SANDEMA!

Good news: as of Thursday, Sandema has internet once again!

On Tuesday morning, we visited the Tamale branch of Sinapi Aba Trust, a Ghanaian microfinance institution, and spoke to the regional manager there. He told us about the goals of the SAT and the way it structures its operations and its loans. In many ways it is similar to the Grameen Bank, the original microlending institution, such as its focus on loaning to women and in how its clients are organized into groups. One key difference is that the SAT provides training along with its loans. This training is not in basic productive skills, which it assumes its clients already possess, but in business skills such as customer relations. From what he told us, the SAT has been very successful, with a 95% to 98% repayment rate. It's been around since 1994, and in the last six months alone they've grown from about 2.5 million clients to 3.7 million, counting both individual and group borrowers as single clients.

Afterward I made my previous post from a small internet cafe, and then we loaded all our things onto another blisteringly hot bus. It cooled down somewhat once it started moving, and after a few hours we arrived at the bus depot in the town of Bolga. Here we moved quickly to another bus. As we moved we were swarmed by vendors and people offering to carry our bags for us, and, it seemed, a fair few who just wanted to gawk or jeer at the white people. I suppose that's just part of traveling in a place where we're visibly very different from the locals, but it was a jarring change from the relative warmth and hospitality we'd experienced elsewhere.

We then boarded the bus that would take us to Sandema. This bus was delightfully mad. It was stuffed with things that wouldn't fit in the luggage bays. To get to the back of the bus we walked over a thick layer of people's things, such as backpacks and big bags of grain, which covered the floor of the central aisle. Many people rode standing up because there was no room for them to sit, as some of the seats were full of more of people's things. There might even have been some goats or chickens aboard. Kelly told us that the relatively empty buses we'd ridden previously had been anomalies and that this one was typical!

Finally, a little while after night had fallen, we arrived in Sandema. The boys from the Horizons Children's Centre met us there with a cart, which they loaded up with all our bags and pushed all the way to our house! After eating a quick dinner that Joe Abobtey had brought for us, we did a bit of unpacking and then went to bed at about eleven. Then, in the middle of the night, a storm hit us. Our room's windows were facing into the wind, so it came howling through, banging our door open and shut and waking us all up! We made several attempts at blocking it with our bags before finding one that didn't get pushed loose after a minute, and then went to sleep again, listening to the tremendous howl of the wind and enjoying the cool air it brought into the house.

The house itself has four bedrooms, several bathrooms and showers, a kitchen, and a living room. It's what we might call a fixer-upper back home, but the rooms are spacious enough and there are plenty of ceiling fans which help keep it cool. A partially-built wall surrounding it encloses a yard, from which we've spent some time each night watching lightning in distant storms. There are bats that live inside the roof and at night they can be glimpsed as they fly in and out of the gaps to hunt. We have a refrigerator with a freezer which is a welcome luxury, as it allows us to cool our own purewater and keep some leftovers from the meals we make (though I'm not sure how cold the fridge keeps things - today I checked on some scrambled egg with onion from two days ago, and the onions had gone blue and a bit fuzzy). We do our laundry in buckets and hang it to dry on some lines we've put up around the yard. We'll be spending the next month here, and despite its imperfections, we're all settling in quite well and it's starting to feel something like home!

Sandema is a small rural town in Ghana's Upper East Region. The local language here is Buli, which is very different from the Twi which is spoken in most of the areas we've visited previously. Animals are abundant here. Many people here keep livestock, which generally seem to be allowed to roam free, so walking from place to place one sees donkeys, chickens, guinea fowl, the occasional turkey, and a lot of goats. Lizards are as common as squirrels in Vancouver, and like our squirrels they come in gray and black varieties and can be seen climbing over just about everything, and even chasing each other up and down trees. The people of Sandema have been quite welcoming, particularly as Kelly and Taha already know many of them. We have a few friends already who drop by in the evenings just to hang out.

The primary reason we're here, of course, is the Horizons Children's Centre. While we'd met most of the kids in the dark when we first arrived, the next evening they had us come to the school to formally welcome us. We knew they were going to sing us a song, and one of the group members, Ben, had brought his guitar, so he picked a song he knew how to play and we came up with our own words to it. After we swapped our songs, three of the kids played African drums while the rest of us danced. All the kids were very friendly, and they and the teachers were very welcoming. There's a pretty wide age range. Some of the kids don't look older than about six, while others look closer to seventeen.

On Thursday, we got a tour of the Tono irrigation system, which was a short ways outside Sandema. This consisted of a huge dam and a small number of canals that carried the water from the dam over a large area of farmland owned in parcels vy a number of farmers, and used to grow everything from rice to tomatoes. The northern region of the country has only one rainy season, unlike the south which has two, so farming in the north tends to be harder and to yield less than in the south. The Tono system was intended to alleviate this problem. Two of the chief engineers on the project talked to us about the challenges still faced by the farmers, such as choosing crops for which there will be a strong market and having to compete with the farmers in the south, and took us on the tour. We only saw a small part of the farmland itself, getting a close look at some rice paddies near the dam. It was a very interesting excursion, though doubtlessly the most fun part was riding in the back of the pickup truck that took us around the dam. :P

Thursday was market day in Sandema. This market cycles every three days between the towns of Bolga, Navrongo, and Sandema, spending one day in each town. After getting back from our tour of Tono, we went to the market and bought groceries for the next few days, as well as delicious Ghanaian "doughnuts", which are really just fried, mildly sweetened balls of dough, not unlike Honey's doughnuts in Vancouver. The market isn't as big as the one in Kumasi (which I'm told is the biggest in West Africa), but it was still quite large and very busy, full of vendors shouting prices for all manner of items, from food to clothing. Much of the food looked appetizing, though some of it really didn't.

Equatorial regions tend to have extremely dense and vibrant ecosystems compared to the rest of the world, and one problem this causes is that nature tends to encroach much more rapidly and aggressively on human-built spaces than in the global north. Keeping things clean here is therefore much more of a challenge than at home, and with the relatively low level of development, they don't have the tools we do to fight back against it. If you have meat outside, it's going to get covered in flies, and without access to refrigeration, it's going to smell. This is precisely the situation at the outdoor markets. At one stall I saw what was probably the most disgusting thing I've seen anyone try to sell - a massive pile of mulched dried fish, surrounded by a cloud of flies and smelling like it had been sitting in the sun far too long. It was very impressive, in a ghastly kind of way, and certainly not something you're likely to see in Canada!

That's about all for now. Given that there's regular internet access here, I'll be able to post whenever there's something new and interesting to share. I expect things will probably slow down for a while now as we'll be spending all our time in one place. Until next time, thanks for reading!