A few pictures

The Best Dogs of them All

Isla and Herbert in all their loveliness. These dogs are just too photogenic to pass up:

Building Stuff

When we weren’t painting we were building. Alex and I made a pretty mean carpentry team. Here are a few photos of the projects we completed:

A compost bin A garden fence, although we can't take credit for this one in particular. The students built this one. The first of many gates A goat pen and grazing extension
Yet another Gate

A closeup of the goat sanctuary

Yes, we even do custom kitchen furniture

Palm Wine

After the stop at the mining site it was on to the place where Palm Wine was being tapped. In case you are curious, Palm wine is a semi-alcoholic drink very common in Ghana. It is made from the liquid in the palm tree and the process requires a palm tree be dug up by the roots and tipped over on its side so all the liquid from the roots drains out of the sides. Palm wine can be drank fresh in which case it tastes like a Smirnoff ice mixed with coconut milk or it can be further distilled and made into an evil hard alcohol from hell called akpeteshie. Fresh palm wine is tasty and refreshing, akpeteshie gives me a week long hangover.

Palm wine tapping sites are generally located in the bush near a grove of palm trees. The one we visited on this particular day happened to be next to a river which was perfect for cooling the copper pipes in the process of distilling the akpeteshie from the fresh palm wine.

Here are some photos to enjoy:

Distilling the akpeteshie

A scary dude pounding fufu

Gold Mining

Hiawa is in the Western Region and right in the thick of Gold Country. Although the omnipresence of Gold mining is conspicuous (new SUVs often zipping through the town filled with foreigner prospectors), I had never had the opportunity to visit an actual gold mining site. The men who work the mines are called Galamse boys and are known for being very strong, a little rowdy, and always throwing their money around. Galamse work pays very well sometimes up to 70 Ghana cedis a day (roughly $50) and in the Western and Ashanti regions Galamse work is easy to find. This all poses an interesting problem for promoting the value of education in these communities. Considering most Ghanaian teachers make roughly 8 Ghana cedis a day and even well paid professionals less than 30 Ghc, how is it that you can justify coming to school and working hard to better your mind when with your body alone you can accumulate quite a lot of wealth. In fact, Alex has two students the Aguri brothers, who live less than a 10 minute walk from several mining sites but a 2 hour walk from their JHS. How can you possibly explain the value of walking two hours to school when simply working across the street could make you a very rich man by the age of 30. It is a problem indeed.

My mining site experience went a little something like this: One afternoon after a long day of painting Paa Yaw met us in his taxi and asked us if we’d care to see how palm wine was made (more on this later). This offer usually includes a delightful walk through the woods and frankly a glass of Palm wine was just what this girl needed after a long day of World Painting. We drove a several minutes out of town, down a dirt road, and were informed that we would be making one stop at the mining site before continuing on to our Palm Wine destination.

I honestly don’t know what to say about this particular experience other than my jaw dropped to the ground as I stepped over the ridge to see a large pit full of workers mining gold by hand. This is no 49’s gold rush operation but more of a man-as-machine situation. The sound of the pit alone was astounding with its rhythmic clanging and banging. It was an assembly line of sorts- one man would place a shovel load of earth into a tin pan which would be tossed to another man, again to another man, and then handed to another who would dump the dirt through a hand-cranked sieve. The work seemed never ending-- tin bowls being tossed every this way and that but all in perfect rhythmic efficiency. It was truly a site to behold. The pictures definitely do not do it justice and I am unable to post the video I took.

Truly an Unbelievable sight

A view of the mining site from the top

Galamse Boys

Painting Stuff

Next term I have grandiose plans to work with my Visual Arts classes to slather my school with painted murals. One of these paintings is going to be a world map. Having never actually drawn or painted a world map before, and given the enormous number of students I will have to control in implementing this project in my own community, I thought why not use some of 4 week vacation to go help another volunteer paint a map at his school. A little practice round if you will.

So, just after festival time in Abura Dunkwa, I headed to Hiawa to paint a world map at the Hiawa Catholic JHS with Alex. With the exception of the walls of the school not being perfectly perpendicular and thus causing our map to look a little crooked, I think a great job was done by all- by all I mean Alex and I, as we drew and painted to whole thing after realizing the project took far too much skill for adolescent Ghanaian hands. I believe that my SHS Visual Arts students, however, will be quite capable of completing the map themselves. All of the skills required are well within the topics we’ve covered in our Picture Making classes this year.

Here are some pictures of the process:

It sure does help to have a monstrously tall friend to comfortably sketch those hard to reach areas.

Alex

Countries Painted

Best shade of blue for an ocean ever!

Frame ala Ari

A detail of our hard work

Ice Cream Truck?!

There is a festival during the Easter holidays in my town and so naturally I invited a slue of friends to come tear up the town with me. After several beers and hours of dancing we emerged from a local hotspot only to here the delicate ding-a-linging of an Ice Cream Truck?! Seriously, if I didn’t have this picture of Alex buying a Vanilla cone (the first of three) I’d be pretty sure it was just another mefloquin hallucination.

Alex thoroughly enjoying the Ice Cream Truck

Chocolate, Vanilla, and Twist!

Gender Youth and Development Logo Contest

I really enjoy posting pictures of my students’ artwork (mostly so I can tell them that their art is on the internet) so here are a few submissions I got from my Visual Arts students for a GYD logo competition that was held. GYD is an organization within Peace Corps which does great things for women and children in Ghana.

Lawrence Miano, Form 3

Georgina Donkor, Form 2

Cornelius Anan Gyan, Form 3