The big draw was the promise of Canadian-style eattin’: Sushi (made possible by Barrie-Chong-Ping generosity) and beef burgers!
What’s a party without a theme? The evening was in honour of the beach. See if you can spot the rippling waves, anemone, snorkeler, tourist, and seaweed.
As can be expected, the sushi made us all a little giddy and shenanigans ensued.
Never mind that cream you find in the Body Shop; this is the real pure, unrefined all-natural stuff! (However, Body Shop does source all its Shea butter from Ghana which has huge benefits for the local women.)
Shea butter is made from nuts that are picked, boiled, dried, cracked, crushed, grinded, and beaten, separated, heated and finally re-cooled into a pale yellow butter by the amazingly hard-working rural women of West Africa.
All of the steps mentioned above are done by hand except for the grinding which is usually done at a grinding mill. It is hard, hard, hard work and if you look at the butter makers’ arms you’d think they were weight lifters – serious guns!
Shea butter is gaining a lot of popularity in Europe and America for use in luxury cosmetics but in Ghana it’s still used in the rural villages in its unrefined form for its skin healing and protecting properties.
“How does this link to your work?” you ask. Well, since March 1st, I have been working with a HUGE project ($103 million dollars of funding by IFAD, Government of Ghana, and the African Development Bank) called the Northern Rural Growth Programme (NRGP). Simply put, my job within NRGP is to try and make these hard-working Shea nut pickers and butter processors more money.
The district I’m using to pilot my interventions is Bawku West and I have three pilot interventions that I’m testing out.
One has nut exports training local women to produce higher quality nuts that they would receive a premium (above market) price for.
The second intervention is working with groups producing soaps from the butter to determine their constraints to selling more product. For a constraint of supply then we can help by training more women on soap making to help expand existing businesses with recruitment. For the constraint of demand (i.e. the products don’t sell well) then we determine why the products aren’t selling and address with support for improving the quality of the product, efficiency of the process, and marketing (signs, packaging, promotional events, etc).
Finally, the third intervention tries to get suppliers of gum boots, gloves and cutlasses to travel to local villages so the women have an opportunity to buy these goods that are generally only available in larger towns and cities. These items help protect the women from snake bites (snakes go after the fruit that surrounds the Shea nut so the women’s hands and snake mouths are often in the same place). The going estimates suggest 1% of women are bit and 10% of those bites are fatal. With 600 000 women picking Shea nuts, you do the math.
But, with the initial care complete and her wounds deemed not critical the true nature of the Tamale Hospital was revealed:
$10 for an identity card she already had
+ 2 hospital attendants asking for my number
+ The same attendants not knowing where surgery was and then playing with the sensors in the door of the elevator in an apparent attempt to demonstrate bravery in the face of the door closing on his arm
+ Being turned away from surgery to go get an x-ray
+ Being turned away from x-ray because I had to pay first
+ No one knowing whom I should pay or where
+ $16 for x-rays from a cashier on the other side of the hospital who couldn’t accurately subtract 16 from 20
+ 3 hours waiting to get an x-ray everyone knew would prove nothing was broken
+ A trip to a washroom with no lights, no doors, and no running water (At least I couldn’t SEE how unsanitary the place was.)
+ 20 minutes getting the anaesthetic right and listening through the door to sentences such as “OWWWWW! Yes, that still f*&%ing hurts!!” and “Did you dilute the last one?”, “I don’t know”, “How much have we given her?” And my personal favourite: “Do you know what you’re doing?!”
+ 4 stitches
+ Not waiting in the endless line up at the pharmacy because you pay in cash, not with the government insurance plan
+ Encouraging your friend to swallow her painkillers and antibiotics with a healthy sip of beer
= One fun-filled day!
Seriously though, while I greatly enjoyed the quality bonding time with my friend and can laugh at some of the antics, it was a sad, sad place to be. The picture of one middle-aged woman still comes to my mind.
She was naked lying on her side on a rolling hospital bed in the waiting room outside surgery. Someone had thrown a piece of cloth over her but her back side was still exposed and caked with a white powder mixed with the women’s sweat. Her eyes showed she was awake but completely unresponsive – I got the immediate sense that she didn’t care if she lived or died. Distracted by her expression, it took me a long time to notice her foot was bandaged.
Unable to suppress my curiosity, I asked a passing nurse what was wrong with her. She said her foot needed to be amputated. “But why? What happened?” The nurse gives me a defeated look and says: “Oh, you know these village women. They get a small infection but they leave it, afraid to come to the hospital. By the time it gets so bad they come to the hospital, we can’t do anything about it but cut off the rotten bit.”
It occurred to me then that the white powder was probably just to relieve bed sores after spending months lying down in pain, unable to walk with the badly infected foot. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like to endure. How was her poverty and fear so great that it prevent her from coming to the hospital sooner?
It’s not all work and no play all of the time!
Over the past 8 months Troy and I have taken a few days here and there to make sure we see the sights Northern Ghana has to offer.
This photo is from Pikwuro Slave Camp. It’s now a tourist destination and these folks treated me to a song and dance made by banging small rocks against the boulders – exactly how the slaves used to keep themselves entertained while awaiting their fate.
For protection, the people of Sonyo decided to build all their homes attached together.
To get around the community you walk along the roofs and up and down ladders made from felled tree trunks that take you from the rooftops right into people’s houses.
They xylophone is a traditional instrument for the Gonja people. One household I visited had a xylophone band all ready to play for me when I arrived.
For a time, I joined the children as they danced around in front of the musicians. The dance involves seemingly impulsive stomping of the legs while flailing the arms in a kind of crazy chicken-dance style.
It looks amazing to watch these experts do it. And while they were delighted at my attempts to match their movements, I’m glad I was the one with the camera.
Mole National Park. It’s probably the biggest tourist destination in Northern Ghana and with good reason! The baboons join you for every meal; you can watch the elephants bathing in the watering hole below while you eat at the outdoor restaurant; the warthog knocked on our tent to get us up in the morning; and we went for a twenty minute stroll through the forest before literally bumping into elephants! Hakuna Matata.
It hasn’t rained in 6 months.
When the dry season first hit, bush fires swept every open space in Bole.
Very few are started naturally; most are lit by farmers trying to kill “bush meat” to supplement their diet, burn diseased crops or incinerate garbage.
The District Assembly (local government body) is trying to inform everyone that the damage caused by these fires outweighs the gains.
That didn’t stop this fire from mocking the Assembly’s efforts by charring the earth around their sign.
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