Life as a Ghanaian Farmer and my Dorothy

I spend my third week in Ghana farming in a very small village called Dimanzugu. The idea behind living in a remote, rural community (i.e. preferably no running water or electricity) and attempting to live like a typical Ghanaian farmer, is to try get a feel for what it is to be a Ghanaian farmer and get a better understanding of poverty.

Well, let’s just say that the experience really opened my eyes. And although it’s taken me a while to post this blog, I think it was important to spend that week in Dimanzugu at the beginning of my placement – to begin to understand the farmer: the primary MOFA beneficiary, or as EWB says “Dorothy”. Without comprehending the difficulties, challenges and way of living of the people I’m essentially working towards helping, how can I expect my work to have the desired impact?

Engineers with Borders, as far as I know, came up with this concept of Dorothy – she is the person you keep in the forefront of your mind when you are considering any development. For my project, I’m working directly with the MOFA office staff of my district: the District Director, Agricultural Officers and Extension Agents. But who am I working for? I’m working for Dorothy – the impoverished Ghanaian farmer who will hopefully benefit from my 4 months spent here. Many volunteers encounter individuals in the communities they visit or live in, who to them represent the person they are working for. For me, my Dorothy was my mother when I stayed in Dimanzugu: Mary Sumani.

She’s an illiterate, married mother of 5 who endlessly toils from dawn til dusk to provide for her family. And yet, she has these dreams: to learn English, to learn to write, and to produce a CD of her music (she sings beautifully!). However, between waking at 4:30 in the morning to collect shea nuts to begin the tedious and extensive process of producing shea butter (which sells for very little in the market relative to the energy required to produce it), fetching water from a borehole 5 km away (because the one in her village is broken), preparing coco (porridge made from maize flour), preparing fufu or tz for lunch and dinner with the soup of that day, caring for her babies…there is little time left for other endeavours. Not to mention costs – her family is living a hand to mouth existence. If they have a bad yield, they entirely rely on her small income generating activities to pull them through: the shea butter, frying fish, etc.

So when I consider my activities and my objectives, I think about Mary and the countless other Ghanaians, Africans, or impoverished individuals throughout the world who are living a similar life. People who work hard for very little profit; who cannot save because every cent made is needed almost immediately; who are given few opportunities and are somehow restrained from taking those that are provided. And that is poverty. To lack basic human needs – clean water, sanitation, education, adequate and nutritious food; but also to lack the capacity to improve your own life.

Now MoFA is responsible for helping the communities and farmers in the area: disseminating information, holdings trainings in communities to teach new concepts/skills/technologies, help organize farmers in cooperatives/groups in order to access credit, etc. But all their activities are aimed at improving the lives of the people in the community – decreasing the level of poverty and increasing food security: educating, providing technologies and approaches to ease the workload (make activities more efficient) and to provide access to otherwise unattainable resources. So, if I can have impact within the District office – more effective trainings, a more efficiently run DADU – then ideally I am helping MoFA to help Dorothy.

But I diverge…according to the title, I should be talking about my stay in the community. Dimanzugu is a very small community of approximately 15 compound houses. I believe everyone there is somehow related to each other – it seems like it was once a very large family that split off from the neighbouring (larger) village of Gbullung to establish their own community. I was only there for 6 days and each day I attempted to try new things. When I first arrived, I met a woman from my compound house named Niziha (the ‘z’ pronounced like a ‘j’). After some confusing miscommunications (three weeks in, I knew next to no Dagbani), I found myself walking with her to collect water. Although extremely pregnant, she was carrying a very large cylindrical container to hold the water, while I was presented with a metal bucket about 1/3 the size of her container. Pumping the water in of itself is a full body workout, not to mention then hauling it back on your head. Well, after I had very embarrassingly sloshed water all over myself, we removed about 2 inches of water from my bucket before continuing on the long walk back. And of course, she was kind enough to stop a few times with me along the way.

The women here, well actually everyone here, are so strong – I mean, they have to be. Pumping that water every day. Carrying everything on their heads. My neck muscles took a few days to recover from just that one time of carrying a bucket of water. Although I must admit that over the course of the week, my balance dramatically improved.

While in Dimanzugu, I also had a chance to witness the entire process of producing shea butter. Every morning at the crack of dawn, a few of the women would walk around the surrounding fields collecting the shea nuts that had fallen off the trees. (Here’s where I got in most of my practice balancing bowls of shea nuts on my head). The nuts are about the size of large walnuts, and very hard. Once the thin layer of fruit covering the nuts has been removed (usually eaten – very sickly sweet), hundreds of them are boiled in a gigantic pot for most of the day. They are then left to bake in the sun, on the floor of the compound house for a day or two, before they are violently struck in order to break off the husk from the softer interior core. Once all the husks are removed (which is a very tedious, time-consuming task) the soft cores are mashed together to form a very thick brown paste. This paste is added to water and heated to form oil. Once it has solidified (over the course of a night or so), voíla! You have shea butter. Now it takes a few hundred of these shea nuts to produce 1 calabash of shea butter – which at the time was selling for a grand total of maybe 30 000 cedis at the market (it is 500 cedis per ‘fist’ of shea butter). That roughly translates to 3.75 Canadian dollars. Besides this, I also helped prepare food – everything from collecting the braa leaves for the soup to pounding yams for fufu. I made tz (stirring the tz was a great indication of my complete lack of upper body strength – when you initially add the maize flour to the water, the mixture become extremely thick).

Apart from working with the women, I also wanted to get a feel from the work done by the men (and children): farming. My father, Yakubu Sumani, took me to a village nearby so that I could see how the farmers were making yam mounds. It was particularly difficult to do at this time because we had not had rain in a while so the ground was hard. Building a yam mound consists of chopping up the earth with a hoe, piling and packing it together. These mounds are about a foot high and a foot in diameter at the base – and they are made mound upon mound, row upon row, to cover the entire field (1 yam to be planted per mound) spanning an acre or two or four…as much as I’d love to be able to say that I helped with an entire row of yams mounds, unfortunately I only helped with a few. Apparently I work too slowly to warrant the use of one the hoes (which were in short supply). I also helped my father plant groundnuts in one of his field. They had already dibbled the holes, so all that remained to be done was drop 1 groundnut into the hole before covering it with earth. After a while you get into a routine: drop, step and cover with your left foot, drop, step and cover with your right foot…etc. I must have planted over 200 groundnuts in one afternoon. While tedious, that isn’t exactly hard work – and many of the farmers I’ve met have their children do it for them.

The worst for me was weeding. Granted, if I’d spent more time with the yam mounds my opinion might have been different. My father had intercropped groundnuts and maize on a 4 acre field, so by the time I arrived, the field was ready to be weeded. It was still early in the rainy season, so the air was hot – and even though we were weeding in the late afternoon (digging up the earth with small hoes around the plants), I was soaked through with sweat within 15 minutes from a combination of the heat and intense labour. By the end, my lower back was throbbing, my arms sore and my hands callused. Although, these I could deal with. It wasn’t until 2 hours later when I looked up to see how little we’d accomplished that I really felt the ache of the work – just a small fraction of this immense field was completed. When asked, he informed me that it would take a month to complete weeding the entire 4 acres. And once completed, he would have to begin weeding again from the place he started. 2 months of weeding.

The days I spent shadowing my father resulted in my experiencing two almost opposite feelings: utter exhaustion from the hard work, and shear boredom from sitting around and doing nothing. The men would farm in the early morning or very late afternoon, but during the day when the sun was at its peak, they would sit around and do nothing. The odd man would be weaving rope to make mats (he used his feet as well, and would roll the strands between his calf and the palm of his hand to tightly twist them into rope – I learned a little, but could never get my rope as tight as his). On one of the days, I biked to the neighbouring village of Gbullung and sat in on some primary and secondary school classes. I also took the opportunity to visit the village library, reading some nursery rhymes and children’s stories to some of the kids whose classes had been cancelled that day (i.e. the teacher didn’t show up). They enjoyed the gestures, intonation and sound effects, but surprisingly few of them actually understood the English. Which is something else I encountered back at my home in Dimanzugu. Fuzia, my one sister in form 2 of Junior Secondary school, came to me one evening to explain something she had learned in class. Fuzia barely spoke English, and while she could read the text, her comprehension was next to nil. She took out a biology book and opened to the Human Circulatory System. She read the words, but had absolutely no idea what it was talking about – and this was after having learned it in class. How do you explain to someone who doesn’t speak English what an artery is? the aorta? It’s not only an inability to retain the information, but simply to learn it in the first place. And if she cannot learn because of the language barrier, then how effective can the education possibly be?

My last visit in Gbullung was with my father to attend the market there. It was a very small market where you could buy ready-made meals (such as “shincafa di wachi” - rice and beans), seeds to plant, spices, farm utensils, cloth, and vegetables. Sumani also took me to the Gbullung ‘hospital’. It had one employed doctor, many empty rooms, no electricity, a single bed with an attached IV, and some storage space. It seemed barren, abandoned…and when we arrived the doctor was treating a patient on the bench outside the front door. It really galls me how an organization can go into a community, build this building to be used at a hospital, and then leave without providing adequate supplies or personnel to man it. And yet, the people of this community at least have a doctor present to provide treatment.

All in all, I had a wonderful time with me family there, and I will never forget that experience. It really helped me shape my work for the rest of the summer (hopefully for the better).

Oh, and Niziha had a beautiful baby boy before I left – his name is Mohammed.