The rest of May

May 24, 2009
Today was the second day of training. I was actually able to participate and do some of the training, which was interesting. I really wish I could speak the language so I wouldn’t have to rely on an interpreter so much. We are planning to take a class, so we will be better able to communicate with the people who live here.
This afternoon, we went to the home of Felicia, one of the Ghanaian women who is working with us on the project. She lives in a concrete duplex with a tin roof (a wealthy home, if you will recall). We went inside her home and met her two little girls: Lucky, who is 4, and Melchizia, who is 9 months. They are beautiful girls. The inside of her home was interesting. The house was pretty small. There was a kitchen as you walked in, and then a hallway to the main room. There were couches along the wall and then some very nice satiny curtains dividing the sitting room from a sleeping room, where we saw the baby. Peter noticed a very nice TV in the sitting room, but I didn’t see it so I cannot describe it. We sat outside under a tree and chatted after our little tour of the house. We sampled Guinea Fowl eggs, which taste exactly like chicken eggs except they are smaller. (Actually, we have been eating Guinea Fowl eggs for a while now, but since she wanted us to try them we did.) Guinea Fowl meat also tastes just like chicken, except there is not so much meat on the animal. I will post a picture of a Guinea Fowl on here sometime; they are pretty funny looking. While we were sitting, Felicia called over various vendors who were passing by and did her grocery shopping. She bought some enormous yams and a couple of bags of small, spicy red peppers. She also stopped the corn flour vendor so we could see what it looks like (just like wheat flour, only perhaps a little brighter white). It was fun to pass the time there and see what a typical Ghanaian family would do on a Sunday afternoon.
We had our own sacrament meeting here this evening. Although there is a temple in Accra and a fairly large LDS population in the country, there is no LDS church or LDS mission here, probably because the region is about 70 percent Muslim (which would make proselyting difficult). It was fun to do it just the two of us.
It was a very nice Sunday.
May 25, 2009
Today we went out to visit the sales agents again. It was very nice to see them all again. The children in the villages were a lot more interested in us today. The children we have met so far either wave to us or look terrified when they see us. One of the little girls at the first village we visited actually held my arm when we were walking around. I also noticed that one of the girls in that village had Down’s syndrome. I thought that was interesting just because I know that people with Down’s syndrome often have other health problems, and so she must be pretty strong to have survived so well with no (western) medical attention at all. In another village, all the children wanted to shake my hand and they giggled and laughed. All the kids here are just adorable, and they are fun to be around. I just wish I could talk to them.
This afternoon I was tired out from the morning trips to the villages, so I stayed home while Peter went to the art market. He bought his djembe drum, and he is really excited about it. He also bought me a necklace as a late birthday present, which was very sweet.
We spent the evening putting labels on containers for the women to sell their products. It’s not very exciting, but it needs to be done.
May 26, 2009
It’s kind of funny to look at the clock on this computer and realize that it’s 3AM at home. Here, it’s 9AM. I haven’t really had a hard time adjusting to the time here. I haven’t had a hard time falling asleep, or woken up at strange hours and been unable to get back to sleep. Basically I just sleep a lot and then feel tired a lot. Peter has not been quite so lucky. He has a hard time sleeping at night here. I’m not really sure why.
I also want to tell you about the mosquitoes here. I have seen a couple of them, and they are large by US standards. Last night there was a dead one on my pillow, and it scared me a little. Mosquitoes are not supposed to be in air conditioned rooms, and our AC was on all day long yesterday. Maybe it got in when the AC was dead and then it died because it is now too cold. That’s what I’ll hope, at least. I get one or two new mosquito bites every day. So far, I don’t have malaria or any other bad diseases that mosquitoes carry. I don’t think Peter has gotten any mosquito bites, lucky for him.
Peter wanted me to write about how we make phone calls here. The system is very different from how we do it in the US. Although they do offer prepaid plans, most people are on a pay-as-you-go system. When you want to add new minutes to your phone, you stop at one of the millions of vendors that sell little scratch-cards with codes for more minutes. You scratch off the little film, type the code into your phone, send it, and the phone gets reloaded with money. The largest denomination of phone money that I have seen is a 7.5 cedi card (about $6 US). You only get charged for outgoing calls from your phone (or for outgoing texts, I would assume), and there are different rates depending on if you call somebody in your network or outside of it. It is very cheap to call the US, about 15 cents per minute. I’m not sure if that is Ghana or US currency. So if you are dying for a phone call from Ghana, let us know. Or if you are dying to call us and you can get a better rate than 15 cents per minute, we can give you our phone number and it won’t cost us a thing! We have a phone card that my grandmother gave us that doesn’t actually work from Ghana, so we could give you the code to that. It has been fun to talk to people from Ghana, especially because we thought we wouldn’t be able to because our internet has been very temperamental.
May 30, 2009
Today was the grand opening of the BonVi store in Tamale. (BonVi is the company we are working with in Ghana). I think it was a success. There were many people who came by, and the chief of Tamale even honored us with his presence. It was cool to see him. He had a man follow him around carrying an umbrella, even though it wasn’t raining at the time of his visit. The chief cannot be rained upon, apparently.
While we were there at the store opening, we had a visit from a street entertainer dressed up as “the juju man” according to Fredrik. I am going to post his picture along with this for you. He had a couple of men with him playing drums, and somebody made a very distinct whistle for him. He was followed by a very large crowd. When he first came around the corner to our store, I was afraid of him. I wasn’t sure if he was part of the visitations planned for the day, but it turned out he was not. When he arrived, he took out a pretty large knife and made some cuts into a post we had in front of the store so nobody would park there, and into a piece of cardboard. After showing us that the knife would cut, he sawed it into his stomach, and his lip, and gouged it into his eye, and somehow “miraculously” he wasn’t cut. After collecting money from the viewers, he went on his way. He left behind a bunch of children that thought it was fun to shake my hand. The rest of the day was uneventful. We went out for lunch, went back to the palace, and then went out for dinner.
I haven’t written about my jobs yet. I am the accountant/banker for the trip, and the warehouse director. The banker/accountant means that anybody who takes money has to come to me and ask for what they need, give me receipts, and anyone who earns it during the day selling products comes to me to turn in their money and an account of what they have sold. For the warehouse director job, I am in charge of making sure that we always have enough inventory on hand and sending a weekly report of what has been sold and used up during the week. They hired a local man as the warehouse manager (that’s why my “title” is director) to do this job, but he wasn’t really working during the initial part of the project (as in, he would sit around and do nothing while the people “under” him were working, and one time he fell asleep) so they asked me to be in charge of making sure that the work got done. We don’t have any “underlings” anymore, and the project directors from the US were worried that the local man wouldn’t be proactive enough to keep the warehouse up and going. We worked together for one day so far (yesterday), and it actually went very well. I think there were two problems: first, managers here probably just do nothing so he thought he was doing his job, and second, he has never had a job before so he really doesn’t know how to do an inventory or how to tell how much stock to prepare for sale, etc. I am hoping that if I can provide good direction at the beginning he will learn how to do the job and be comfortable doing it so when I leave he can take over. We’ll see how it goes.
I have to admit that I don’t love either job. I don’t like having everybody come and ask me for money because I don’t always know if what they are asking for is a legitimate request, or if the price they are giving me is a legitimate price, etc. So I decided I will just be the banker and give them what they ask for, and then if the bosses have a problem with it they can talk to the person who asked for the money.
May 31, 2009
Today was a long and busy day. We had two village campaigns for BonVi that we had to go to. At the first one, the village children started playing with me. I taught them how to do high fives, and then we played a game I knew as “down by the banks” where you sit in a circle and slap the hand of the person next to you and it goes around the circle. I’m not sure how well the kids understood. At first they played really well, and then some of them started trying to hit each other as hard as they could, and the boy next to me imitated slicing my hand or gouging it with a knife a couple of times, and I decided we had enough of that game. Then we played London Bridge is Falling Down. They thought that was fun. I had fun except for when the kids would fight with each other over who would slap my hand next or for different parts of the game. One little boy fell down and started crying, and I didn’t know what to do, and his mother came over and asked what we were doing. I told her we were playing a game, but I worried that she thought I was a bad influence or something. Oh well. She can just chalk it up to “white people are ignorant,” which is what a village chief told Fredrik when he apologized in advance for any offenses we might cause.
This evening, we went to another football match. (In case you don’t know, this means “soccer game” in American.) This time it was the Ghana national team playing the Uganda national team. It was insanely crowded, and I was afraid for my safety a couple of times. People would just push and push, and then there were cars trying to get through the crowd and I thought I would either be trampled or hit. We survived. I don’t think I’ll go to another match, or if I do, I will go very very early. Some funny things from this match:
1. At the beginning of the game, a group of people marched around the field with a very large advertisement on a piece of material like the parachutes you play with in elementary school. You couldn’t really read what it said, but you knew somebody was sponsoring the game.
2. The power went out at the stadium at half time. I was terrified at first, thinking that people would go crazy and freak out (as they would in the US). However, people here didn’t seem to mind too much. There was an elevated amount of talking as people wondered what was going on, but nobody seemed upset about it. Eventually the power came back and they resumed the game.
3. There were two groups of people with different versions of the name “Ghana National Football Team Supporters” who provided band music and dancing in the stands for the ENTIRE game. They stopped when the power went out; otherwise, I think they would have played straight through half time. They were on opposite sides of the field and the music they played kind of clashed. There was no clear melody. However, it was fun to have the African drums as background to the match. It definitely upped the enthusiasm of the crowd.