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hi everyone! internet and phone have been on the blitz for the past week or so … apologies to my family for my lack of communication. i finally got the phone AND the interwebs back up and running this morning – hooray! in the meantime, here’s a post i wrote while i was interweb-less in Sunyani. love, l

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Greetings from Sunyani, the cool and verdant capital of Ghana’s western Bron Ahafo region (over by Cote d’Ivoire). After a quick trip to Kete Krachi to see Ben and meet up with Nic, an Italian businessman-turned-charity-mastermind who set his sights on Touch A Life fundraising, Amanda and I set out for this city, her Ghanaian hometown.

My main tasks were to renew my visa (surprisingly easy!) and meet with George Insiful, fisheries professor at Sunyani’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). George is one of Amanda’s colleagues in her CIDA-funded natural resources work, and I talked with him about TAL’s proposed sustainable aquaculture project, which hopes to combat child labor trafficking and, at the same time, address Lake Volta over-fishing issues.

Here’s the idea: Lake Volta is a very young man-made lake, created in 1964 through the damming of the White, Black and Red Volta rivers. At its inception, the lake was teeming with tilapia and other fish. Over the last 10 years or so, the thriving fishing industry has declined due to over-fishing. Various NGO and media reports suggest that child labor trafficking has increased as fishermen compete for diminishing harvests.

TAL’s hope is to enter into micro-credit partnerships with fishermen who agree to stop trafficking children and stop using child labor. The micro-credit partnership will allow the fishermen to buy stakes in a cage-fishing enterprise, whereby small groups of fishermen will manage very large Lake Volta-located cage fishing hatcheries of 25,000 fingerlings. TAL will assist in streamlining some of the lake-to-market processes and, dreaming big, perhaps one day establish a tilapia export business.

George Insiful (not to be confused with any of many other Georges connected to TAL) was fascinated with the idea of a project addressing both child labor and over-fishing. His teaching/research commitments won’t allow him to participate, but he promised to get in touch with a couple of colleagues to gauge their interest. Just this morning, I got a text message from one of George’s cohorts, an Accra-based professor and sustainable aquaculture specialist, who is interested in meeting up to talk more about the TAL project. I’m hoping to meet with him sometime this week.

What’s crazy about Ghana is how quickly things can move, if people want to move. I get the sense that under-employment allows for a certain degree of flexibility: if people believe in your project and they think there’s a serious possibility that they’ll get paid for participating, they’ll shuffle everything to make it work.

On the personal front, I came to Sunyani and basically lost it – in that I slept for hours upon hours and woke up jittery, slightly feverish and still deeply fatigued. Between the intensity of work, the strain of overland trotro or van travel (usually 9-12 hours at a stretch), and the physical stress of being extremely hot all of the time, I think that when I arrived in Sunyani’s relatively cool clime, my body just gave up.

So after I finished designing the TAL client database in the wee hours of Friday morning, I just stopped working. I slept, read one of Amanda’s Donald Miller books, watched The Interpreter and X-Men, and finished most of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s African travel memoir, The Shadow of the Sun. I went to the market with Amanda and bought my mom some beautiful Ghanaian batik cloth, and on Saturday night, we had dinner (a home-made pizza!) at the home of Amanda’s German friend, Thekla. And then I slept some more.

The sleeping has been more of a feat than you might think. As part of the University’s in-kind contribution to the CIDA-funded project, Amanda lives in KNUST’s dorm, along with 400 Ghanaian university students. Between the courtyard’s non-stop soccer pick-up games, blaring high-life music, and all-night prayer vigils, it’s a lively place.

I’m somewhat dreading tomorrow’s 12-hour trotro trip back to Kete Krachi. One good thing is that I’ve enlisted Amanda’s friend Aaron to travel with me – call me a coward, but I’m done traveling as a lone white woman in a country I don’t know well, and in a region where I don’t speak any of the dialects. We’ll probably start out around 6 a.m. and make it to Lake Volta around 6 or 7 p.m., where I’ll call George, Jr., and he’ll motor across the bay in TAL’s red wooden boat to come get me. Just thinking about it makes me sleepy … and happy at the thought of seeing Ben again.

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