Jordan and Sarah here: That’s right, we’re back together again, I know you were all worried J Last Sunday Jordan returned to Kukurantumi from his epic 5 week venture around the country (Sarah is very jealous) learning a whole bunch of cool stuff of which we will start once we get to Tarsor. We have spent a week now in language training preparing for our LPI (Language Proficiency Interview). Although everyone continues to assure all the trainees that we will all be fine, we are all a little stressed knowing it is pretty much our last hurtle to jump before we are sworn in. We have been studying pretty hard (Sarah is much better than Jordan, but he’s just gotten used to that J ) It is a little frustrating knowing that we are being trained in a dialect that we will not use since the dialect spoken in our village (Gilbagla) is slightly different in many cases. Oh well. We have been receiving packages sent by our amazing parents!! It’s like Christmas every time we open them. We take one piece out and oogle over how awesome it is that we have it here in Ghana and continue always hoping its not the last present. However, we now have a ton of stuff to haul back up with us across the country to our site. Oh well, TOTALLY worth it. We are now counting down the days until we finally get to settle down and begin to make our new home for 2 years. We have plans for a slamming garden (thanks Mom), composting, organic fertilizer, environmental clubs, and much more. We will spend the next week finishing up formalities before PC cuts us loose eg banking, swearing in, water filters… We bought a modem that will hopefully get decent service at our site so we will be able to have a way to update the blog there although there may be fewer pictures since our service would be based on info transferred so uploading pictures will eat up lots of that info. But we’ll be able to keep you posted. We’ll spend the last few minutes uploading pics. But before we go, here are the 5 Don’ts presented to us by the country Director:

1: Don’t get bit

2: Don’t get hit

3: Don’t get lit

4: Don’t do it

5: Don’t eat shit

My paper is published!!

Hey everyone, Jordan here again. I just thought I'd share some exciting news that my thesis research was published in the journal Animal Behaviour. You can read the abstract online if you look up Wein and Stephens jays cache more when handling times are short and habitats are poor. Apparntly at this point you can purchase it, but I'll upload the pdf sometime.

Hello from Tamale!

Jordan here: I'm finishing up off site technical training all around Ghana. We started in Techiman. We stayed at a monestary with sweet rock trails. It reminded me of Moab slickrock in many places but in the rainforest :) We went hiking on them every sunrise and sunset. The views were amazing but since I don't have my transfer cable, I can't upload pictures. Be patient and eventually you'll get a huge influx, I promise. The food was amazing and I wish I could've found the cook to find out how to make it all. Oh well. We visited an organic farm and learned how to make plant tea (basically liquid plant food) liquid manure (liquid nutrients leached from cow manure) and how to do large scale composting. We also checked out a cashew farm and went on a rugged mountain hike as an example of an eco-tourism project. The views were amazing! We also visited a mushroom cultivation farm (even though our area will be too dry to grow them) and it was really interesting! We also got training on how to use moringa trees. Apparently these are pretty much a miracle tree here. They grow in dry climates, they grow fast, they're super nutritious, they're medicinal, it fixes nitrogen into the soil, and they cure AIDS (okay not the last one although after a week of educating junior high school students about HIV and AIDS, some still think it can be cured...). I hope to get my community putting moringa leaves in food and tea and also making it into soap and skin creams to use and sell. Our sector is always looking for ALPs or alternative livelihood projects aka other ways to make money to bring people out of poverty. Then we travelled to Bolgatanga in the Upper West Region. We stayed at a spiritual renewal center which was super nice with electricity, running water, and nice beds! There, we visited a commerce center and chatted with GoG or Governments of Ghana to make connections with groups that could potentially help us with projects. These groups included: the forestry department, Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Business Advisory Council, and the district assembly. We also had a presentation about Village Savings and Loans Associations teaching us how to start or help organize ways for villages to start businesses or make purchases on credit from within the community. Our community already has one of these set up, but it was awesome to learn how it all works. Then we visited an agroprocessing company. It just so happened that it was a pito brewer and we got to see how everything was brewed, and of course how different varieties tasted :) We also got to learn about how to start a beekeeping project at our communities for honey and wax harvest and to increase crop yields with naturally pollination. I got to jump into the bee protection suit to model for everyone (pretty steamy when covered head to toe in Africa). I think we'll definitely want to start beekeeping at our community. Also, I learned how to build a rabbit rearing hutch and how to propogate them. Sarah's been trying to get me to commit to keeping just about every animal she's seen in Ghana, so some bunnies at our site are hopefully in the future at our site as well. Oh yeah, did I mention we got to go all the way up to the northern border of the country at Paga and go to a crocodile pond!! We met up with the water and sanitation crew and got to see the crocs up close. and I mean CLOSE!! One came out and waited and gave us all individual chances to stradle it and touch its back and take pictures! Crazy! Then as a reward for being so calm, the guide fed him a chicken. Then he sauntered lazily back into the pond to digest his meal. AWESOME! Then we travelled to Tamale and went right into training on Food Security. Peace Corps is making a big push for this in Ghana this year. We will be looked at as the experts since most of our jobs are to produce more food while maintaining the integrity of natural resources, specifically trees. Shea trees are very prevalent around our community. Our neighbor Jonathan about 3 km from our site has been working on connecting the women's groups with other buyers to solidify fair prices for their products and I hope to help him organize training sessions for other volunteers. We had some extensive training today about shea tree planting, grafting (taking the fruiting part of a mature tree and growing it on the root stock of an immature tree to grow shea fruits faster), and how to connect the small groups across Ghana to improve their product. I'm very excited! Shea nuts can be eaten as fruits, turned into shea butter, used in chocolate additives, cosmetics, and cooking oil. We also got to visit a giant organic mango plantation and learn about they're whole process and their massive tree nursery! Tomorrow we get to go and learn about vetiver grass which is a grass used to control soil erosion. It has a massively deep root system the holds soil well. Perhaps I will get a chance to use it on some of the roads around our place to help in the rainy season when the roads wash away! Then we take the 10 hour trip from Tamale back to my beautiful wife waiting for me :) We miss each other, but absence makes the hear grow stronger right? Then we have 2 weeks of language training and testing and then we head to Accra for the big signing in event! We still don't know who the guest of honor will be, but I hope its someone fantastic.
thanks so much for following the blog and writing comments. We miss everyone like crazy, but are having a great time here. We're just excited to finally settle in at our new home in a few weeks. Hopefully we'll get to post pictures very soon.
Love to everyone at home!

Funny Store Signs

Ok y'all, only because I have a down day here in Kumasi with fast internet are you getting all of these posts :)

I've been keeping a list of funny store signs I see here in Ghana. People like naming their businesses with something to do with Jesus/Christianity. Here are actual store names that I've seen around Ghana:

Your Desire Plumbing Works
His Grace Ventures
Grace Metal Security
His Love Hospital
Glorious Touch Plumbing
King of King Electricals
Simply by Grace Enterprise
Remember Your Creator Fashion
God's Way Enterprise
Riches of Glory Guest House
Touch not my Annointed Barber Shop
Joy of the Lord Enterprise
And my personal favorite...Mama Lucy Clap for Jesus

Shorter phrases are also seen on tros and large trucks, just as stickers across the windshield:
If God Says So
Bombastic
No Food for Lazy Man

I will keep adding to this list, but I just think it's funny that these random phrases are seen everywhere - Can you imagine if the mom and pop pharmacy down the street in small town America were called: "Mama Lucy Clap for Jesus Pharmacy" instead of "The Corner Drug"? :)

Kumasi!

Sarah here: my travels are winding down. I traveled from Wa to Kumasi today, and will be heading back to homestay on Sunday morning, back to language/teacher training on Monday morning! I spent the past week in Wa for an HIV education project, where we were tearing up, re-concreting, re-painting the town's bball court, and then supposedly having a one-day education session, and then a basketball tournament. BIG goals. We got the court torn up, and by we, I mean we Peace Corps volunteers (all 6 of us) worked for a few hours on a couple of days, and then we got prisoners from the local prison to come out and work. By last night, 3/4 of the court was re-concreted. That's IT. So the week was spent sitting around in Wa (AND making good food with my friend Melissa who will be an art teacher at the Wa School for the Deaf. So not necessarily a boring week, just unproductive, and I was getting tired of sitting around.





I got to connect with Jordan last weekend for a couple nights in Wa before he left on Sunday for Techiman for two weeks of technical training. He is having a FUN time! In Techiman, they got to stay at a monestary for four nights where they make delicious food and learned all about composting and tree planting (I'm a little jealous). Now he's in Bolgatanga (in the Upper East, near the Burkina Faso border - WHICH, we learned they opened back up for travel for volunteers, but the Visa price was jacked up from 20 cedis to 250 cedis! So looks like we won't be trying to visit Burkina unless they reduce that!), and Sunday, gets to go to the Paga Crocodile Pond, feed a chicken to a crocodile, and then sit on it's back (yeah, very jealous). He'll have a lot of cool things to teach me though when he's done, and I can help him with a lot when we're at site.





To answer some questions you have had:





I've heard of a couple of people having trouble posting comments. When I posted comments to a blog a friend of mine had on blogspot, I just had to choose who I was signed in as, usually used my google id, but if you don't have that, you should be able to use open id. I haven't heard of this problem before, so I apologize, but I don't know if I have the answer for you - feel free to shoot us a quick e-mail instead of a post if it's not working!





Language learning has been going okay - we've been traveling so much through areas of different language that we've been practicing many, so it's sometimes hard to keep them all straight when moving so much. But knowing the different greetings in the areas where you are visiting is very important, since greetings are very important here. For example, if you wanted to ask someone for help with directions and were to just go up and be like, "Where's the lori station?", they would probably not answer you, tell you they didn't know engligh, walk away - all because you asked for something before you even had the decency to greet them. So we like to learn the greetings! You can greet too! At our site, we greet good morning by saying "Bey dia" and answer with "Bey dia pinnaa" (both spelled phonetically), and to say thank you is "Bey lo li". I'll let you know how my language is REALLY going when we have to take our test the end of August... :)





How to we get our food? Open air markets mainly - just like farmers markets in the US, except that you can find a lot more than vegetables, including packaged spices, silverware, cloth, used shoes and clothing, raw meat of many different kinds, and soap for laundry. They also have small supermarkets, where you can buy packaged goods, in the larger cities. There are a couple small shops in our village that sell some packaged things too. But basically, you go get everything fresh from the market and come home and cook it! We will be cooking with a propane stove, hopefully not with a coal pot, because I don't like the smell of the coals.





Do you feel relatively safe here? Yes! Larger cities will have their share of crazies, but so will every other big city, anywhere in the world. We feel very safe in Wa, and as a female, I just make sure I'm walking with someone if it's near dark, and don't walk after dark. Our village is very safe - everyone assured us that there's no crime, and people are very respectful. I'd feel safe walking in the dark, expect that without electricity and no lights, I am a scaredy-cat and am afraid of the pitch black dark, so I only venture outside at night to use the latrine.





Funny story about our latrine. It's great, and I'm actually glad we have a latrine, because sometimes when volunteers have flush toilets, and then they don't work, you're left with a mess. I don't have to flush my latrine! But we also share it with some friends: cockroaches! I wish I had my camera when I'd get up in the middle of the night to pee. The instant I shine my headlight into the latrine, they all scatter for the cracks and crevasses - dark areas. And one of these dark areas is under the lid you sit on. I didn't realize this until the third night, when I accidentally bumped it, and a cockroach ran out, and I liften the lid up out of curiousity, and 6 more scuttled down into the bowels of the latrine! I don't need a cockroach crawling on my butt while trying to do my business at 2am! So from now on, I will be lifting the lid and scaring all of my newfound friends out of the vicinity :)





Another funny story while I'm thinking about it: I was walking with my friend Melissa from the main city center of Wa a couple of days ago back to her place, and we had stopped to talk to a tail0r to get their scraps of cloth, since Melissa is teaching me how to make a floor rug. I was adjusting my bag strap as I was walking away, eyes on the group, and literally walked into a sign that was a foot long right into my forehead....in front of like, 40 Ghanians all sitting in their shops! I heard a collective "Oooohhhh!" from all of them, and turned around and tried to play it off, while feeling pretty embarassed...had a nice lump there for the past few days. As my dad would say, that's the "Klutz" in me (his grandpa's last name :)





Bug nets: We have a mosquito net we sleep under. Basically it is just a giant net that hangs from its four corners, and drapes over your mattress/bed. If it's in a bed, you tuck it in between the mattress and bed frame when get in to go to bed, if it's a mattress lying on the floor, you just tuck the edges of the net underneath the mattress. A few bugs may get in as you transition, but whatcha gonna do. It feels very exotic to sleep under the net - like when you're a little kid and you make a fort under blankets draped over the ping pong table and other chairs/tables and feel so cool :)





Basically, people at our village are VERY nice and excited to see us. When I visited site the week after Jordan, I had a great time playing with almost every kid in the village at some point during the week. A couple afternoons I had like, 30 kids in our compound, and I taught them how to play Simon Says (failure, they didn't get it, since they don't speak enough English and I don't speak enough Sisaali, but they were still having fun imitating all the funny things I was doing!), and Hide and Seek - they LOVED this! We have a bunch of good hiding spots in the compound, but once you play for a half hour, you've found them all. But they would still just shriek with joy/surprise when found. And they got a kick out of me counting in Sisaali from 1-20, and then they would imitate my exact intonations when they would count :) Then they showed me the games they liked to play, and got me to try some fun dances, but they were way better so I let them dance :)





I also had all of the women at the bore hole laughing at me when I carred a jerrican (probably 5 gallons of water) on my head back to the house. They were joking with me about doing it, and I threw it right up there and walked (haltingly) back to my porch, where I needed someone to help me take it down :) But aside from that, no one ever let me pump my own water, or carry it back, someone did all of that for me - could get annoying not being able to do it ourselves, but then again, it is heavy... :)





Last story - my hands are getting tired :) The school had a teachers vs students soccer game on the last day of school (which the teachers won, but the students should have but one of their goals was called back, go figure that the teachers would rig the game :), and then afterwards, the teachers had a dinner. We had goat - goat that I had watched that afternoon cook over an open pit to be able to burn/shave the hair off, and then watch get cut into pieces. So they cook this goat meat in a stew all afternoon, and when we eat it that night, it is delicious - but meat is not the only thing that is in my bowl from the goat. They served basically everything in the goat. I had something in my bowl that looked like liver (sorry Dad, I know you like liver, but I couldn't bring myself to try it), something that looked like brains, and something that looked like intestines...yum! So I ate my two pieces of actual meat, and then when the teacher next to me asked if I was done, I said yes and played it off that I was full, and he dumped the contents of my bowl into his, and proceeded to eat the brain! Food does not go to waste in Ghana, glad someone could enjoy it, since I wasn't about to... :)





Thanks for the comments! You have all been so nice to offer to send packages! We appreciate it so much! Right now, I think we're set (more so because it will be a lot to carry back to site come September!), but also because we have a lot right now, but BELIEVE us, we will take you up on your offers soon! Spices are hard to find here, and they MAKE the meal. So we will continue to scope out what would be good care package items, and let you know :)





Love you all, can't believe it's been two months here already - we will be sworn in as real volunteers in less than a month! Crazy! THANKS for the support from everyone, it means the world - miss you!





Love Sarah and Jordan

Some pics! (From a friend's camera, so none of me OR Jordan but still pics :)

Girls carrying stuff on their heads and goats on the road in Wa - typical site in Ghana! Along with a fun rhyme we heard ALL the time when we were there this past week: Nansala, How are you?, We are fine, Thank you, and you?" Ridiculous! Nansala is another word for white person, and EVERY kid we would walk by would chant this at us, it sounds cute, but it's very annoying by the end of the day. So I got to saying it back at the kids WHILE they would chant it at us, and they would stop and kinda look curious as to why the Nansala was saying it to them, which sometimes worked and sometimes they would just look at us, and then just say it again :)

Andrew and I waiting outside of a "fast car" on our way from Wa back to the Eastern region for our AIDS training. This is at the "lori station", which is the main hub in a city where you go to find a taxi, tro-tro, fast car (basically a more comfortable and reliable tro, seats 14 people) and buses of varying degrees of quality :) You can also buy lots of food off of people's heads at these stations (as well as anywhere in Ghana, for that matter). Andrew is wearing a smock, which is a typical male Ghanian shirt, handwoven, and somewhat pricy, but can be embroidered specifically with beautiful designs. We all called him Jesus for the week when he would wear his crazy hair down :)

My peeps at one of the older mosques in Wa - isn't that so cool! There are a lot that are very run down, but many old ones look like this, built out of mud bricks and are still used!

Largest mosque in Wa - very beautiful! The inside space is very open, where there are no benches, just many many prayer mats. The call to prayer happens five times a day, which I respect, but don't necessarily appreciate at 3:30am... :)

Andrew (volunteer in my group) and Austin (two-year, extending volunteer) in Takpo (Austin's village 45 mins outside of Wa) drinking Pito (the local drink in the Upper West that people of all ages drink, fermented millet that is kinda sweet, kinda the thickness of beer, carbonated, pretty good but an aquired taste).