Day 49 - Oworobong

Today was not the most incredible day of my life, but it was pretty high up there.

I woke up early and indulged myself in a shower.  This consisted of a bucket of water and a cup.  I felt remarkable refreshed and clean, and I was amazed how little water it took.  I got dressed and started sweating immediately.

We got to the breakfast table and were delighted.  There was so much food, we thought we were supposed to save some for lunch.  The best part was the mysterious-looking brown balls.  We passed them around and tentatively tried a bite.  Delicious!  It was some kind of fried dough ball, still warm.  When Kofi came in, we asked him what it was.  You’ll never guess: donuts!  Sometimes in Ghana they are also called Ball Floats (I like this name better).

After a very quick breakfast, we hitched a ride to the cocoa fields.  Our ride was a flatbed truck with wooden boards set up in the back to sit on.  There was not much room, and one person sat on top of the car.  We held on tight.

Soon we got out and went on foot.  Kofi’s men cleared a path for us with machetes.  Because of this, the going was slow, but we made it to a field that you would not recognize as a farm.  But indeed, we could see the cocoa trees with the cocoa pods growing right off the trunk.  Kofi’s men picked out a few ripe cocoa pods and cracked them open with machetes.  It is a long process to go from cocoa pod to chocolate.  The cocoa seeds have to be extracted from the pods, then fermented a week and dried before they are even sold to the chocolate companies.  The whole process takes over a month.  The secret no one knows about is that the cocoa seeds are surrounded by some kind of goo, and if you put this goo in your mouth, you will make your taste buds happy.  We kept grabbing for the seeds to suck the goo off the outside, which tasted like mango-banana goodness.

We continued touring the fields and learning about the mission of the Rohde Foundation.  Their goal is to get money to buy all of the adjacent fields all the way up the hills and harvest the cocoa for sustainable profit.

We went back to the village by foot and were soon rejoined by the children.  We went to visit the school for older kids, and the children followed us the whole way.  The kids holding my arms wanted to run, so I was the first to arrive at the school.  I ended up interrupting a boys’ classroom English lesson.  They immediately crowded around and said things like “I love you” and “I will marry you.”  I learned a very important lesson today: Cultures are different all over the world, but teenage boys are the same everywhere.

Thankfully, the other arrived behind me within a few minutes and distracted the boys.  We spoke to the classroom and met the teacher.  We distributed gifts and school supplies that we brought with us.  Kofi led me to a different classroom which was mixed boys and girls.  Normally, the genders are separated, but there weren’t enough girls being sent to school in this village to have their own class.  He prompted me to distribute most of the school supplies that I brought to the few girls to encourage them more.

Before leaving, we took photos with the students and Kofi invited them all to a gathering later in the evening.  We returned to the clinic for lunch and met the nurses – there were no doctors.

The same flatbed truck came for us and we piled in. The ride must have been at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half.  The road was indescribably horrible.  The potholes were extreme, the rocks were large, and the puddles so deep that one had a tortoise swimming in it.  We might have made the trip in much less time, but we had to slow almost to a stop to get around and over some of the obstacles.  Sometimes the truck had to leaning at a 45 degree angle as it spread over the uneven road.  I stood up on the front board to look over the truck and give the people my crowded bench more room to spread out.  I had to hold on tight not to get thrown backwards, and the person on top of the truck had to hold on tighter not to get thrown off altogether.

The landscape changed toward the end of our journey.  Instead of grassy fields, there were hills covered with huge rocks.  Kofi noticed our amazement and had the driver stop so we could get out and climb a huge rock formation and take photos.  Then back in the truck.

Anytime we drove past people working in the fields or walking along the road balancing supplies on their heads, we would smile and wave, and they would wave back warmly.  We passed a few small villages, and when children would see us, they would run after us chanting, “Obroni, obroni!”  This means “white person.”

Our destination was a trading village on the bank of a huge lake.  The lake was so large, you would not believe it was man-made.  It was actually formed rather recently with the building of the new hydroelectric dam.  Before, the entire area was lush forest.  The village was filled with booths that were empty that day, but on Saturdays the place is a packed trading center.  People would come by boat from up to 2 hours away.  The main difference was that this village had electricity, and many of the homes had TV’s, radios, and satellite dishes.   We spent about half an hour wandering the village, then returned along the same road back.

We had a little time to clean up for dinner, which was to be a big occasion tonight.  Kofi had invited the regional Chief and many other guests to join us.  When the Chief arrived, we all introduced ourselves and shook hands.  The Chief was dressed in a toga-like outfit and his wife had on a long dress.  Their son had on a bright yellow soccer jersey and shorts.  The position of Chief is inherited, but matrilineal, so the heir is typically the Chief’s nephew.

The dinner table was very long; the Chief was at the head, then the 8 of us, then teachers and nurses at the end.  BD sat with us and told us about the Chief, even though he was sitting right next to us.  The Chief did not speak English, and we did not know how to talk to him or act around him.  He waited for us to start eating before he started and never tried to communicate with us.  His son sat on the corner without any table room and ate off his lap.  We kept thinking we were doing something wrong or being rude, but we didn’t know what to change.

After a delicious but slightly awkward dinner, we all moved into the courtyard to the side of the clinic and sat around in a circle.  Kofi took the opportunity to educate the community about the mission of the foundation.  The Chief also shared his welcome, then he opened the floor for questions.  We went around the circle with questions for the Chief, with BD translating for us.

At the conclusion of the discussion, we moved into the yard of the clinic, where they had brought in the village computer, hooked it up to a generator, and put on a dance party for us.  The computer was a massive machine, but had the latest version of Windows on it.  The Chief just sat and watched us, but the kids and teenagers happily danced with us late into the night.  (It wasn’t actually that late, but it felt like it because the sun set so long ago.)  We went to bed tired and happy.