Photoblog II

These kids love photo time, always ready to dance for the camera.

As I said above.

This boy's name is Yow and I was surprised to find out recently that he's actually about my age. I didn't even believe this for some time, but I forced the family to show me his ID card! Unfortunately because of some disorder he has alot of trouble learning and developing properly, but he's happy as a clam most of the time.

These are all the kids here: Yaaba (back left), Yow (back right), Ako (front left), Andala (front center), and Lie-e (front right)...Then some visitors Micheal and Isaac (sitting in back). Interesting note that Yaaba was given her name because of the day she was born, Yaaba means friday.

Nice group shot, getting tired of the photo shoots though lol.

Hot day during lunch, director (Charles Akongua) sleeping out front.

Large farmer group in Nyambandi, pretty well organized group. Half focusing on livestock and the other half focusing on crops.

This lady really wanted me to snap a photo of her child. Seriously funniest pose possible!

Stuck in the office building during some serious rain in Chereponi (I believe this is when I've gotten my cold, which started a whirlwind of other sicknesses including malaria and stomach parasites).

Chereponi thanks God for the rain, and my body crumbles in the weather!

The JF program and me

Hello everyone out there!!!

As it has come to my attention that the JF program is losing some support at my local chapter I've decided to dedicate this post to why I think the program is so important!

As a university student myself I find that the education-work system is very streamlined: you get some good high school marks, attend a nice university for 4-8 years (depending on your personal choice), and then you go and find some work with the education you achieved. For some people this is completely fine and acceptable and they are complacent with this level of experience of the world. But personally I feel at each step of this system you are confined to a bubble. Within this bubble you experience a certain number of cultures, people, and environments. A fundamental component of understanding the reality of the environments you live inside is being able to see the environments you do not experience and truly understanding what effects the decisions you make can have on those other environments that you may not have the chance to see. The JF program allows students, people armed with quality educations in their country, to realize the reality of another world and to realize their own value in this world and the implications of the everyday livelihoods of the western world.

The JF program has opened my eyes to the value of the innovation of mankind. People in Ghana use the smallest amount of resources to survive for a year, and work harder than everyone I've ever met. This work has given me an insatiable passion to use every skill that I can muster to understand lives that are nothing like mine, and push the envelope of these skills to try and see if maybe there is a solution that someone hasn't tried.

More than this the JF program has the ability to give a voice to the most often unseen and unheard rural poor of Ghana. To work within a broken system to help the people being exploited, to see this exploitation, and work to change or fix this system from the ground up.

Most importantly the JF program is an opportunity to change lives. An opportunity to open a persons eyes to reality of other environments than their own, to strive to understand these environments, and to drive ourselves to solve problems that our much bigger than ourselves. And maybe more important than that it is an opportunity to change maybe just one persons life for the better, to inspire even one  people to work with a broken system to improve their lives and to speak out in the favor of the people suffering around them.

These are some reasons why I think the JF program is important for me and has changed my life, but this is just one persons opinion :)

F the system

Hello everyone out there!

As my last post was about culture, this one will be more about work:

The system is a butt, and here's why!

Just like in Canada level of education is directly linked to perceived level of prestige, but here in Ghana it's a concept that puts a bottleneck in development in the agriculture sector. As a result it puts a bottleneck on the advancement of rural livelihoods! I the Ministry of Food and Agriculture each worker receives some fuel allowance to perform their service, and the fuel allowances are as follows:

Director : 300ghc/month ($187.50 Can)
Agricultural Officer: 100ghc/month ($62.50 Can)
Agricultural Extension Staff: 50ghc/month ($31.25 Can)

Then the level of educations of these people are as follows:

Director : Masters + some experience or Phd.
Officer : Masters or Bachelors + quality experience + rarely afforded promotion
Extension : Bachelors or very high quality experience + connections + highschool

Now everyone should be able to see direct correlation between fuel allowances and level of education, but here's where things get funny! The required distances of travel to do there actual work is as follows:

Director : 0 miles/month or maybe 120 miles/month (for "important" meetings in Tamale, and other comfortable city centers)
Officer : 0 miles/month or very rarely [i.e. once or twice a year] 120 miles to Tamale & back.
Extension: Easily 400 miles/month or more depending on the operational area!!!!

So as you can see the people with more education receive a higher fuel allowance, and the people who actually need it receive less. Worse than this these people rarely receive all of their fuel allowances, and are considered to be insubordinate if they ask why. Then if this isn't enough if these people (extension staff) have all-star ideas or opinions to share during meetings, they will be immediately shot down by their superiors.

These kind of problems aren't only in my district, they are widespread systemic issues. This is an example of a barrier in the MoFA system that EWB sees, but is forced to work around to do work in collaboration with these people. Most people reading this might ask why we work with these people, and the reason is because MoFA's work has a direct and real impact on farmers. The extension agents treat the farmers like family and the farmers do likewise, so the dissemination of important information and technology through these bonds is essential for agricultural development in Ghana.

Private corporations who don't have many of these same barriers create new ones for themselves. These corporations generally don't like to collaborate with MoFA in their extension work, which results in the following problems: the farmers the include in their projects don't know or trust their extension workers so they either stray away from them or take advantage of them, the farmers don't take the extension of these people seriously, and the corporation fail to fully understand the rural realities of each district because they spend short amounts of time there and leave quickly.

So here's my thing! If we are all working towards a more developed Ghana three serious changes need to happen! The first is the reversal of flow of information, the information should travel from farmer to extension to district director to regional to national, as opposed to the current backwards fashion. Second we need to recognise the hard workers and reward them appropriately, and penalize the lax individuals for their greediness. Third (and this one should be obvious, but apparently not) private sector, public sector, and the farmers need to work together!!!

Funny stories:

Some farmers will join a private project (WIENCO cotton, in my district) to get the inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, and plows. Then do something really sly. They will plant the crop they actually want to grow, and maybe mingle in a little of what they were supposed to grow, then at the end they will harvest what they wanted. After this is done they will burn the entire field and say "I don't have to pay, there was a brush fire here, how can I pay you? Go away!". Generally this works, but it also ensures that future projects will be leary of the district altogether. So the real winner here isn't all that clear!

Thanks for reading! And if you didn't no thank yous for you! 

the Lyin’, the Witch, the Tech Probe

So I’ve been here in Chereponi for about 3 weeks and here’s a very interesting update on my social life and work life:

Recently (Sunday May 5^th) I heard what sounded like a rooster incessantly crowing outside of my room in my families house. As it seemed pretty distressing to everyone involved, and it was 5 am, I decided not to wake up to take part. Moreover as the argument was taking place in Anoofou, and I only understand less than 2% of this language, I decided my joining in would only make a confusing situation more confusing. So I decided I would ask someone, who can speak a little English, to give me the low down later. On that day I was invited to attend an farmer group (FBO) meeting in my own community with an AEA named Alhasan (whom I’ve been calling Elisan until now), which was to cover a returning project called N2Africa (which I hope to find out more about during this meeting).  But because of this heated argument the meeting was cancelled, and when I woke up I asked a boy who lives nearby and is a part of the FBO what had happened. He said, “one woman who is a part of the FBO has something wrong with her head and was shouting she wanted to go into the bush”, this didn’t make to much sense to me so for the time being I accepted it and let it go.

Just yesterday morning I met with Alhasan and had the opportunity to ask him why the meeting had been cancelled. He told me that the woman who was screaming (like a rooster) had a daughter who is very sick. The chairman of the FBO, and my host father, was accused of causing this and many other sicknesses in the area over the years. Supposedly Quujo-Ghandi is believed to be a witch of sorts and is very feared in the area, he has been blamed for causing many sicknesses and the locals fear him because of this. The screaming woman was asking him to remove the curse or she would beat him and finally she decided she would go to some temple in Tombo village (I believe) and have this curse assessed or removed by a witch camp and that upon her return he would be sorry. When I asked why these people believe my landlord is a witch Alhasan said the didn’t really have a reason, but the belief is so strong that his song cannot even find a wife because nobody will marry the son of a witch.

When I probed into this matter further I found out that Quujo-Ghandi’s side of the Ando-Yamano village also comprises his FBO. Quujo-Ghandi is also a contact farmer for Ando-Yamano, which means that all the information and projects that come to his village are first told to him because he is considered to be the most serious farmer in the area. On the other side of Ando-Yamano is where the chief resides, but because of some internal struggle between the chief and Quujo-Ghandi most information and projects stay on Quujo’s side. It is my conjecture that because of this struggle, and withholding of information, that this rumour of witchcraft has spread wildly. As for specifics on this struggle I think I will need more time to suss that out, but for now I think it is safe to assume that the source of the witchcraft is Quujo’s withholding of extension information. Apparently these witch accusations are very common, and often push even small girls out of their own towns and into these witch camps mentioned above. The accusations can become so widespread in some cases that, Alhasan said, sometimes the accused will begin to believe them as well. Furthermore these people will be compelled to leave the village as instructed, because they fear persecution for being some type of monster.

As I’m here to work on extension this information is very troubling for a few reasons. If these types of struggles and accusations are common, and Alhasan claims they are, then the withholding of extension information by contact farmers must be somewhat common as well. By theory MoFA reaches out to these contact farmers, whom usually hold a fair amount of resources already, with the implication that they will disseminate this information among their community members who trust them. But in this case this theory has completely broke down and in-turn caused a sort of internal struggle resulting in serious accusations of witchcraft. Secondly the AEA responsible for this area (Alhasan) is well aware of this struggle but continues to do his work just the same as always, using the same contact farmer although this man is not disseminating the information properly. Finally these accusations are a fundamental violation of human rights, forcing people out of their homes with groundless rumours spread by powerful people for corrupt reasons. I’m not sure how to react to this, maybe the readers could give me some insights here!!

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think (if your thinking)!

Photoblog (I finally figured out how to do this right!)

Met some men staying at the same place we had our in country training in Tamale. They were from Accra, here doing service work for the MTN cellphone company. They were also cocoa farmers who told me the cocoa price they were getting wasn't enough, thus the service work!

Pretty flowers that were growing everywhere in Tamale.

My (extremely) humble roof-less Ministry of Food and Agriculture office in Chereponi.

These are some extremely serious farmers here in Chereponi, in the village of Stambick. They're the definition of early adopters, because of the trusting relationship with their Agriculture Extension Agent (Haruna) they listen and value his advice on farming technology like row planting and composting. When I asked "why do you compost?" the man to my right replied "because we lack resources in our village, and Haruna assured us if we correctly compost we can conserve"!

A little roofing in the house!

This was a farmer group I met in Nandungballa, who were considered to be farmers at risk. These guys border on a river and so they are also fishermen, but there is no Agriculture Extension Agent to support them in their farming, because of the lack of transport nobody can frequently go there. When I interviewed them I discovered that they had the mentality that the ministry of food and agriculture exists to give hand-outs to farmers. Leading me to believe that this may be a good place to test some hypothesis on behavioural change... That is if I can get back there!

My host sister preparing an ingredient called Phonu. I tried to do this, but it was a total fail, she is monster strong!

My host brother preparing Dowa-dowa, I asked to try but was denied.

Picture party!

A glimpse of Chereponi country side.

Bullocks plowing Just outside of Nadungballa!

The river that creates a border between Ghana and Togo. I was not allowed to cross!!