you have a bible?  I had definitely not brought one and so it was a bit of an awkward moment as everyone looked in disbelief that I did not have one.  Then, I looked for the verse and tried to make some sense of the Kassem of the religious education teacher.  At around 10:00 maybe, the church service started.  The beginning was characterized by deafening music and singing and energetic dancing by many members of the congregation.  There was a group of 5 women standing at the front who were singing, two drummers and the entire congregation sang at the top of their throats in a small church that was packed full with people still standing at the back and children sitting on the ground.    Thankfully, the religious education teacher was very kind and translated the readings and the sermon of the deacon to me.  This made the service much more appropriate and I enjoyed it a lot more.  I found that the soft voice of the religious education teacher was in stark contrast with the sharp, almost yelling voice of the preacher and the Master of Ceremonies.   At around 12:00 the service was over and we all headed home.   

So much from Navio this weekend.  Till the next time.

First Week in Navio

After spending the entire Easter weekend in the village, my universe had indeed shrunken quite significantly and it was interesting to observe that when I went to Paga and to Navrongo that Monday afternoon, it felt like I was entering civilization again.   The difference between the town of Navrongo and small village of Navio is so stark that it really hit me quite strongly.   I reflected that when I first came to Paga with an implicit comparison to Tamale in mind, I was surprised at how small Paga was.  Coming from Navio, I felt like my short trip to Paga and Navrongo was quite extraordinary and I was even a bit overwhelmed by the bustling activity of the market and the traffic on the streets.

The next day, I took an even bigger leap as I drove to Bolgatanga, the Regional Capital to take part in a meeting of the Regional Director and the District Directors. Again, this same difference hit me and even going to the EWB office there were there was air conditioning, a fan, and even a refrigerator was another moment of surprise.  Overall, the day was quite informative and after soaking up lots of information at the meeting, I returned to Navio that evening. 

Later that week, I was fortunate to attend a meeting of farmer group leaders in a town called Sirigu that is about 24 km away from Paga and at the very eastern end of the district.  My very attentive readers may note a slight discrepancy here as I am working in Paga at the Kassena Nankana West District Office but I was visiting a community who is part of this district but is at the very eastern end of the district.  This difference is still a bit confusing to me but so far I have not completely understood the reason for this oddity.  The meeting was very informative though.  The AEA I was visiting had assembled about 20 farmer groups together and they held a meeting to review quarterly goals for the last quarter and to set quarterly goals for the next quarter.   They asked me several challenging questions and especially because the previous volunteer from EWB, who had been working in Paga, had been focussing on a different area than I would be.   

At the time, I did not realize the truly exceptional aspect of this meeting.  I thought that this process may be common with other AEAs as well.  However, I later learnt that actually this type of meeting is a completely new phenomenon even to more senior volunteers who have been working with communities.  Part of the challenge now is to find out more about this practice, to see how well it is working and whether it may be a procedure that may be applicable to other groups as well.

The next day, Saturday, I was involved in constructing a room for a relative who lived next door.  Once again, I saw the power of communal labour in a village.  There were two expert builders but everyone else was helping out.  We started levelling the ground with hoes and then setting down the first level of blocks.  Since the soil here is very suitable for building, you can make blocks (earthen bricks) by using soil just directly from the ground and adding water.  In other regions, you may have to add concrete to add more strength to the soil but in Navio apparently, this is not necessary.  So, these blocks were prepared in advance and were ready and waiting to be used that day.

After the first layer, we needed to make mortar.  To do this, you simply take a hoe, a lot of water and then remove your shoes.  You pour the water onto the soil, stamp the soil with your feet and then use the hoe to mix the water with the soil.  After doing this for a bit, you will be able to make quite a strong mortar.  The other neat aspect about building this way is that you can actually reuse all your old building materials.  In this case, the new room we were building was to expand the compound so previously, they had destroyed the old rooms.  The remains were lying there and after adding plenty of water and hacking at it with the hoe, the old walls and blocks had become mortar that we used for the new room.  Perfect recycling!  I was very impressed.

The other impressive aspect about this building project is the teamwork that I had already alluded to before.  Once the foundation was laid and everything was ok, everybody joined in to mix the mortar, carry the mortar to the various parts of the wall and then apply the mortar join the blocks.  Essentially there were five types of tasks:  Mortar mixing, mortar carrying, mortar application, brick laying and water fetching.  First, about 10 or more women fetched the water from the well and filled a large container.  From this, the mortar mixers took small buckets to spread the water over the new mortar area.  They took off their shoes and then were stamping the newly moistened mortar and using the hoe to add more earth to the mortar-water mixture.  The sections of mortar that were ready for application were shovelled onto empty bags that two people would carry from the mortar mixing site to the different points on the wall where others were busy applying the mortar.  The mortar application was done by hand as well with the first task being to make sure that the slots between the blocks were well-filled without any gaps.  The second step was to add a new layer of mortar onto the top of the bricks.  Once the new layer was ready for the blocks, the mortar appliers would form a human conveyor belt to bring the blocks from the block pile to the various points on the wall. Throughout this process, the two builders made sure that the wall was straight and inspected and corrected brick positioning.  

While this process is quite simple to describe, in practice doing each one of the steps carries its own challenges either in terms of skill, strength or insects.   For instance, the mortar mixing is quite hard work and then sometimes you happen upon an ant nest and then your feet can be quite sore with ant bites. The mortar carrying is also not an easy task and especially learning how to swing the sack in coordination with the other person and to deposit the mortar at the desired place without losing half of the mortar to either side of the wall is a challenge.  Also, the higher the wall becomes, the more difficult the lifting of the mortar and the bricks becomes. 

Overall, it was quite an amazing experience of communal labour but also quite an exhausting first day in the village.  The evening, was taken up by a soccer game and after a very long day, I lay down and was asleep almost instantly.

A rough beginning with a good conclusion

The next week began with a bit of a rough start as I was quite sick.  I was not sleeping very well, and feeling unwell with headache and stomach pains.  The heat became more of a problem and it took me two days to be fully functional again.  However, I did use the time to meet with Extension agents and to go into the field to visit another potential site for the Block Farms.  This visit was quite similar to the first.  We first met with the Chief of a village named Kazugu.  Co-incidentally during this visit, I learned that there was a German volunteer staying in the Chief’s house whom I briefly met and greeted in my first language, German.  This brief interaction made me reflect about the history of development in the area.  I realized that I was not the first white man to stay in the village and that I would not be the last.  I became quite thoughtful about my plans for living in a village and it started an inner dialogue that continued until Thursday.  Overall, the rest of the field visit was quite challenging for me because it was all in Kasem and I did not understand much of what was said and also because I was having an AEA ride on the back of the Moto while driving across very bumpy fields, through sandy conditions and all in all having much trouble balancing the bike with the increased weight.  However, we returned safely to the Chief’s palace to bid him goodbye and then we returned to the office. 
Thursday was Holy Thursday and so in the afternoon, I was invited to attend the church service at the Catholic Church.  I had plans on going to see a colleague in Bolgatanga who was celebrating his birthday that night but having been assured that the mass would not take longer than 1.5 hours, I agreed to come.  The service was very thought-provoking but unfortunately also much longer than 1.5 hours and so I missed the chance to go to Bolga as it would have been a very late night.

The next day, I had plans to move out of the compound and into a village called Navio.  Before the move, I had weighed the pros and cons extensively but eventually decided to do it.  I did not feel like Paga was truly a home and missed living in a village, learning Kassem, and living with a family.  I knew that the compound in Paga where I stayed was quite nice.  It had running water, a shower, electricity and was literally 1 minute walk away from my office and 5 minutes away from the market.  However, I made all the arrangements and moved out that day with some apprehension but also hope for being welcomed into the family just like I had experienced it the last time. 

Indeed, I was not mistaken.  Even though I was a bit scared, the reception I received was very very warm and I was overwhelmed by the level of hospitality and generosity that everyone showed me.  I was not used to this at all and was even unsure of how to receive it at times.  For instance, I decided to move into a room that did not have electricity yet.  The cables were there, but it had not been connected yet.  The man who had invited me to stay there was called Anas and he immediately went to call an electrician to get the placed wired for electricity.  There were many other things he and my new host mother, Abapa, did that I did that were so generous that I did not even understand.  I also met a very friendly youth called Aaron who spoke very fluent English and was living in the neighbouring compound.  That Thursday afternoon, I spent talking with Aaron and his friend Calvin under a tree, relaxing and just trying to learn a bit of Kassem.  In the evening, Anas came by and we went to a small general store in the village where we watched some Nigerian Movies.  It was quite interesting to be part of it.  Since not many people have TVs, the community comes together to watch.  The store owner apparently had a TV and people were sitting on chairs, standing and sitting on the ground to watch.  It was quite different than watching TV at home in Canada.  Also, the plot and the sense of humour in the movie was quite interesting and totally different than what you may find in a North American movie.