Training Session in Bolga

This is a long post, my apologies. I hope the story is worth the read.

Once a month, each District of MoFA provides all of the Agricultural Extension Agents (AEAs) with a training day. In an attempt to get more AEAs engaged in the Agriculture As A Business program, we asked for permission to use three hours of the training day to provide a workshop on our curriculum. We got permission on Tuesday afternoon for a training day on Thursday. Yikes! That’s not much time to prepare – thankfully Meghan has done this workshop before and had ideas of what to do. My immediate task was to get some t-shirts made, Meghan had decided that if people sign up for the curriculum, they would get a shirt…some things are universal – people like free stuff!!!

So begins the epic journey. I went out to find someone who could make 30 shirts in just over 24 hours. This might be a challenge in Canada, but in Ghana it is an adventure. I set out on my bicycle (pink helmet on head!) and start biking around looking for a place that prints shirts. I see a place and navigate my bike there. It’s about 4:30 pm and the girls sitting at the stand say that the person who prints the shirts is away and that I should come back tomorrow. But I need them done by tomorrow!

I see another place and bike over – they think they can do it, but need to see if they have all the shirts. I agree to wait until he can find out…a little boy runs to get me a stool to sit on while I wait. Since it’s about 10000 degrees and I know that five Ghanaian minutes is not 300 seconds, I sit down to wait for Peter the printing dude to return. His two brothers are sitting there and start talking to me. We go through the standard questions – bare in mind there are variations!

Them (T): Wuhtenga (Good afternoon)
Me (C): namba (response)
T: lawonie (how are you?)
C: la an son wumi an wonie? (I’m fine, how are you?)
T: La an son…hahahahahaha (I’m fine…lots of laughter!) You speak frafra!!!
C: Only small-small (ie: don’t ask me anything else because I won’t have a clue what you’re saying!)
T: Where do you stay?
C: I stay in Bolga

Then the conversation can go many ways –
But where are you from? You should marry me and take me to Canada. Can I get your number so we can be friends? How long will you stay? Etc. etc.

Thankfully, this conversation continues like this:

T: Where are you from?
C: Canada
T: How do you find Ghana?
C: Oh, it’s very beautiful. I like Ghana.
T: Then you should stay, how long are you staying? You should stay longer.
C: I can only stay for five months, until December but I am very glad to be here.
T: I know someone from the UK, his name is (insert random person’s name here!). Then look at me wondering if I know him. Haha.
T: Is it true that where you people come from, you can do (insert something that sounds amazing to Ghanaians like getting paid by the hour)?
C: I try to answer these questions as honestly as possible. Yes, we have more options in Canada, but Canada IS NOT perfect.
T: I wish I could go to Canada to see what it’s like, just like how you came to Ghana to see what it’s like and to learn about us. It’s not easy for us to go to Canada, not like how easy it is for you to come here.
C: I wish that one day you will be able to visit Canada too, but it wasn’t easy for me to come here. It took a lot of planning and fundraising to get me here.
T: Are you married?
C: No
T: Are you done school?
C: Yes
T: Then why aren’t you married?
C: I haven’t found the person I want to marry yet.
T: You could marry me
AWKWARD SILENCE
It doesn’t matter how you answer this question – they have something ready for every response. Partly I think they’re joking. If you say you don’t want to get married, they tell you that the Bible says to go forth and multiple or they ask if anyone in Canada would marry someone who doesn’t want children; if you say I don’t love you, how could I marry you they say we can get to know each other; if you say you’re married – then you’re safe! I’ve been thinking about inventing some kind, lovely person (a Brad Pitt look alike maybe? Only younger…) at home. Occasionally I say, “Yes, let’s get married. Are you ok being husband number 2?” This usually stops the conversation, we both laugh, and we get to move on to other items…like, what religion are you? An awesome thing here is that religion is really important to people but with all the different religions it seems very peaceful and nobody seems to mind what religion you are…maybe this is because I haven’t dug deeper into this topic but on a surface level, I like this.

While we are sitting there is a random sketchy looking dude who keeps coming and saying hello to me. He is dressed in a one-piece blue coverall outfit with a baseball cap. He keeps saying hello and wants my bike helmet. I almost want to get him to try it on, just because I think it would go well with the rest of his outfit, but I also really like my helmet. He hangs around and won’t leave. The men tell me not to talk to him because whenever he sees “people like you” he wants things and he won’t leave you alone. They start to call him my bodyguard and find it funny but want to make sure that I’m safe and don’t talk with him when I’m alone. I assure them that if they weren’t there I would have definitely not stay around this man.

By this point it’s getting dark and I put on bug spray. I am asked: What is that? How does it work? Do mosquitoes have malaria in Canada? Etc.

Anyway, Peter, the printing guy, comes back saying that he can get the shirts. He asks if I have an electronic copy of the logo we want putting on the shirts since it would make the quality better. Off I go on my bike to find an electronic copy to put on a pen drive. I return and we attempt to put it on his computer. No luck. The drive won’t show up on his screen so eventually we go to his brothers and try several times. No luck. With the guarantee that they will all be done tomorrow afternoon, I am escorted back to the taxi station. I am SO grateful for this because it’s dark out – and there are open sewers, motos, cars, goats, chickens, and pedestrians and so much more zooming around the roads. (BTW, I have decided that if I am so unfortunate as to fall into one of the open sewers I am getting on the next flight home. This is my breaking point). Anyway, I get to the taxi stand and put my bike in the back of the cab, and squeeze in with about 5 or 6 other people. We are packed in like pickles. The scents, like the passengers, in a Ghanaian taxi cab are quite diverse. This makes me laugh and hold my breath. The elderly muslim man beside me smells like tea and keeps smiling and calling me sister and reminding me to be grateful to the Almighty. CHECK.

The next day at noon I am waiting for my AEA to pick me up for a farmer group meeting and I get a call from Peter, he can’t get the shirts. WHAT!? This was my main task for the meeting tomorrow – panic panic panic, breathe deeply. He says he can get 16 shirts and I say, done, do it, go, please! He says they’ll be done by 4 p.m and that he’ll call me when they’re done. But then rain happened. When it rains in Bolga (and maybe the whole of Ghana?!?), life stops. I return to Peter’s stall at about 5 p.m and wait while they work on the shirts. I have never seen shirts being printed and I find it fascinating! They put one colour on all the shirts and then move on to the next colour. I wait and wait until about 7 p.m when they say they won’t be done (because of the rain) and that I should come back tomorrow morning at 8 a.m to get them.
This is what they look like when I leave:


Knowing that 8 a.m doesn’t mean 8 a.m we return the following morning to get the shirts at 9 a.m. We leave with our shirts at about 9:30 a.m.

The finished product:

Peter will work on the rest of the shirts and I hope it goes well because we will need the rest of them for the training day workshop that we will do in Paga for Nadia next week. (She’s helping me with my workshop and I’ll be helping her with hers next Friday).

The training session was great – awesome!
Here is a picture from training day:


It was great to have Meghan there since she knew what she was doing. We started with an ice-breaker of jeopardy and then broke up into three groups. They had to describe how farmer groups that are novice, intermediate, and advanced in agri-business might view several topics, such as group meetings, finances, group projects. For example, finances for a farmer group with novice agri-business skills might not have a bank account and might not collect group money while a group that is advanced in agri-business skills might have a bank account that they regularly deposit money into and everyone in the group knows the bank balance. We did this to get them thinking about the different types of farmer groups that they are working with so that they might think about which of their groups could most benefit from agri-business training. We came back together as a whole and people presented their findings. I was surprised at how much everybody discussed the group breakdowns. We then introduced the AAB program. I will blog about the Curriculum later, this post is way too long as it is…at the end of the day, I got 11 AEAs signed up! I am so excited to get to work with AEAs and see them interact with farmer groups.