The Work

After nearly 9 months in country, I've written about a variety of topics regarding my service and experience in Ghana, from representing Americans as a volunteer to the language I'm learning and even the struggles I've had integrating. But what's it all for? The challenges, the triumphs, the learnings? The first goal of the Peace Corps is "To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women." And while I've highlighted why a volunteer can be successful without focusing on that goal, that's not who I am as a person. I need tangible results and I want to make a direct impact on the people in my community. So I thought it would be valuable to post an update here about what I've been actively working on to accomplish this goal. As these projects progress and show results, I'll expand on them. But here is an introduction to how I spend my time in service to my village.

1. Permagarden: During pre-service training (PST), we had a great guest trainer for one week to teach us about permagardening. The benefits of a permagarden method include retaining water during the dry season, ease of work for the owner and the ability to grow a varied and nutritious supply of food for an entire family. When I arrived at my community my first request to the chief was to obtain some land so that I could start my own. It took a couple of months, but I was given a great plot right by the roadside.

There are many ways to go about implementing this concept into your community. Other volunteers in my cohort have already had success acting as a trainer for their village, in which they do no work themselves to put the focus on sustainability and the community being accountable for the garden themselves. Others have done well simply improving existing gardens by teaching them to adopt the methods we were taught. My strategy has been to work on it entirely myself in my spare time hoping that the results will be my best selling point. If even I - a foreigner - can make a nutritious garden by myself with no added money, surely the villagers with a full family of laborers can do it too.

SLXLM

The challenge I've faced so far is that when I went to plant the first bed, I realized that most of the crops in the first rotation required transplantation instead of directly sowing the seeds. So I built a nursery and will wait to plant it to line up with transplanting them during the minor rainy season (early September). It has also given me time to work on perfecting the berms (mounds of dirt around the garden that direct the water) and planting them with a live fence. Live fencing keeps the goats, sheep and chickens out for free while keeping the structure of the berms in tact.

2. No Till Agriculture: Almost daily I hear from the farmers in my village that they have poor soil and too little rain to be largely successful farmers. And while it's true that they face environmental challenges that are only getting worse with climate change, it's also true that the ability to maintain soil health and get strong crop yields is very much within their reach.

The typical M.O. of a Ghanaian farmer is to slash the grass (or whats left of the past crop) and burn in followed by hiring a plow to till their land. I assure you, anyone experienced in environmental science is cringing right now and what makes this worse is that they rarely have the money to plow and often do it on credit or believe they can't farm because they can't afford to plow. I am trying to start a culture of no till agriculture. Without going into the details at this moment (I hope to have a no till centered blog post later), it's safe to say it involves quite a different process than they're used to.

I started with the rest of the plot on which I was given by the chief. The garden by design is small and easy to maintain so I had enough land left for another use. Later, I was also approached by the Catholic Church (and their school) in my village about using their land for a demonstration plot as well. On both pieces of land we are practicing no till agriculture to improve the soil quality. Another volunteer, who specializes in this discipline, was kind enough to visit for 2 full days and help me teach the community members about what we were doing. She is also in the process of writing a grant to have her bosses, the owner of the CNTA (center for no till agriculture) in Ghana, to come and give a presentation and demonstration, hopefully sometime in September.

With the help of the school children and my counterpart, I continue to maintain these farms no less than every few days to ensure we have positive results to display to the village. While it will take at least year, more than likely two years or more, to truly revitalize the soil quality on these farms, I hope to have just enough time to see the differences before I hand things off to the next volunteer and/or my counterpart.

3. 4H Clubs / Working In The Schools: I love working with Ghanaian children and have an open invitation to teach literally anything I want to them by the Catholic school in my village. And while I have taught English already, I'm not sure that's where my strengths lie. What I hope to do, however, is give them some direction and motivation about the possibilities that await them in the farming profession. Easily the most common profession in Ghana, it is dying in terms of what kids want to do when they grow because it is not seen as a place they can make money. I hope to show them that's not true.

My main focus will be starting 4H clubs in both of the schools in my village, and possibly other schools in surrounding neighborhoods. I have already had a meeting with the local 4H representative and am ready to get our first local meetings started in the next couple of weeks.

4. GLOW/BRO Camp: I am on the executive board for the Volta/Eastern region GLOW/BRO camp, specifically on the budget committee. Each volunteer in these two regions will get to send their two highest achieving students to the camp, free of cost. The camp will focus on things like leadership skills, gender identity, networking and other lessons that they might not have a chance to learn at their home. The camp will take place in August and you may see a plea from me for fundraising soon!

5. Future Projects: My counterpart and I have loose plans to start mushroom cultivation and grasscutter rearing. I will ultimately be happy if one of these projections comes to fruition. I'm also regularly approached by different community members about things like beekeeping and rabbit rearing. All of this falls under my umbrella as an agriculture volunteer, but time will tell which people are serious enough to put in the work it will take to get these projects off the ground because in the end, I'm here to assist them in meeting their goals, not the other way around.