Trevor in Ghana

In my first week in Ghana I’ve gone from a city of over 2 million people, to a farming village of a couple hundred… When I arrived in Tamale I spent the first few days with some other EWB volunteers. It was a great chance to bombard them with questions and hear about some of their experiences. I also spent some time wandering around the market, trying Ghanaian food, and attempting to learn some Dagbani (the most common local language in these parts).

After a couple days in Tamale it was time to head to Damongo where I would be spending some time in a small farming village. I woke up super early and headed to the trotro station. For those of you who don’t know what a trotro is it’s a small bus but with just as many people and luggage as a full size bus. They also don’t run on much of a schedule, they just leave once there are enough people. I arrived at the station just after 6:00am only to find out the first trotro had already filled up and left. I ended up having to wait around for about four hours until the next one finally t.

After a couple of hours on a pothole ridden dirt road I arrived in Damongo. I met up with the lovely Sarah, an EWB volunteer who has been there for a couple months. I stayed with her and her host family for the night. They were really kind and I spent most of the night playing some kind of board game with the children who kept beating me!!

The next morning I got up and traveled 15 minutes on the back of a motorcycle to SORI Number One. Despite the boring name, the village is pretty unique. It’s a settlement village where families from different areas have come to live because of the fertile farming lands. As a result there are a number of different tribes all living together in a single community.

The thing that struck me most about the village was how spread out it was. I had expected all of the families to live in a particular area with the farming fields a short distance away; however the households were scattered amongst large fields of maize. As with most parts of Africa maize is the favorite crop both to grow and eat. They keep their main fields by their house so that they can easily tend to it and protect it. The farmers in the community also hold other fields about an hour walk up the road where they grow secondary crops such as groundnuts, cassava, and cowpeas.

For the two nights I was in the village I stayed with Matthew and his family. Matthew, 21, lives with his mother, two younger sisters, and two younger brothers. They are originally from East Mamprusi (another district to the east), but when the man of the household passed away they moved to more fertile farming lands.

Matthew had just finished Secondary School and had rushed back home to plant the fields before it was too late. From what I could gather this was the norm for him and most other boys in the village: no time for “summer vacation.” Go to school October to June, and spend the break working in the fields to feed your family and hopefully make enough money to pay school fees for the following year.

Left – Matthew, Right – Tarica

I spent a lot of my time talking with Matthew and his two close friends, “Papaya” and “Super.” Papaya’s real name is Tarica, but he got the nickname because in his homeland they call papaya Carica-Papaya. They couldn’t really provide me with an explanation for Super’s nickname, but you have to admit it’s pretty sweet. I told them my nickname amongst my close friends is Fletcher. From then on whenever I saw Tarica he’d yell “Fletchah, wuzzup!!” which always made me laugh.

I also got my first taste of real farm work while I was there. You know that feeling when you go to the gym, and everyone is super buff and in-shape, and you feel like a pathetic lazy bastard. Well the same thing applies to farming. Despite my overwhelming feeling of inadequacy everyone seemed to be incredibly excited that I wanted to do some work on their farm. After about an hour of weeding I was exhausted, my hands were starting to get blisters, and my lower back was starting to throb.


The following day it was time for some real farming work. No more or this casual weeding business, it was time to till a field and get it ready to plant cowpea. The community had hired a tractor to plow the maize fields, but the rest of the fields were left to be done by hand. To get the work done efficiently every other day all the farmers come together to work on one farmer’s field. Without this farmers would never be able to prepare their fields in time for the planting of specific crops. Today the village was working on Matthews’s cowpea field. It was a brand new field that had just been cleared. I have to say it was a pretty impressive sight watching all the farmers working side by side in unison. I tried to help them a couple times but it more for entertainment value. I was way to slow to keep up and wasn’t doing a good enough job.

At the end of the two days it was time to head back to Tamale to start my work at MoFA. I enjoyed my time in “Number One” and learned a lot from the people and experience. There’s also a lot I didn’t get a chance to discover during my short stay. It can be difficult and frustrating to try to overcome the barriers that exist: language, gender roles, culture, age. That said I’m still determined to learn more. I know an important part of being an effective development worker is understanding the lives of those you are trying to help. I still have a long ways to go, but at least I’ve started down the path.