Jim informed me that I had my days mixed and that yesterday was Tuesday. This morning: up at 6, breakfast at 7, depart
at 8. A variation on breakfast:
scrambled eggs, warm beans this time, watermelon, toast. They serve sausages all over Africa , but they are not American and I skip those. From the Sky Plus Hotel where we are staying
there is a lovely view, but it is always foggy so we can’t get a good picture.
This was to be the last hard day of traveling to meet with communities. We had met with 8 yesterday, but we only
managed to do 5 today even though we got a much earlier start. The other areas we’ve visited were almost all
ready to be considered to have some type of water system. They had shown that they had been able to
collect money for the water, have a bank account, repair old wells, etc. Each community is supposed to have its own
WATSAN committee. Today we met some that
never had one, were not organized in any way, hadn’t fixed their broken wells, don’t
collect money, don’t have bank accounts for transparency, etc. Once again, the largest communities were less
organized and had a tendency not to cooperate with each other. They are foolish enough to pay a company that
puts water in little bags, instead of paying the same amount for and entire
bucket of clean water out of a well.
A very rocky
community way up in the mountains.
Today we went up a steep dirt road with hairpin turns, ones that
frighten Clarence. He has a palpating
fear of heights. He even gave up his
front seat to sit in the rumble seat on the way down the mountain so he
wouldn’t have to see it up close and personal.
They are still working on the road, making ditches for the rainwater so
it won’t spoil the road. These ditches
are made with available rock set in concrete.
We don’t know when the road will be paved, but the steepest parts are at
the hairpin turns and Clarence tries to hide how freaked out he gets. I kept telling him that our dirt road rides
in Nepal were much worse. He was delighted to be down. I was also happy when we left too because it
had just begun to rain and we were not sure how slippery the road would be in a
downpour. The village has a spectacular
view from up there but it was hard to capture its beauty with my camera.
Picture this
view in vivid colors—all brilliant green and red dirt.
This is the first day we got back at 5 PM .
Tomorrow we have the same schedule in the morning, but we’ll be visiting
two more villages high on the mountain and one down below. We are going to do some spring developments
here. Before they built the road the
people carried their telephone poles up the mountain so they could have
electricity—amazing—it is very steep.
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| We could not figure out what these mounds were. A man who spoke very good English said that the old ones in their village still worshiped these 'Gods'! |
This stone is used for sacrificing a goat or other animal, once again only used by
the elderly. We have seen something here from the Old
Testament!
One more half day of visiting communities before we head back to Accra .
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