Last Trip to the West – July 31

We started the day early with a 6:30 departure for Kwame Yebohakrom in one of the FORIG trucks, with what we hoped would be the last of the parts for the Lister engine project. With Govina at the wheel of the truck and Peter as co-captain we made quick time to the village arriving somewhere after 10, even with a quick stop for fufuo. The building for the engine was still unfinished but was complete enough to hopefully finish the project. After quickly bolting the generator up, tightening the belt in place we were ready to test our system. The engine was fired up, running as well as ever and the generator was spinning without vibrating out of place or throwing the belt. Everything seemed okay until Peter went to test the generators voltage with a standard light bulb, which was immediately popped. Concerned, we called the man we had purchased the generator from to learn that he misspoke when we told us the generator operating speed, and we were operating it at over twice what it should be running.

A man in Duasidan next to the covered Lister engine

Determined to finish the project, we decided after a bit of head scratching to try the second smaller pulley on the machine that was shipped with it to see if we could match the desired speed.  After a quick run to Nkran Kwanta to grab another belt and relocating the generator we fired the Lister engine up again for another test. Sadly, even though the generator was spinning at what should be the correct speed, the test light bulb was popped again. Even after turning the generator around to spin it in the opposite direction we were unable to get the correct voltage. Running out of time in the day, we decided to take the generator back to Kumasi to see if it had become damaged on its way to the project site. It was upsetting to leave the village with all our hard work unfinished, but we knew if the generator could be revived, our friend Peter would have no problem finishing the project after our departure.

Meanwhile the girls were dropped off at Duasidan in the morning to have one last meeting with community members regarding the monkey sanctuary advertisements and future work in the community.  We arranged with the printer in Kumasi for the road sign advertisements to be printed before our departure from Ghana and arranged for the Duasidan Assemblyman, Jacob, to post them at appropriate intersections en route to Duasidan.  The community expressed interest in forming a community center if future Pavlis students could provide supplies for it.  They even showed us which room in an old school building they could renovate for community use. 

After our formal meeting we requested that we could have a taxi called to pick us up.  It took three hours to actually get the taxi, but we passed the time playing with the huge crowd of kids that showed up.  Finally, the taxi arrived, driven by a nice guy called German, who dropped us off in Babianeha. 

Mollie and Helena with kids in Duasidan

In Babianeha, Mollie went with Victoria, Emmanuel’s cousin who will start University in September, to interview families in the village about their cooking habits.  It was really interesting to see the range of cooking methods used in the village all the way from very modern gas ranges in kitchens to open fires outside the house.  Meanwhile, Helena and Chelsea ran a few final errands around town, including dropping off a bag of biochar for the school garden. 

A typical outdoor fire for cooking

In the afternoon the girls traveled to Dormaa to speak with the MCE there.  However, because it was the one-week celebration of the president’s death, both the MCE and the Director were busy and so we got to meet the assistant director.  He was very enthusiastic about our efforts to advertize the Duasidan Monkey Sanctuary and he was especially excited about the website we hope to develop.  He was very optimistic about future development of the site by the Dormaa Assembly in collaboration with Pavlis!

After a long day of work everyone was ready to head home to Sunyani to have dinner with a delegation of people from the Sunyani MCE’s office as well as some other friends from Sunyani.  Just as Mike and Clayton were beginning to arrive in Dormaa to pick up the girls, their truck overheated, stalling on the road. The girls were sent on ahead to finish the journey by bus, just before realizing that Mike and Clayton had the only sets of keys to the dorm. Running quite a bit behind, the truck was quickly fixed and the guys quickly rushed home to change with the waiting girls and head to the dinner.

Despite being one hour late, we were still able to meet everyone for a wonderful dinner. The meal was a fancy buffet with two courses.  We all looked quite dashing in our newly tailored Ghanaian outfits if we do say so ourselves! 

The group with our friend Govina after the dinner (note his black clothing and red scarf worn in honor of the one week celebration of the president's death) 

Written by Mollie and Mike

Kwame Yeboahkrom and the Death of a President– July 24th 2012

After another few trips into the magazines of Kumasi, the welding and parts for the generator set-up had all been completed and found for the lister engine project in Kwame Yeboahkrom.  Our caravan started with Mike and Chelsea returning from Kumasi along with Govina and Peter in a truck full of everything we were bringing.  Then at Sunyani Clayton switched in with Mike and headed out towards Dormaa and the village areas; Helena and Chelsea tro-troed their way there separately. 

            While we were riding in the truck, Govina began to hear rumors from his friends that something had happened to the President.  It turned out the President of Ghana, Atta Mills, had died in office.  We were told that rumors of his death were not uncommon since his health has been bad in recent years, but this time the rumor was true.  It’s a particularly strange time for such an unfortunate thing to happen because he was campaigning for reelection in the Ghanaian Presidential vote this December.  Now his VP, John Mahama, has been sworn in and will continue the elections.  Many people are wearing the red and black funeral cloth during the day, and the newspapers tell us there is a period of national mourning that will now extend until the late President’s funeral on August 10^th. 

Going back to our village trip, we arrived at the village and we could see the small building they had constructed to house the lister engine.  They showed us inside we could see the villagers had already poured a concrete base and mounted the engine in position on top of it.  By luck there was a man in the nearby town of Ankrankwanta who had years of experience working with the kind of engine similar to ours, and he was a great assistance.  With a fresh can of diesel, motor oil and a little bit of cranking, the lister engine originally ordered by a previous Pavlis group started chugging happily away.

Most of the rest of our work was letting Peter set up the wiring and breakers to deliver power across the yard to the clinic, and setting up and mounting the generators itself.  We spent a while trying to communicate how we wanted the generator placed in relation to the engine, where the studs needed to be to secure it, how to align the belt, etc.  Nearly 20 members of the village surrounded us whenever we worked around the engine, and there was a lot of discussion in Twi we couldn’t catch over the plans we suggested.  Even the local village chief, Nana Yeboah, was into the discussion, and once we had established the spot for the generator and they began to pour the concrete, he was right down with everyone working and getting his hands dirty.

Mike working on the engine with an audience

Unfortunately one thing that went wrong was that the coolant system Mike had envisioned did not fit to the lister engine, and so we will just need to find a few parts in Kumasi and then return again for a day trip to set it up.  The concrete for the base did not dry during our stay, and so we also need to return to actually test the generator.                       

Our plan was to stay two nights in the Kwame Yeboahkrom and leave on the third day, so we stayed inside the spare rooms of the clinic that were kindly offered to us.  During the night of the President’s death we were invited into the downtown area of the village to have dinner at the chief’s house.  It was fascinating to actually be staying in one of the more remote villages in Ghana and seeing a little bit more of what life was like day and night.  Outside the chief’s house we waited for a while under a solar-powered street lamp and a good number of the village residents came and gathered around the area to take a look at us.  The children got a big kick out of our attempts at Twi and many of the older villagers were fascinated by Helena and Chelsea’s hair.  After the dinner of rice and hard-boiled eggs with spicy tomato sauce, the village had a small funeral celebration dance in honor of the late President Mills.  Govina was still with us, and pushed us to lead the dancing.  The music was loud and a lot of people showed up to join or just watch the obroni trying dance the popular Azonto dance.

The following morning before we got to work, Nana Yeboah showed us around his village.  The first day he showed us a cocoa plantation, and we learned that the majority of the people of Kwame Yeboahkrom are cocoa farmers.  We had never seen anything like the big yellow and green pods sticking out of the cocoa tree trunks, and later Nana invited us to try some of the dried beans from the pods that tasted exactly like unsweetened chocolate.  The next morning he showed us the palm farms, where the trees were either cut down and tapped to harvest the sweet and tangy sap, or left standing to produce palm fruit, then processed into palm oil, an extremely popular cooking oil in Ghana.

Dried cocoa beans and two picked cocoa pods pictured

Written by Clayton

Meeting the MCE, and Travel- July 12

This week’s tasks required us to split apart once again, but not before we had a meeting with the MCE of Sunyani, more or less the equivalent of a mayor.  We were greeted outside his office at the Municipal Assembly building at 10am by the Director, who we had met the previous day.  He led us inside the office and into the sudden sight of about seventeen of the important ministers and managers of the city.  We were invited to sit for the meeting and did so, a little nervously. First, we went around and shook hands with everyone. Then we sat down, and it was everyone else’s turn to come and shake hands with us. Everyone in the room introduced themselves, and the Director gave an introductory speech about our presence there.  

For the most part, the Director and the MCE did the majority of the talking, explaining their main concerns for their district and how we might be able to help. One of their concerns- which we are already assisting with through our book shipment- is the lack of supplies, especially books and computers, in their schools and communities. The minister of education also spoke up regarding education methods, and proposed that when we visit the local schools, we can observe and learn about their teaching methods, while we teach them about ours. Lastly, the MCE discussed the details of our book shipment, which will be picked up and paid for by his office once it arrives at the port in Tema within the next couple of weeks.

At the end of the meeting, we all shook hands again and exchanged contact information with the MCE as well as the minister of education, who had offered to show us around the local communities next week. After we left the Municipal Assembly, it was time for our group to split up for a while- Mike and Clayton took a taxi to the Sunyani bus station and nabbed the last seat on a bus to Kumasi while the girls expected to stick around Sunyani for a bit and take care of some work before traveling to the Babianeha for the weekend to get the middle school’s biochar experiment started and re-visit the Duasidan Monkey Sanctuary to discuss some advertising ideas with the community. 

The plan for the Mike and Clayton in Kumasi was to meet our electrician friend Peter and spend the day searching for an electric generator/alternator component for the Kwame Yeboahkrom Lister engine. By the time they navigated their way across Kumasi and met up with Peter however, it was too late to go looking that day.  Mike and Clayton spent the night in the FORIG guesthouse on campus, while Emmanuel’s wife was very kind and made them each a mountain of rice and mutton for dinner.

In the meantime, Chelsea, Helena, and Mollie spent much of Thursday afternoon following up on project work. They went to the Ridge Experimental School again to check in on the school’s supplies and computers, and to find a time when our group could come and do some science demonstrations similar to what we did at the CSIR Basic School in Kumasi. They met Jackson, the former headmaster at Ridge, who showed them around and explained that the students have exams next week, so we will not be able to visit until the week after.

Next, a trip to an internet café in Sunyani (a small room with ten or so computers, in which we paid the U.S. equivalent of about 25 cents for a half-hour of internet access), allowed Helena, Mollie, and Chelsea to check on the progress of the Duasidan Monkey Sanctuary marketing documents. They arranged for Mike and Clayton to pick up the documents at the FORIG campus, so that they could bring them to Babianeha on Saturday.

The Ghanaian version of Target.

After a late lunch and some fast packing, the girls took a taxi to the transit station, hopped on a nearly full bus to Dormaa (Note:  In Ghana, busses are less likely to depart at regular times since they usually don’t leave until they are full, so getting on to a crowded bus meant a sooner departure!), and began their journey to Babianeha.  After a comfortable (if bumpy every once in a while) one-and-a-half-hour ride, Mollie, Chelsea, and Helena arrived in the town of Dormaa, where they convinced a taxi driver to take them on the twenty minute drive to the Opuni house in Babianeha (the Opuni house being the home of Emmanuel’s mother and excellent host, Dora Opuni, as well as an assortment of his relatives).  

Chelsea, Mollie, and Helena's bus ride to Dormaa.

 Upon the girls’ arrival, helpful residents carried their bags and ushered them into their compound, where Emmanuel’s brother, Kwadwo, spent about ten minutes haggling (in Twi) with the taxi driver for us over the price of the ride. The discussion was very interesting to us, because Kwadwo and the taxi driver alternated between raised angry voices and laughing. After the taxi driver was talked down from twelve to seven cedis (7 cedis ~ 3.5 USD). The girls sat down to a meal of cooked yams (plain, so as to please Chelsea) and a vegetarian dish of cocoyam leaves (so as to please Mollie) which had already been prepared by the Opuni household.  The girls then retired for the night in the Opunis’ guesthouse, a beautiful newly constructed home that had not yet been used by the family themselves.

*Note: This post was written by Clayton, Helena, and Chelsea.

Tro-Tros and Kwame Yeboahkrom – July 9

We're sorry for the delay again, everyone! We bought an internet modem last week, but the provider has been down, so we have had very limited internet access. We should be able to put up several new posts by the end of today, though. Thank you all for your patience! :)

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We all awoke Monday morning wondering if the recently returned power was really all that appreciated. The local student radio station adjacent to our room greeted us at 5am blaring their music from a small radio in their room, disrupting all of our sleep. But we were still able to get moving at 7am to enjoy a nice breakfast of eggs, toast and avocado prepared by Mollie, Chelsea, and Helena, while Clayton and Mike slugged their way through their morning.

This was our group’s first day apart from one another. Helena, Chelsea and Mollie stayed in Sunyani to sort out tasks around our dorm, while Clayton and Mike set out to Kwame Yeboahkrom to deliver the Lister engine housing plans and create a parts list, accompanied by our Kumasi electrician friend Peter (pronounced “Peetah”). This trip was also another first because instead of using Emmanuel’s forestry trucks to get to the village, we took the famous Ghanaian tro-tros the entire way, which created quite an adventure.

Starting in Sunyani, the first tro-tro trip was to Dormaa, with Mike and Clayton crammed in the first row and Peter behind. We entertained ourselves by pointing out the various oddball ads, business signs and taxi slogans along the way.  One sign appeared to be trying to tell us not to simultaneously lead small chickens while playing the trumpet.  From Dormaa everyone packed himself into the back row of another tro-tro, said goodbye to pavement, and bounced, rocked, creaked and banged all the way to the village of Ankrankwanta. From there, we took one last tro-tro to the clinic in Kwame Yeboahkrom, arriving there a bit after noon.

Working with the clinic’s doctor and our tro-tro driver- who, coincidently, also is helping with our project- we discussed the plans for the generator housing. We decided on a 10’ by 12’ room with one door and three basic windows for ventilation. The engine will be bolted to the floor with four studs imbedded in the cement that were delivered with the engine, while all other components such as the generator will be screwed in place after the building is done.

While we were in Kwame Yeboahkrom, our driver showed us another Lister engine being used in the village, which was previously unknown to us. This engine was powering a small grain mill, so although we still need to create our own system to connect a generator to ours, we at least have a working reference for what is needed to get our engine running.

After seeing the motor, we returned to the clinic and ironed out the rest of the details. We then shared a quick friendly chat with the clinic’s doctor and after Clayton attempted to speak Twi to a small crowd of laughing girls, we set off again in the same series of tro-tro’s back home. Leaving a little after 4:00 in the afternoon, and arriving home to the dorms around 8:00, Clayton and Mike joined the girls for a nice dinner of rice, fried cocoyam (a potato-like tuber), and breaded garden egg (like a mini eggplant) along with their best interpretation of no-bake cookies with locally available ingredients, ending another long successful day.  

The girls had a full day too, but with less travel: learning more of the ins and outs of the Sunyani market, organizing information from our projects so far for documentation, putting up blog posts, and cooking with ingredients from the market!

*Note: This post was written by Mike, though he wasn't here to post it himself.

Journey – Akwantuo: July 2,3

On our second day in Ghana we were introduced to Sunyani, a city approximately two to three driving hours west of Kumasi.  We settled into rooms at the city’s KNUST satellite dormitory; we will use these rooms as a housing base throughout the rest of our stay in Ghana.  We spent most of the day running errands (i.e. securing plane tickets for our advisor’s departure, exchanging our US dollars for Ghanaian currency, the cedi, and outfitting our new residence with common household items such as hand soap and dish detergent.  On our trip to the Sunyani market, we stocked some of our in-country phones with minutes and we were even able to try a popular local snack, pies (meat and onion filled bread, a seemingly distant relative of the pasty!).  We ended the evening with an even more familiar dinner (pizza!) with our advisors at their local lodging, the Eusbett Hotel.

Beginning the next morning, we had a very full day of traveling around with our advisors.  We were off just after 7 am and on the road to Dormaa, just outside of Sunyani.  The road has many speed bumps/rumble strips with two or three small strips in the road in a row.  After meeting briefly with a representative for the regional minister, we continued on to Kwame Yeboah Krom (Kwame is a common first name, Yeboah is a common last name and Krom means village.) To put it mildly, the road was extremely rough on the way to the village. 

We met a local government representative near Kwame Yeboah Krom and he lead us into the village, where we were visiting the Lister engine, a simple engine that was ordered for the village two years ago and just arrived a few months ago.  Our goal for this trip is to facilitate the building of a housing structure for the engine, to buy a generator, and to try to get the engine up and running.  It was very exciting to practice our small Twi phrases, as most people in the village didn’t speak English.  The kids especially got excited! This was our first time visiting a more rural area, and we had an enjoyable, if short, time.

Mike and Clayton checking out the Lister engine           

After visiting the engine, we visited the local representative’s home in the neighboring village of Okirakrom.  When we visit again to work on the engine for a few days, we can stay at his house.  In the courtyard there were a bunch of orange trees that were heavy with fruit.  In Ghana, oranges are green on the outside, but orange and juicy on the inside.  What a treat!

From there, we continued on to the village of Duasidan to visit the Duasidan Monkey Sanctuary, a relatively unknown location that the locals would like to develop into an ecotourism site.  Here, a large group of kids flocked with us and our two guides a short way into the 40-acre plot of forest.  In a clearing of bamboo, one guide started tapping on the sticks and pretty soon, we were surrounded by monkeys!  We had brought peanuts and small bananas to feed to them and they snatched them right from our hands!  One of our projects is to help advertise the sanctuary to tourists, so we took a lot of photos and videos.  Emmanuel sat down with our two guides to help translate and we taped an interview with them. 

The group with two local guides (left and second from left) and one of our divers, Govina (third from left)

Monkeys!

Chelsea feeding a Monkey

Next, we traveled about 20 minutes to Babianeha, where Emmanuel’s family is from.  Emmanuel’s mother had prepared a huge and delicious lunch of chicken, a cocoyam leaf (like spinach) dish, and jollof rice for us! After a quick meal, we visited the community center that was founded by Pavlis students in the past, interacted with the children who were there reading books and using the laptop computers, and then took a short walk to the Ghana/Ivory Coast border.  We talked to the border officers and then crossed over briefly.  It was pretty much the same as being in Ghana except for a few French phrases.

After our short visit to the Ivory Coast, we headed back into the vehicles for the long drive back to Kumasi.  We finally got in around 8 pm, settled into a guesthouse for temporary lodging in the city, and then concluded the evening for dinner with our advisors at the Royal Basin Hotel.

Places

While we are in Ghana, we will be traveling all around the western part of of the country.  For those of you interested in touching up on your Ghanaian geography, here's a Google Map to help you keep track of the places we'll be writing about!