Kumasi Magazine - July 19-20

With list of parts and a few rough schematics Mike and Clayton travelled to Kumasi again to meet our electrician friend Peter, and try to acquire everything we thought we needed for the generator project in Kumasi.  The tro-tro and taxi trips around Kumasi are always exhausting and slow, but the city is so full of interesting sights that it’s always exciting.  We were headed for the Kumasi magazine, where the largest concentration of car repair, engine work, metal workers, and parts shops were to be found.

The first thing on our list was the generator that Peter, Mike and Clayton had selected on their last trip to Kumasi. After waiting for a while at the shop the owner showed up, started the generator Ghana style to demonstrate that it worked, and the generator was loaded into the truck.

We needed the pulley for the generator to be modified so we took it to a machinist who Peter said could do the job.  The machinist needed the pulley removed from the shaft of the generator, so he grabbed his friend to try and use a vice to pull it off.  When that wasn’t working, he led us down and over a few streets to another machine shop that had a very big vice.  We watched while about 4 or 5 men grappled with the vice, twisting and pushing until finally the pulley started coming free.

The markets in the cities are almost like large towns of their own, crowded with concrete and wooden sheds roofed with corrugated metal.  They’re usually organized by content; house ware shops are next to each other, food stalls are in the same area, car parts can be found all in one place, etc. so it’s not too confusing to look around. Furthermore the shopkeepers and workers usually know the area extremely well and can direct you or lead you to find anything you need.  It’s a time consuming and tiring way to go shopping but it can be fun too.

The next day Mike, Clayton and Peter returned to the Magazine, only this time with tro-tro’s.  We combed the immense collection of parts store to collect everything needed ranging from coolant hoses and hardware to the frame and mounting studs. We even had to walk though a funeral to find a man who could sell us exhaust parts. By the end of the day we had collected all the necessary wiring, coolant plumbing and hardware, the belt, the pulley from the machinist, a coolant tank, and a frame. We finished the day with the welder, handing him everything we needed him to assemble for our trip next week.

Written by Clayton and Mike

We're in Ghana - July 1

Hi everyone, we’re sorry for the delay in blog posts- our days have been long and we’ve been keeping busy! Our flights (Houghton->Chicago->Atlanta->Accra) went without a hitch, and we arrived around noon, Ghana time, on July 1^st. Our advisors Mary, Bob, and Andrew from Michigan Tech, as well as our Ghanaian contact Emmanuel (our other Emmanuel- not our TA in Houghton) and a few of Emmanuel’s friends greeted us when we arrived in Accra and took us out to lunch at a small restaurant just outside the airport, since we had a few hours before our final flight from the capital Accra to the city of Kumasi. It was so surreal to finally be in Ghana- a place we have been imagining for so long. We dove right in and tried some local dishes- Clayton, Helena, and Mollie all had red-red, a plate of beans with red palm fruit oil, and fried plantains, while Mike and Chelsea had the jollof rice, a rice dish with tomato sauce and spices.

The group at the restaurant near the Accra airport

After our late lunch we flew to Kumasi, the home of KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University Of Science and Technology) and FORIG (Forestry Research Institute of Ghana). The drive from the airport to our hotel in Kumasi was probably the highlight of our trip so far. As our expert FORIG drivers wove in and out of the traffic (though “traffic” seems too tame a word for the amount of activity on the roads here), we finally got our first look at life in a country very different from the one we just left. In the city, there are people walking everywhere, crossing the busy streets as casually as if there were no cars at all. Among them, street vendors walk between the cars at the stoplights, carrying their wares on their heads as they offer everything imaginable- from chocolate to toilet paper- to the people sitting in their vehicles. Another striking feature of the surroundings- which can be seen everywhere in the area- is the bright red color of the soil, which is one of the most basic indicators of the fact that we are very far from home.

After our eventful first drive through town, we went out with our advisors to another local hotel to watch part of the Spain vs. Italy soccer game (4-0, Spain), and then had dinner at the hotel restaurant, where we tried mashed African yams for the first time, as well as fried plantains (different from the red-red kind) called kelewele.  Finally, we got to get some rest, since at this point we had been up and traveling for the past two days. Needless to say, we all slept pretty well!