Amansie West Project

Monday, April 13, 2015

It poured rain Saturday night, so hard in fact that I had to bring in my clothes off the balcony to dry inside.  It rained most of the night so that the next morning it wasn’t so hot when we went to church.  Today it was hot again, but I think the rainy season does help a little bit.  Air conditioned cars help a whole lot more…

 

Today we left at 8 AM, drove to the Amansie West District office and picked up Cheslyn, who is our representative from the District.  While driving out to the areas to check out where they dug the wells, I began reading the hygiene training program of the group that we hired to help us.  They gave Dever’s the report of what they called ‘phase 1’.  This is where they trained the District and then went into the villages to assess how the communities were doing.  They helped them form water committees and encouraged them to begin saving their monies.  They are not used to women taking leadership positions, so they had to make sure that at least 2-3 women were on every committee.  They were especially pleased when one woman was named head of the water committee.  Next they will present the PHAST portion of the hygiene training to the District so that they can begin their teaching, but it will be overseen by this group.  I liked what I was reading, but one is never really sure about sustainability until a few years have passed, and the training is everything.

You could see that it had rained as we drove in those monstrous water puddles; occasionally we forged our way on some foot paths in the car because the ‘road was impassable’.  The only mishap of the day was when we were coming home and someone rear-ended us and dented our bumper.  Just another blip on the screen of our day…

The puddles were a couple of feet deep, but we didn’t get stuck. 

In one area Jim didn’t think they needed mechanization and wanted them to change it to hand pumps—we shall see.

Cocoa seeds come from the tree to the right of the picture where the lady is holding up the pod.  In the pod are many seeds, but they have to remove the stuff around them.  Then they put them out to dry, pulling out the dry ones and putting them into bags where a man comes to purchase them by the kilo.  After that, most of it is processed in other countries, but some of it is done in Ghana.  They pulverize the whole, dried seed, which then becomes the powdered cocoa, or at least that is what they tell us. 

Drying racks for cocoa beans.

 Drying cocoa seeds.

One of the ways that communities have to raise money for water projects is for the heads of the community to take 1 kilo of the product and sell it and put it in the bank and that seems to work very well.

We arrived back at the hotel in mid-afternoon.  We have to leave this hotel in the morning (I am weeping).  We will be checking out a new area to see if we will be doing another large water project and will be staying at another place.  Tomorrow, another adventure; I am way too happy here.

Love, from Kumasi

PS: I found out that the fruit above the cashew nut tastes a bit like lemon, but perhaps not as sour.  Because the process for getting the final product of a cashew nut, most people just eat the fruit above it; professionals are the only ones that bother processing the nut into what we get to purchase and eat. Apparently it is quite involved.