Seikwa is the village where I live and work. The word "village" is important. Here in Ghana people differentiate whether you live in a village or not. They actually seem to look down on people that live in the village.
So what is life in the village really like? Well first of all you have to get there and getting there is not always that easy. Some volunteers have to wait for specific times each week to go or come from their village. Usually on market day it is easier to travel to or from the village. In my case getting in and out of my village is relatively easy the ride however limits your desire to leave...
The road to my village is, a very rough, 20 miles from the nearest town, Berekum. The journey takes about 40 minutes to an hour. The dirt road has been eroded by the heavy rain that occurs here. At one point, a section of the road became so muddy that cars couldn't pass. Riding in a trotro to or from my village is a pretty scary affair. First of all the trotros they send to the village are typically older and more broken-down. Some divers are better than others but here's a typical breakdown of the experience:
- 0 to 20 MPH - This is a pretty safe speed.
- 20 to 30 MPH - You begin to feel the fear!
- 30 to 40 MPH - You begin to clutch on to something for stability. You also begin to sweat from the fear.
- 40 to 45 MPH - You start to pray for your life.
- 45 to 50 MPH - Your eyes are closed, head is down and you notice that pieces of the trotro begin falling off!
- 50+ - I would expect that at about 55 MPH the trotro would begin to break-up much like the Space Shuttle Columbia reentering the earths atmosphere. I don't know. I am lucky enough to have never traveled this fast in a trotro to my village!
The worst thing about traveling to or from my village (aside from the threat to ones life) is all the dust. Your kicking up a massive dust cloud as you travel down the road, and though you don't eat your own dust there are plenty of other vehicles on the road. The worst experience is when your diver tries to pass a vehicle kicking up a massive cloud of dust ahead. Then your both dirty and scared for your life.
When you arrive at the village the dust is no better. This is in fact one of the major defining characteristics of the village - it is dirty and dusty.
The road ahead looks pretty rough...
Here in Ghana they have a cultural habit of sweeping the yards so that there is no topsoil remaining, only a hard silt clay surface. Each morning Ghanaians get up and sweep any semblance of nascent green plant matter away. I'm not sure why they do it but it is very ingrained in their culture. I suspect that since they cannot afford lawn mowers, keeping the weeds down would be too much trouble.
People in my village are persistence farmers, that is they grow their own crops, just enough to survive with a little extra to sell. Some of the more wealthy people (many of my students families) have cocoa farms in the Western region of Ghana. Most of the local people just grow maize, yams, cassava, and plantains. In one of the surrounding villages they grow peanuts and there is some cocoa but not much. There are also sparse pineapples and bananas.
Here are a couple of nice pics I took outside the house and one at the school at night. The one on the left is the sunset and the one on the right is the clouds of an impending storm; both pictures were taken just outside by bungalow which is in the foreground of the right pic. The last pic is the one of the school blocks at night.
To be continued...