Small-small

While I lay sick in bed (or was on the toilet), Spring has started. Now when I go out and leave the main road, I step into the village this town actually is to find everything buzzing with life. In this small park we have recently discovered, I breath in the humid, fresh air. The soil has been covered in green, the trees have started flowering, reptiles can be seen even more than before and butterflies and birds flutter around between the plastic waste.
“They have started farming”, Christoph reports us from the outer world. That means we will have a great opportunity to see the farming happening at last. On the other hand, it will make it increasingly difficult to find research subjects. No time to waste and linger around anymore. It is as if after a long sleep the earth and time itself have woken up by the beat off the rain.
The magic of the rain. No wonder that people are adoring and worshiping the rain in all ancient religions. It seems way more logical to me than praying to a man once nailed on a cross.

And me? I will start again “small-small” as the people say here…. Little-by-little trying to come to grips with the world around me by observing, listening and … enjoying it!

Inshallah!

In a country where the Mosques summon the believers to their prayers 5 times a day. Where our Muslim brothers from the bicycle repair spot lightheartedly quarrel over their place in the prayer line before kneeling down again for their umpteenth “Allah w Akbahr”.
In a country where you buy your jeans in the “Jesus never fails”-boutique. Ride through the dodgy trafic in the “Put your trust in God”caps. Or eat a meal out of a plastic bag in the “There is no power above the power of God”-snackbar.
In such a country, religious expressions are seeping into my own vocabulary without notice. I caught myself saying “may God bless you” and “thanks to God” on more than one occasion already. And sighing an Inshallah… when I hope that the car will come to take us back to town.

They say that the African is a deeply religious being. And this goes way longer back that the monotheist religions that trade and conquest brought them. Traditional shrines and rituals are still the parch-and-parcel of African everyday life.
Divine fate rules life. This gives unexpected answers to interview questions. When asked about future decisions and plans, it is not unusual to reply “How can I know what God has in mind for me?”, as if will and own choice have no place…
I asked an 18 year old what training would he choose if he was given the opportunity to learn on any aspect of farming (animal rearing, soil fertility, a cash crop etc.). He replied: “Okay, all those different aspects are ways to make your farm successful. May God give me success if it is his wish and guide me on my path.. That is my answer to your question.”

Among these steadfast believers, I started sighing myself “Oh Lord teach me humbleness…” and I think the Lord is well answering my prayer… although his lessons are hard ;-)
As you have followed my black ponderings above, I am going through a struggle to get to terms with my so-called “uselessness”. A lot of pretentions had to be left in the first weeks as a result of the constant heat-induced sleepiness. Then other pretentions are being taken away by the diarrhea, some important backlashes in the research project, the not all that positive reaction of Ghanaian researchers and farmers to our research….
At first, my idea was that by linking up to the Ghana School Feeding Program (GSFP) I would have something concrete to deliver recommendations to. And through SNV (a Dutch development organization) as a research partner, we would make sure our research would benefit local organizations and partners to the GSFP. So even though I could not do action-research myself, it would at least not be doing some “stand-alone”research.
Soon upon arrival these two “anchors” turned out not to be very “stead fast”. The Dutch government decided to withdraw her support from the GSFP for several reasons: financial management is not performed the way it should by the Ghanaian government and 70% of the money goes to the 3 richest districts. Is this about fighting poverty or winning votes in the presidential elections this autumn?
Secondly, SNV announced that they did not want to be partners in our research. Reason: According to SNV they offered mr. Eenhoorn (the former Unilever guy now the associate professor in charge of our research programme) to link us up with local partner organizations, which would mean open up our research agenda to their input. Eenhoorn refused this as he wanted to stick to his own brilliant research plan…without even discussing the option with us, the researchers. And failing to report back the subsequent withdrawal of SNV to the project.
I was very angry with mr. Eenhoorn for two days and was determined to tell him what I thought of his depreciation of us as researchers by taking such an important step in research strategy and by spoiling our chances to contribute anything to local knowledge development. But on Monday morning, when I managed to reach him…. Well, intercontinental phone calls are just not the best for disagreements and besides he has this way with charms and words that made me decide not to spill my energy any further.
I sigh… even though we both are Dutch, we seem to come from other planets… so talking louder will not open ears that are full of other music. I only hope he understands that developing a happy society, is not the same as running a company… that subsistence farming is a different kind of trade than selling Magnum icecream… and that Africa is not a market to be conquered but the home to many who want to live life in all its aspects, not just the productive ones. And that since it is their home and not ours, we should have a whole lot of respect and a lot more patience!!
But oh well, it might just as well be me who does not understand. And in the end, can anyone pretend that he fully does??


So humbleness, Lord, humbleness ;-)

Guilt as my garment

But can you at all compare their happiness with your own? If you were used to the village life and T-Z and porridge, to the hard work during the rains, and the idleness of the dry season? If you knew from little girl on that you would marry as the first, second or third wife to a man and have children and work on the land? Well, my ponderings are classical and cliché. But as I have found out before, clichés carry a lot of truth within them. That is, I see much more smiling faces and hear laughter around me than on many a day in the Dutch polder. And if poverty is the absence of opportunities and choice. Richness can lead people to suffer from the uncertainty that comes with having too many… Once you are able to fulfill basic needs, life can become as empty as purchasing the latest fashion.
As always, truth is sure to lie in the middle. There are good things here, there are good things there. We all have our own problems, and the perception of the individual determines the importance or even the reality of the problem. With our rational, Western minds we like to classify our observations to seek for efficiency, effectiveness and economic priorities. Blind to these ghosts of our own, we ignore someone else’s ghosts (the rain god, the ancestors) as back ward. And our preaching and teaching has done its work with the educated Africans leaving their communities and countries to fulfill the new goal of personal achievement. To become more educated and struggle for a place in an office…
And what about me? Where ponderings, feelings, western’ rationalism mingles with African magic, melancholy lies waiting. The feeling of guilt to interfere in other people’s lives without offering them anything in exchange competes with the attraction to a world so different from mine. With the weight of the world on my shoulders converting all my ponderings in moral judgments about my own life’s choices, life is a never ending struggle with depression as a natural reaction. Why is gratefulness so much harder to welcome as my garment than guilt?
Striving to complete integrity, to congruency is only possible in a life without taking risks to make errors. And that is not a life. But then is the good intention or heart enough? Who decides when an error is an error… And am I so infected by Western productivism, that I can only measure my value by the good deeds I am able to realize in the material world as others measure it by money or career achievements..

On lighter days, Africa makes me laugh to a point that it is inappropriate. They laugh at me, for being strange. But customs here are often so strange, that I cannot hold back my laughter either. After greeting yet another chief with some minutes of bowing, clapping and ‘Na, Na, Na’, it start to trickle the laughter muscles as we’d say in Dutch and I have to bite my lip to prevent another outburst…

On others days, in Zinindo, a somewhat bigger town, the plea for assistance of the farmers becomes again unbearable to me. An accusation. Its knifes deadly sharp when in perfectly in tune with my inner critiques…
To the farmers we try to be honest from the start: we come to ‘take’ not to ‘give’, we ask them to be our teachers in telling us about the way they practice agriculture and the constraints that come with it. That by teaching us, we hope that we can send a clearer picture of their situation home: indirectly to donor organizations and us as part of their future work force… in order not to repeat past mistakes. They do understand. They say.

15-04-2008: Sweet village life in Balsheigh?

(The following is just taken from my field report, not written to entertain ;-))

Through the example of house building, the chair man explains how communal labour has its place in the village. “When a man wants to build a house, he himself is responsible for providing the material, like sand, cow dung, wild fiber plants for the roofing or sink. But for the work he can count on all the village members to help him on the day he has announced. When strangers pass by they will lend a hand – even just for a minute – so that they know that anytime they have to hide for the rain they have a roof in this village.”

Some huge trees in the village provide not only shade, but also the local ‘cotton’: Kapok. Kapok is used to make pillows or matrasses. “Nowadays, the trader comes by to buy the produce and we just sell it for any price he gives. We don’t know the prices in other places, we just want to sell it. Yes the price is low. The revenue accrues to the family of the planter of the tree.”
Later on, we see old man making rope from a fibrous plant that grows in the wild and is also sometimes cultivated. The produce from this typical dry season activity, he himself goes to sell in the market. It is used to tie up cattle or building purposes.

The groundnut and rice processing and trading is women’s domain. Men help in the ground nut processing (during our group interview we sit under a tree for shade peeling groundnut while conversing) but the women from Balsheigh and some neighbouring communities organize themselves to go to the Tamale market to sell the produce to the retailers. The women also process the rice by threshing, cooking, drying. For this they use their own produce, but also buy extra rice. For this buying of unprocessed rice they can get a loan. Interestingly, the loan is often used to buy the rice produce from their husbands, so that the men can repay their farming loans.
For lunch and evening meal T-Z is served: a staple based on maize (thick maize porridge) with a sauce made from cassava leaves or groundnuts. Apologies were made that the maize was mixed with smashed cassava, as they started running out of maize. Cassava seems to be seen as a poor man’s crop instead of a ‘miracle crop’, that can still produce on very poor soils with little water and can be stored in the ground for a long time.
The chief receives our presents. Joris gives him hazelnut and walnut from his garden in the Netherlands as the counterpart for the bitter kola nuts we have received so often in the last days. “Oh your land must be sweet, since even the nuts taste sweet. Bring me the seeds to grow these trees.” The chief, old and fragile, kept on expressing his gratitude for our visit and said that we did very well. That it is hard to live in the village, that it is “not sweet”, that it was not like the life in the towns that attracted him so much. We explained him about the disadvantages of city life: the danger for the children to play, the haste of the people, the lack of social cohesion etc. He was surprised to hear that it is possible not to know your neighbors, to hear that life in the city is not only sweet. He was happy to see that we ate T-Z as he had been worrying about what to give us. And he was even more surprised that for us sleeping under the moon and stars on the floor of his compound was special to us…. We affirmed him that we were fine and happy and it was true. For the moment. When next morning’s porridge (a thinner version of last night’s dinner with some spices through it) was served, I knew I couldn’t live in the village conditions for more than some days if it were without my supplies of biscuits… That as a holiday the village life is sweet, but that it is the choice that makes it sweet. The knowledge that I can get a proper meal when I get back to town, that when I catch malaria I can leave and pay the treatment…

Update

Underneath you find a lot of pieces that I wrote on Joris' laptop and today the internet works well, so: there you go!!! As you may read, I am healthy and enjoy Africa, although our pace has slowed down considerably because of the heat....

Dirty water?!

No where on earth, the water tastes as good as at home in Wageningen. But since man cannot live by water alone…

Here, I easily drink away litres of water a day and as long as the water meets hygienic standards, I try not to complain. From the very expensive bottle we have shifted to the ‘sachets’ - half a litre sealed water bags of pure water. Besides the price, another disadvantage of the bottles is that most shops only have one or two in store, so they have sold out after ‘white man’ came by and you will have to visit some three shops to get your daily supply. This in the heat, makes you sweat so much that you will need yet another bottle…

Sachets can be bought in packets of ten litres, that just fit in your bicycle basket. The taste? It depends… the trick is to find water that has not been in the sun for a long time and to keep them cool or transfer them to bottles as soon as possible. Otherwise the plastic taste is verrrrry dominant indeed….

But it makes me feel ashamed to nag about the taste when others depend fully on the tap water of doubtful quality (?) or on even more unsure supplies. In the villages women have to walk for hours to meet the household’s water demand from the river.

So you would expect the people to be very happy when a development organisation comes to dig boreholes and put pumps. But… as a nice example of African irony:

The people complained: “The water is acidic. When you give it to the trees they die.” “The water from the bore hole is salty. We don’t cook with it or it will spoil our dishes.” They tell us and let me taste the crystal clear water from the borehole with the taste of exclusive Spa water or even Wageningen water...

Then they show the water that they prefer. “Nice river water”, pointing at the sandy, turbid water that they fetch far away and then settle with aluin and filter it with a piece of cloth. “But are you not afraid of the guinea worm?” “No we never have trouble with them”, they reassure me. Looking at some swollen bellies I wonder about other parasites….

Not withstanding these are the things that make me smile daily here in Ghana. They may be very frustrating for development workers. They might lead government officials to say that these farmers are backward and stupid. But does not it only show the truth in the Dutch saying:

“Over smaak valt niet te twisten / You can’t argue over taste…” ???

Trees and taboos

In his muslim attire he attended us. The village’s tree planter. The man who had dared to plant ten cashew trees (eight of them dried out or got eaten by the goats), even though the traditional belief is that one will die at the moment the tree planted grows higher than oneself. He was a muslim scholar he said and had read in the Koran about the importance of tree planting. And he had realized that whether or not you plant a tree, you will die and it is better to leave a tree for your children. The other villagers now agree with him and they happily had received tree seedlings from an NGO some years before: the teak grows well, but the mangos were flooded.. and when even simple fencing is too big an investment, it is hard to keep away the animals.

Traditional belief holds that some trees are home to the ancestors. Those trees are not allowed to be cut, nor to be planted. The baobab tree, the sheanut, the dawedawe… Only thing is, people will often not tell development workers who propose a tree-planting project about this, as it is a taboo to share such secrets.. or people are afraid to be called backward. So it can take years to find out.

James tells that years ago they let people from other tribes from the south, come to plant the trees for them as they would not be affected. But then someone tried to plant a tree and did not die, and then others tried…. Also there is less danger in planting ‘white-man’s trees’: trees like the mango that are not originally from this area and the ancestors do not care about.

“… then you are in the right place!”

On Friday we got introduced in the first research village. And doing this correctly in traditional Dagbani style is no piece of cake. Our translators were there to save us from the rudest mistakes, but still we made a lot… As the Dutch would say, I felt like an ‘elephant in the china cupboard’.

Leaving our shoes and slippers in front of the round clay hut, where all the household heads (the elders) were gathered. The thick, sweet sour smell of African men.

The traditional greetings that translated would be something like “Good morning. How are you? How is the family? How is the land? Etc”. We only know the first part “Desba” and know that after most questions “Na” is the correct answers. After most… so sometimes you are horribly wrong and reply “yes”, when they ask you where you are from…

Water was brought to welcome us.

After translator Al-Hassan explained the purpose of our visit, one of the men concluded with content that: “If you come to study agriculture, you are in the right place. Because that is what we do..... Actually that is all we do. Well, we have a few guinea fowl and chicken. We send a few children to school.”

They also made it clear to us that they hoped we did not come to tell them that they should produce more rice. The government and NGOs had been promoting rice growing in the valley bottoms that could be sold as a cash crop. “We now produce rice and the women process it. But we don’t believe in eating rice, because our staple is T-Z, maize porridge. So why produce more rice for sale when later we have to buy maize? Besides the soil has gone acidic and the water has become weak, and rice yields have declined. We would welcome people to work on maize…”

A second meeting followed. Again with the men, but now also with the chief. More opportunities to make mistakes and provoke their laughs. Handing over one cedi (a dollar) as a sign of respect, we were then given to eat the bitter Kola nuts (indeed, the original ingredient of Coca Cola!) that the old men use to get energy. We had a hard time breaking them to share and chew them…

Afterwards we were shown around, receiving guinea fowl eggs as ‘we cannot offer you breakfast as we should, because it will cook to long’. Seeing the swollen bellies of the kids, I felt more guilty with every egg. But Al-Hassan said they would feel very insulted if we suggested giving them back to feed the children.

We talked about cereal seed selection, storage, trees and soils and were introduced to a Fulani family, another ethnic semi-nomadic group that herds the animals for the farmers.

And I finally had some success with the local man: the eldest man with three teeth left informed which of the two white ladies would be his wife…

Fried yams and bicycles

The title of this weblog “Sorghum and tro-tro’s” might have been badly chosen. Even though Accra in the south is full of tro-tro’s – minibusses in which at least twelve people are crammed – here we hardly see them. Shared taxis, motorbikes and bicycles are dominating the streets of Tamale. They even have bicycle lanes, what more could a Dutch girl dream of!

So I daily cycle on our far-too-small blue bike with its practical basket in front of me to get water bags or our take-away lunch. That lunch shows the importance of yam, a tuber crop, above the sorghum cereal crop I hoped to see more. But sorghum is excellent for drought and it therefore is more popular further up north. And actually… yam chips are a great lunch. Well, so far at least. Let’s see how many days it takes to grow tired of white bread with omelette for breakfast and yam chips for lunch…

The embarrassing thing is that having been scared away with the stories about Ghanaian cuisine, we haven’t even tried the fufu, banku or t-z yet: the cereal based staple foods. But we’ll soon go to the villages and will have too… But Jeroen, don’t worry: there is plenty of rice, plaintain and red-red bean sauce are nice and I haven’t been “forced” to eat meat yet!

Latest news: we have managed to rent a house for a month with our own kitchen!

The family keeps growing

“TSSS… sister… tsss … sister.”

As you see, next to friends, Ghana is a great place to expand your family. But are you up to the responsibilities that come with that…? Because “You are our sisters, we are your brothers. Your problems are ours. Our problems are yours.” (Quote from Tom & Jerry our new ‘brothers’, after we told them we were not going to rent their house even if they had already ordered the beds….)

Too many friends

It is common wisdom that you can never have too many friends.

After ten days in Ghana I am inclined to believe you can…

‘I your friend’ always knows where to get exactly what you need for the lowest price. Whether it is a bicycle, hotel or a taxi home.

‘I your friend’ always has a lot of friends from “Nederland” already, that he “very much likes”.

‘I your friend’ says you can always call on him anytime you need him. But if you are stupid enough to give him your number, he’ll instead be calling you all day long.

Certainly not all of them are rip-offs. Only some of them use you to improve their status. A lot of them are demonstrating genuine friendliness and hospitality. And that is amazing in a country where so little `works´ and people have so little. For sure. But still, even of friends you can have too many.

The good new is: I am hardly in favour with the other category of ‘friends’. The ‘hey white lady, I want to marry you’- friends all go for Bianca’s round female forms. Skinniness is not fashionable in Africa ;-)

What kind of a bus is this? (01-04-2008)

We are on the bus from Accra to Tamale (13 hours if you are lucky). Around us people shout:

“What kind of a bus is this, without airco and without music?” “Why are we waiting for that lady? She should be on time. Five minutes is five minutes!”

Spoiled, rich whites complaining that things do not work as in their countries? No! It are the Ghanaians themselves that defy our prejudices…

Looking at the scenery, we see how beautiful the south of Ghana actually is. How lush, even at the end of the dry season. Hills green with what is left of the tropical forest once covering more than half of the country. At the bus stops, women are selling their produce. The cliché, but incredible. Africa’s strong women . No hunched shoulders here. Their straight backs revealing years of training, carrying big loads on their heads.

Sleeping is too much of a word… (Accra, 31-03-2008)

Last night soaking in our own sweat under a mosquito net in our double bed, the ventilator kept on failing with every power short cut…. Halfway through the night I wake up dizzy and sick. Stumbling to the toilet with my flashlight, I start doubting this mission for the first time. Am I up to the “violence” of the African continent? Already there is no air to breath and they say that Tamale is even hotter…

My intestines (darmen) have a better flush than the toilet … but a bucket of water is there to help. Of what was left, my stomach relieves itself in the sink.

Crawling back to bed, the rest of the night is spent half awake, half unconscious – sleeping is something else.

(All seems more dramatic than it is. Malarone + heat + one glass of beer taken in the hope that it would still the thirst for more than just ten minutes, can produce a lot of nausea… I am still parasite-free)

Back? (From my diary: Accra, 30-03-2008)

The houses, the colourful clothes, the dirt, the warmth….

The noise, the traffic, the trees, the laughs, the attention…

The discussions over prices, the beginner’s mistakes, the menu that is always shorter than on the card…

I am back!! Back home to…. Mexico, to Guatemala…!

That’s what I first thought and felt when I arrived in Accra and I felt happiness, excitement… The most beautiful thing of being in such a challenging environment:to feel more than ever that you are alive. Finally living completely in the moment, being HERE and NOW without years of disciplined meditation, because otherwise…. you’ll get crushed by a car/ loose your money / catch a nasty disease / miss a beautiful scene / miss that bit of information that could be crucial for your research.

Of course Ghana is no Mexico or Guatemala. It does definitely resembles more to the latter than to the former. And up till now in my simplistic view, it is most of the times enough to just put ‘more’ in front of the following adjectives, so it becomes: dirtier, hotter, even more people crammed into the mini-busses, more power short cuts, more hassle…. Oh yes, and some ‘less’: less water in your shower, less paved roads…

It impressed me: seeing the first African capital from the air. We landed in Lagos, Nigeria. It was so weird to see a country capital where only a few central roads are paved and all the others are red, dusty, dirt-roads. It finally dawned to me….

From the white, snowy Alps. Crossing a sea of water and then a huge sea of sand. I had arrived…. This is Africa. !Que emoción!

Heet Tamale

Geen mooie verhalen. Het internet heeft zich aangepast aan de traagte van de Afrikaanse hitte.
Alleen jullie laten weten dat het goed gaat. Dat ik plak en jeuk van het zweet. Maar dat alles een avontuur is. En dat ik email helaas erg weinig zal lezen of zal schrijven. Voorlopig beperken we dat dan maar tot het noodzakelijke.