Morning by morning new mercies I see

Hi folks!
It's been a while since I've written a meaningful post, so this one is well overdue. Currently, I am finishing up my FIFTH MONTH in Ghana! I can hardly believe it, actually. The other day another volunteer characterized time in Ghana by saying, "the days drag but the weeks fly." It seems like a strange way to describe time passing, but it couldn't be more true for my experience at my site. Some days I wake up, exercise, eat breakfast, do laundry, visit the office, play games with friends, and come home to find that it's only 11am and I have the whole day ahead of me. Yet the weeks seem to be flying past me at an alarming rate, and I'm sure the time will only go by faster as the holidays approach and traveling begins to pick up. The past few weeks have been busy, with weekly District Assembly meetings, event planning at the ITFC office, and trips to town for event-planning meetings with a few of my fellow volunteers. Later today, two other volunteers and I are going to start writing the proposal for a grant for a football camp in the middle of December. We're hoping to bring in around 80 children to a local secondary school for a 3-day camp in which we will do football (soccer) drills in the mornings and teach health lessons in the afternoons. It will be a co-ed camp and it will be free to the participants, who are being chosen by field assistants for ITFC who work in the surrounding villages. This grant will be under my name, so it is officially my first big project, and I could not be more excited! Having the opportunity to work on these types of projects is amazing, and certainly makes the work that I do here is fufilling and fun! Productivity came to a halting grind on Tuesday afternoon, as I came down with some sort of illness that left me basically in bed until Friday morning. I ate some local food before the menacing sickness descended, so it was probably something caused by eating chop that was not properly heated. Whatever it was, it left me pretty ill and I had trouble keeping down food or even moving from my spot in bed for a couple of days. It sounds bad now that I write this, but sickness here is just... different. Having stomach problems here is something you just learn to live with, nearly every cut or scratch gets infected, and getting a fever seems to be par for the course. You just learn to tough it out, and things tend to pass over time, which is exactly what happened this week. I'm happy to report that I'm in tip-top shape today and hope to remain that way until at least... tomorrow :)

I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and we had a pretty interesting conversation that I thought I would share with you. This particular friend is the headmaster of the primary school in Gushie and his name is Razak. He's 33 years old, married to one wife, and has two children. He's Muslim, as are about 95% of the villagers in Gushie, if not more than that (though Razak doesn't live in Gushie, he lives right outside our village in a slightly larger community with electricity-Can't blame him!) The fact that he is in his 30s, has only one wife, and plans on having only one wife for the rest of his life makes him an anomaly in our area. In general, most older men in my village have more than one wife and have A LOT of children. This is what Razak and I talked about the other day-the differences between families in Northern Ghana, particularly Gushie, and the US (at least what I'm used to in West Michigan). When I explained to him that it was not only uncommon to have more than one wife where I'm from, but also illegal, he was very surprised. It's a very common practice among Muslims in the Northern Region where I live, and as I understand it, the practice is an accepted part of practicing Islam as long as a man can love and provide for his wives equally. I know many Muslims here, like Razak, who believe that it is impossible to love and provide equally for more than one wife at a time, so they keep one wife, but plenty of other men in my community have large compounds with two or more wives. According to this practice, however, most of the men in my community have a maximum of no more than 3 or 4 wives at a time. So basically, an average man in Gushie has around 3 wives and each wife has several chidlren. The women begin bearing children at a young age and continue having children fairly late in life, so some women in my village easily have ten or more children. Combine that with the fact that families live in compounds, in which all of the wives live in separate rooms (generally with their children) connected by one common eating area...

I'm going to stop this post now and continue talking about families the next time I get internet access. I have to write my football camp proposal, so I have to devote the rest of my internet time to that! I'll hopefully get back to the internet this week and finish on this topic!

Why, mice, why?!?

When I first moved into my house, I was amused by what I thought was a cute furry mouse wandering around, squeaking occasionally. He was like a pocket-sized companion and he didn't really bother me too much. I like to call that time in our relationship the "honeymoon phase." This phase lasted about 4 days, until I realized that this sweet little creature was eating me out of house and home. Seriously, his appetite is uncontrollable. I thought I would just leave him alone until I got a cat, let him enjoy a little more life until he became dinner. But then there were some delays in my receiving a kitten (as in, you can't take kittens home straight from being birthed. They have to grow a bit, unfortunately...) and the mouse apparently became 3 mice who were determined to eat everything they could find, leave droppings in peculiar locations, and keep me up at night with incessant squeaking and scurrying. I still haven't had the heart to use the "killer mouse glue" that Shawn left me, or rather, I don't want to have to dispose of the little guys when they find this glue. Instead, I'm still going to wait until I get my kitten, and in the meantime, I will continue to complain :)

Okay, so my mice musings are all you'll get as a post today. I have a lot of things to accomplish during my internet time today and the pace of life has been pretty slow lately, so I don't have too many good stories that merit me spending valuable internet time on. As a consolation prize, I posted some more picture to Facebook. A few of them actually have me in them, too, so enjoy!

I'd like to thank the BBC world radio for making my house way more exciting...

Whew, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this! As usual, Ghana is treating me very well… The past few weeks have been fun and, at times, very busy. I had the chance to teach my first HIV lesson about 2 weeks ago to some farmers working for ITFC. I rode my bike out to the Dipale farm, about 10 km away from Gushie, at 6am to meet up with the farmers before they started work at 7am. They all gathered around and we talked about modes of transmission of HIV, the effects of the virus, and ways to prevent ourselves from getting HIV. I had them play a small game and I basically just encouraged them to think about the ways that they had personally decided to protect themselves against the virus, and more importantly, shared with them the importance of getting tested. The main reason I went out to the farm for this lesson was to encourage all of the farmers to come out to an event we had this past week, called a VCT event. I helped Shawn put on this VCT event, which stands for Voluntary Counseling and Testing, at the ITFC office, and it turned out to be a really big success. We brought in nurses from Tamale who offered free and confidential testing, and I handed out free condoms and certificates to those who got tested. About 70% of the employees came out to get tested, so I was very pleased with the way that the event turned out!

Besides the preparations for the event last week, I’ve been continuing to work on integrating in the community and meeting people. I still play a lot of cards and since this is harvesting season, I’ve been shelling a lot of ground nuts and eating a lot of yams! We had another festival last week, called the Yam Festival, in which we did exactly what the name of the festival implies and celebrated yams. How exactly does one go about celebrating yams? Well, basically all you have to do is eat yams in every way they could possibly be cooked. I ate fried yams, mashed yams, boiled yams, and Fufu. I ate yams until I couldn’t eat any more yams, at which point my counterpart gave me a bag of uncooked yams to take home and prepare for myself. I love the fact that basically every festival and event I have experienced here so far requires lots of cooking and eating, though I suppose it’s the same way in the United States…

I finally bought a radio a few weeks ago, and it has transformed my life at site! What used to be quiet evenings spent reading by candlelight have become radio-filled evenings spent reading by candlelight! I am more aware of the world news than I ever have been, and I have the BBC to thank for that. I listen to a lot of BBC and their various programs about all sorts of things related to science, health, news, culture, etc... I am beyond thankful for the way that the radio connects me to the outside world and gives me something else to keep me busy with when I'm in my house!
I wish I could write more, but 2 other volunteers are hovering over my shoulder waiting to use the computer, so I must hand over my rights :) I’ll try to get back to the internet as soon as I can!