An Awful – Completely Preventable – Accident

I’ve mentioned before that our village is full of noise.  I’ve learned to decipher a few of them.  There’s a distinct difference in sound when a Ghanian women is angry, happy or alarmed.  This morning, we heard our neighbor, Acee, in an alarmed panic, screaming and running towards the road.  Luke had his shoes on and rushed out of the house before me.  As I was catching up, our neighbor boy, Sandy, was running and crying.  I held his hand and we ran to the road together.  The entire community was there within seconds.  A little four year old girl had been hit by a cocoa truck.  She was already being taken to the nearest hospital, about 30 minutes away and there was only a pool of blood left and a few crying, frantic mothers, aunts and relatives by the roadside waiting for a taxi to take them the hospital.

I stood there wanting to console, to help, anything!  I didn’t know this little girl by name.  There are a lot of children in the village, but I’m sure I’ve seen her or she’s yelled “ba fwe” (white man) to me and we exchanged waves and giggles.  Luke and I had just met her father, the village carpenter, the day before. 

This happened while we were waiting for a Ghana-WASH truck to come take us to go monitor latrine construction in a nearby village.  When we left for work, we still didn’t know if the little girl would be ok.  I worried about her all day.  Most of you know, I spent most of my college years as a nanny and my worst fear was seeing one of my kids hurt.  That, coupled with the chaotic roadside conditions of our village, are appalling to an urban planner and it’s bothered me since day one here. 

When we got back from work in the nearby village, I sought out whether the girl was ok.  The village seemed like it was back to normal.  Although mothers were keeping their children closer to their side tonight, the same mothers who were frantic this morning, were back to cooking and caring for their families.  After getting through a few language barriers, we found out the little girl had died.  I’ve mentioned before that Ghanian’s don’t openly grieve, so maybe that’s why it was conveyed so matter-of-factly.

I wanted to cry on the spot and I was also outraged.  This is part of it I keep reminding myself.  This is why I am here, to service conditions like this.  I’ve shared before my concern for being a Community Development Volunteer in the Health, Water and Sanitation Sector here, but I’m starting to see the link.  Health extends beyond disease and sanitation.  I think it also encompasses a psychological well-being.  How can quality of life be improved if one doesn’t feel safe in his or her own community?  If you have a clean water supply, low cases of disease, but no sense of security, is your community healthy?  As an aspect of health, safety can’t be ignored.  Yesterday’s incident revealed to me my secondary project and it couldn’t be more fitting to my passion.  Borrowing a planning theory taught by Dr. Antoninetti, that if it’s safe for children, it’s good planning, I framed a strategy for a safer village focusing on the children of Adjakaa, which will subsequently benefit the entire community.  My list is ambitious and will likely take the entire two years as I also work with Ghana-WASH projects.  At the prospect of making a real difference, and hopefully stopping another preventable tragedy, I haven’t been more excited or motivated to be here until this point.

First Two Weeks at Site

We are finished with training, officially Peace Corps Volunteers and at our site.  The first three months at our site are supposed to be spent settling in and getting to know the village.  During training, we were told that we would be sitting and staring at the wall a lot during our first few months at site.  Just staring, thinking, listening and killing time.  Everyone thought the couples in the group wouldn’t have to go through this because we have each other -awww.  Instead, we found ourselves sitting and staring at each other the first day!

Adjusting to a new home in a new village amongst a new culture is a very very difficult task.  But, I signed up for it, so I’m not complaining.  What may seem like complaints are coming from an attempt to explain something that would never happen in America.  The rural third-world village life is nothing short of wild.  Wild has been a catch-word in U.S. culture and has had various meanings throughout the decades.  The 50s suburbanites that spoke of the wild beyond their manicured lawns, the 60s wild and crazy, the 70s wild and groovy, the weird, the funky wild of the 80s, and the 90s anarchist grunge-driven wild.  Here, now, wild is synonymous with remote, harsh, and all of the above!  It’s a jungle out there…literally!  There’s always a sheep “mahh-ing,” a child crying, partial nudity, and a radio playing.

I was very uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity at first.  It’s getting better every day and I’m feeling a little more adjusted.  We get out and try to walk around the village almost every day.  We don’t get very far before we run into a local who invites us to sit down and there we stay talking for a few hours.  Our house is mostly bare and we are slowly filling it as we unpack and get supplies.  The power goes out anywhere from 1-5 times a day, which we don’t notice except for our fan not working.  We are really thankful to even have power, or the possibility of it, in the first place.  The longest it has gone out was for four days last week.  We get our water from a borehole.  The local kids help me, carrying gallons of water on their heads, ultimately taking it to a large container in our house for storage.  We put a few tablespoons of bleach in it to kill any bacteria, etc. that might be in there before we use it for cooking, bucket bathing, hand washing dishes, and/or hand washing our laundry.

We went to town a few days this week to get supplies, open bank accounts, and go to the market.  A trip to town is a 25 minute taxi ride on a rained-out dirt road, with no AC and sometimes cramming 7 adults in a taxi smaller than the size of a Toyota Corolla.  We usually only set out to accomplish one thing a day as it is painfully slow (and hot) to get simple errands done.  So, when I say that small victories keep me positive and happy here, you’ll understand that taking a cardboard tray of 30 eggs back from town without any breaking is a self-esteem booster.

My main frustration is cooking, something I was very good at and enjoyed very much in the U.S.  The market (imagine a disorganized swap-meet) has mostly local, in season foods and items.  Very little is available as far as manufactured goods.  It’s so hip to the local, organic scene in the U.S., you would think I would be in culinary-hippie-heaven.  In reality, what I can buy is nice to have, but there isn’t much variety.  Tomatos, garden eggs (like a white eggplant), onions, garlic, cabbage, ginger, avocados, red peppers are in season now and I’m doing my best to experiment.  There is also plenty of plantains and cassava, the ingredients for “fufu.”  Fufu is made by boiling both the plantain and cassava to make them tender, then they are pounded into a dense yet gooey starch that is then made into a ball and used to match a stew or soup.  Ghanians eat it almost every day from what I can tell.  

Then there’s the meat scene: raw meat exposed on a table with flies everywhere, makes me want to first puke, then convert to vegetarianism, even more than The Jungle or Fast Food Nation did.  Most of our protein is derived from eggs (free-range of course!) or meat that is freshly cut (your neighbor’s chicken isn’t hanging around anymore) and without the presence flies.

I tried to make a Ghanian dish the other night.  One of our favorite soups, called Groundnut Soup, with rice.  Ghanian dishes aren’t quick or necessarily easy to make.  From what I’ve observed, most women are making meals all day.  They call p-nuts “groundnut,” so this soup has a p-nut butter type base with other ingredients such as tomatos, onions, ginger and palm oil.  It takes a good two hours to make. 

Locally, they puree or blend vegetables by hand in a mashing bowl.  This takes some skill and manual labor and I’m not the best at it.  The dish turned out great and I was so proud of myself.  While I was letting it simmer for the last 15 minutes, I went outside to wash the dirty dishes used during cooking and our neighbor came up to me.  In the local language, I told her that I just made groundnut soup with rice and she laughed.  Ten minutes later, she came over with fufu and light soup (a popular Ghanian dish).  I was so upset!  I now realize that it’s an aspect of Ghanian culture.  They must think I can’t cook because I’m not Ghanian and feel responsible if I or Luke were hungry while here.  When Luke and I are together talking with the local women, they ask who will cook for us.  I say I will and they…you guessed it…laugh.  Can I just mention that we’ve had fufu almost every night since!

There are a lot of children, and all I’ve seen so far are very cute.  Yes, of course I’m keeping tabs on the quality of cute kids in my village!  Most under three years old are afraid of me.  The first few days they would run and cry at the mere sight of me.  Given my emotional state during those first few days, I was completely sympathetic to their terrors and wanted to run from myself and cry with them.  Most are getting more comfortable with me.  The other day, our neighbor, “little nana,” did an ungraceful two year old run right up to me while I was sitting on our porch and climbed into my lap.  She just sat there and stared at me for a good 10 minutes then just got up and left.  The older ones are more comfortable with me and yell “sista abena” when they see me until I wave and then they move on.  They watch me hand wash dishes and clothes outside, they watch me sweep, get water, they watch me read, and cook.  There’s actually four sets of eyes looking in the window watching me right now.

Our village speaks a variation of Twi, so I have to learn yet another language dialect.  Everyone expects us to know both languages already and I’ve just started to remember my Twi again.  Luke, of course, is picking up both quickly and everyone in the village expects me to on the same level with him and it is a point of great frustration for me.  Since I’m not at the same level, they tell him (while I’m standing there) that I don’t speak well and that he should teach me…those incidents go on the “blows to self-confidence” list.  So, recently I have been making my best efforts to walk around without Luke.  It’s pretty awkward, walking around an unfamiliar community while you know everyone is staring at you and also sitting with locals, unable to really communicate.  They laugh at everything I say and there are many moments of silent gazing.  It is very uncomfortable and my least favorite part about it is the attention I get all the time, which I’m sure comes to no surprise for anyone who knows me.  They are concerned with my moles, thinking they are some sort of bug bite.  My hair is always a topic too; how do I brush it, cut it?  Where are my kids, they ask, when will I have them, can I take one of theirs back to America?  Will the airplane charge me extra if I’m pregnant?  My lips, they are lighter than Luke’s, why? Some ask for money, they assume that because I am white I have money.  I can tell you that a PCV living allowance doesn’t leave any room for monetary donations.  I’m sure most, if not all, Peace Corps Volunteers experience this.  I’ve reached rock star status in this small village.  It looks like I’m going to have to get comfortable with it as there is no equivalent of youtube or the Disney channel here to create an attention-sucking celebrity overnight.

As I get used to dealing with different foreign frustrations and challenges on a daily basis, there are challenges I faced in the U.S., but I have to overcome them here in a completely, emotionally, different way.  I find myself feeling first isolated and then a little stronger.  A close family friend passed away recently after a long struggle with cancer.  She was a uniquely kind and loving mother, wife and friend.  I got the news via an email from my mom and there were many emotions that followed.  I felt helpless, like I couldn’t be there for support and also so out of place to be mourning this loss.  I sat on my porch this morning and looked out to the vast nothingness of the jungle, thinking about death and life.  It started to rain, the first AM rain since we’ve been here, and tried to conceal my grief as much as possible (Ghanians don’t openly cry).  Had I been back in the U.S., me and my mom would have gotten together for coffee (COFFEE!) and a walk and a lot of hugs and talking and of course some good Bassett-girl sobbing.  I actually couldn’t even call her because there was a religious festival going on and I couldn’t find a quiet spot to talk.  It was both tough not physically being in the US, yet being here alone to get beyond the sad news.

One of my favorite professors, and an amazing individual, also died of cancer a year ago.  Junior Seau, an icon in San Diego/ Oceanside with so much influence, took his own life recently.  How is it that a person fights for life while another gives up?  Life is so unfair.  In my sadness, I realized that, I see it all around me now.  Unfairness in the form of poverty, disease, hunger, and ultimately death -often from preventable causes.  People one day just aren’t here anymore.  They “fell” or “they got sick” and died.  We were told not to be surprised if a child or someone you are close to in your village dies.  Death is, unfortunately, a fact of life.  The timing just seems so flawed.  Then again, when is the right time?  I can’t answer that, or even think about it.  It’s a fate I’ll meet when I meet it.  I just hope that we live with the mindset of positivity and an appreciation for life while we, and other’s around us, have it.  As my fellow rock star, Eddie Vedder, would sing “No time to be void, or save up on life, you gotta spend it all.”

I think after these two years I’ll be emotionally stronger and hopefully not callous.  There are also positive occurrences that will happen in my absence that I know I’ll have to face in a different emotional light too- the birth of two babies I won’t even see until they are two years old, for one!  Even though I am not physically with my family or friends, I am learning to appreciate them and every moment while taking one day at a time and living in the now, now!  Wild isn’t it?

Type-A Volunteer

Looking back, I have to admit, when I signed up for the Peace Corps, I think naivety had the best of me.  In my defense, the PC application process, and even training, is plagued by vague information.  The most material offered after a web search is about the history of the PC, the theory that drives it, what kind of volunteer box you can fit in and where you could go.  Even after interviews and phone calls, you reach the same information plateau.  Having agreed with the PC mentality and wanting to be a part of it, I filled out the application and submitted to the unknown.  Yet, what’s amusing is when I got on the plane to come to Ghana, I thought I knew exactly what I was going to do when I arrived.  According to my invitation, I am a “Community Development Volunteer” in the “Health, Water and Sanitation Sector.”  I think I was so excited to get the invitation letter than when read it that I didn’t put it down and say “what the fuck does that mean?!” like the critical-thinking, master’s degree-holding, cynic that I am.  Only now, after months of life-altering preparation, and two months of being in country do we even know where we will spend the 24-month long commitment as Peace Corps Volunteers as well as our official project, the next assignment of the unknown.  And I’m still trying to define exactly what those words meant on my PC invitation letter.

The PC essentially makes you embrace a “buy the ticket, take the ride” mentality, which I am good at, in every sense of my life except my career.  I’ve been struggling with the nature of my PC assignment since day one here.  I think that has led to vague descriptions as to what I will be doing here and why.  I’ve had a lot of friends, family and followers express confusions revolving around issues that one wouldn’t understand unless they were here in Ghana.  So I hope to, at least, share with you what I know up until this point.  Clearly I am learning the ways of PC information sharing!  Don’t get me wrong, I still feel a great sense of conviction to help address the needs of a developing country.  It just makes me nervous not knowing exactly how I can do that with my specialty.  Control-freak much?

So, let’s begin the lesson on Ghanaian Health, Water, and Sanitation issues from the limited view of a Peace Corps Community Development Volunteer.  An excerpt from The Crow and the Lamb in David Sedaris’ book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk:

The crow was out one morning, looking for something to eat, when she spotted a newborn lamb suckling in the field below.  Sheep, she thought. What I wouldn’t give for a life like that.  The mother spits out a baby and then she just lies there doing nothing while it feeds itself.  No nest to build, no spending every rotten moment searching for food, and even then it’s never enough.

On top of that, birds had to be homeschooled, not like sheep or cows, who learned junk from one another.  “It takes a village,” they like to say, no that there was much to learn in the first place. You lower your head, and food goes in.  Raise your tail, and it comes out.  The eating part, they had down, but the rest, forget it.  Crap smeared from one end of their bodies to the other.  Where was the fucking village when it came to cleaning themselves?  That’s what the crow wanted to ask.  Oh, they moaned about insects – flies lighting on their faces all day – but news flash: flies go where the shit is, so if you don’t want them clustering on your forehead, clean it!

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here or our panties in a wad about cultural insensitivity. 

Actually, about sensitivity: you shouldn’t read the rest if you are prone to sensitive feeeeelings, have a weak stomach, or don’t like the s-word. 

That said, I’m not saying Ghanians are sheep or cows and I’m a crow.  The point to take away is the part about crap, or just “shit,” here in Ghana.  

“Have you ever eaten shit?”  Gasp, “no!”

In many, if not most, villages in Ghana, there is a huge problem with open-defecation (OD).  In other words, they shit in the open and leave it exposed.  This, as you can imagine, can cause a series of health related problems.  Diarrhea and disease related to OD kill around 1.8 million people every year, mainly children under five.  Most communities have a designated area, usually a field on the edge of the village, where they shit.  Most adults and teens use those areas, but I’ve seen children shitting in the middle of town where everyone can see.  Some of the areas where OD occurs are near water sources and/or in streams, lakes and rivers.  Animals, children and adults trek the feces from the OD area through town.  Flies land on the feces and then fly to food, water, or any other surface throughout the village.  Toilet paper is considered a luxury and whatever is lying around is used to wipe.  Corn husks are popular to clean with- don’t ever touch one!  I saw a sleeping baby on it’s mother’s back the other day with flies around its nose and lips and couldn’t help but wonder where that fly had been before.

There is a clear link between OD and inadequate health, sanitation and hygiene issues in Ghana.  To combat this issue, we are working for Ghana WASH as behavior change agents.  Ghana WASH is funded by USAID and implemented by Relief International.  We are tasked with “engaging in activities such as community entry and mobilization, community profile analysis, hygiene promotion, advocacy, leadership, civic engagement, social marketing and safe water and sanitation practices.” 

The grunt of our work for the first few months to a year is a Community Let Total Sanitation (CLTS) strategy called ‘triggering’ to raise awareness and mobilize the community to collectively decide to change.  Triggering basically shows community members the link between OD and health problems.  The message is that if you OD, then you are essentially eating shit.  It’s a crude and explicit method that brings about shame resulting in a mobilized community against OD.

A few examples of trigger methods we do are community mapping, the f-diagram and a transect walk.  They are all done together in that order and it usually takes an hour or two, depending on the cooperation from the community.  Before the triggering occurs, we integrate ourselves into the community by being visible and getting to know the communities we are tasked with helping.

The community mapping gathers the community members together under a tree or in a classroom setting (depending on the village).   We have the community member’s show where they live, go to church, get their water and where they open defecate with symbols they pick (rocks, leaves, sticks, etc).  Then, we have them draw lines from the points of OD to where they live, get their water, etc.  We ask them where the dirtiest place in their community is and it’s always where they OD.  Then we ask why it’s dirty and they mentally draw the connection between OD and hygiene/sanitation issues within their community.  The other day, when I participated in a mapping exercise, there was a water spot and an OD spot next to each other.  They identified that as a dirty place in their village, noting that those that get water from that source get sick the most.

The f-diagram (google CLTS f-diagram for the image) draws the link between OD and eating shit.  Before the demonstration, you gather a sample of shit from the community and put it on a plate with a little oil on it (the oil here is red and we call it red red).  You start by asking them if they have ever eaten shit.  They all say no.  Then you tell them that you got this shit from their community today.  Within seconds flies are on the shit.  Then you bring out a plate of rice and set it next to the shit.  Within seconds, the rice is red from the flies going back and forth from the shit to the rice. The community members are disgusted as they can literally see that they do eat shit.

We next ask the community members to show us where they OD and we walk there as a group.  I call it the walk of shame.  The idea is to take them where they OD so that they realize the unpleasant sight and smell of shit everywhere collectively and with visitors (me and Luke and our counterparts).  We ask them questions and have a discussion right there in the uncomfortable setting.  They are used to going to these places and maybe seeing a few other people, but when we are all there it’s shameful.  In reality, and as we showed them earlier, the shit doesn’t just stay there.

These strategies are usually successful in causing a community mobilization effort to build latrines and stop OD, so they are ultimately safe from their own shit.  Ghana WASH subsidizes some of the materials used for latrines, but the community members must first dig their latrine pits and provide the locally available materials and contribute to the latrine building process.

That is the basic outline of what I am anticipating will occupy most of my time.  Ghana WASH seems like they have a great structure.  A huge positive for me, being a Type A person/volunteer when it comes to my vocation.  There is also a lot of opportunities for me within the scope of Ghana WASH and also outside and I will definitely take the opportunity to write grants and do whatever else  I can while I am here for two years. 

So, while I’m not educating people on the evils of auto-oriented development (or telling of the history of that original turn of the century Victorian-era home with a gothic influence that Mr. so-and-so lived in), but instead I’m educating people about eating their own shit, I’m hoping that after two years, the two will be somehow relevant.  If anything, it shows of the limitlessness that is a career in community development and the many avenues that I could take when I’m done with my service.  <--Me, staying positive!

Technical Training

We are in the technical phase of our training.  It’s focused on activity based learning about what we could possibly do outside of our primary projects.  We are in Tamale (Tom-a-lay) in the Northern region and have also traveled outside of Tamale to other PCV sites to see the projects they have worked on over the course of their volunteer experience.  The Northern regions of Ghana are a lot different than the Southern regions.  The weather is much drier and the landscape is more typical of the Africa you would see in movies.  The people are still the same, very kind, and you do see more of a Muslim influence.  We are enjoying our time here as we know we probably won’t make it back up to these northern areas again while we are here since it took two long days of traveling to get here.  

We’ve seen secondary projects ranging from tree nursery’s to malnutrition clinics and have participated in half-day/day-long activities like mural painting and school-health day instructing.  One of my favorite events so far has been teaching kindergardeners about hand washing.  I, along with two of my colleagues, taught a room full of about 50 kindergardeners how and when to wash their hands.  We taught them the “hand-washing” song (no, I won’t sing it for you!) and used glitter to represent germs and how they are washed away with soap and water.  It’s interesting to see some of the barriers to healthy living.  With hand washing, it turns out that goats love soap, so you often won’t see it left out and so it doesn’t get used.  However, the kids seemed to have understood as half-way through our lesson, they took a bathroom break.  They all ran out to the field near the school and peed (another topic for another day) then ran to the hand-washing station and washed their hands.  They proudly showed us their clean hands, it was both cute and gratifying.  Hopefully they teach their friends the song and continue to wash in our absence.

This blog posting may seem like tech training is uneventful.  It's actually the opposite, we are doing so many things that I can't talk about each in detail, so i'll let the pictures speak.  We're looking forward to the end of training and getting back to our site!!

Pictures: 

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100848305341124.2808341.3323693&type=1&l=eb3e7caa48

Off the Map

The words “Site Announcements” written on the March 21 calendar square have been staring at me for months.  Where we are going has been the question on my mind, and on the mind of everyone who knows me, since we joined the Peace Corps.  It’s a very unsettling idea, not knowing where you will live for two years nor having much of a part in the decision-making process, aside from what my resume says. 

Site Announcements, 11 am…10 minutes and we’ll know.  A big map of Ghana with the regions is drawn in chalk on the concrete courtyard at our training retreat site.  We were the last to be called.  “Luke and Malia Campanella…dramatic pause… Western Region.”  Western Region, that sounds nice.  If you look for it on the map, it won’t be there.  The closest city on the map to us is Enchi, the district capital.  We are working with Ghana WASH, a country-wide NGO funded by USAID.  They focus on community-led behavior change.  We are part of an awesome team; four others from our group were chosen to work on meeting the criteria and open-defecation-free goals of Ghana WASH and are placed at other sites in the country.  It seems like it is a good project and that we will be busy.  My community development education will be applied in a way I would have never guessed, and that is very exciting to me.  I think I will be able to bring a unique experience to the American Planning table and maybe this will be the foundation for a career in international or grassroots planning.  I know, a little premature perhaps, but it’s nice to finally have direction.  There is also a lot of room for secondary projects, of which I am sure they will reveal themselves soon and I will talk more about both at length when I’m not so overwhelmed.

After learning of our site and meeting our counterparts, we set out to travel to our site the next day.  Our counterparts help us integrate into the community and get settled.  They live nearby and they work for Ghana WASH.  Traveling in Ghana wouldn’t be complete without some kind of mis-hap; our bus broke down two-hours into our six hour journey.   After the bus broke down, we waited for three hours on the side of the road in a cute little town with plenty of chances for people watching…I’m sure they thought the same thing of us.  The bus was never fixed (an electrical problem) and a Ghana WASH truck came and got us and took us to our site.

 After our first night during our site visit, we were deliriously exhausted, both mentally and physically.  We went to bed at 8pm and I took a nap before 11am.  The realization that we are so isolated, and the newness of an already unfamiliar place is unsettling.  And while our house is very nice, it is also awkward.  We have the nicest house and accommodations of everyone in the village.  Our home is painted bright green and in the center of the village.  Needless to say, the fish-bowl just became a fish-tank, but I think we will be happy here for two years.  

Our site is really isolated, literally in the middle of nowhere.  We drove for three hours out of town on a dirt road to get here.  There is a cluster of six communities around us, accessible by bike (yep, I’ll be riding a bike, like the PC poster child) and 30 communities by taxi.  We are tasked with trying to reach as many of these communities as possible while we are here.  Our site has less than 1,000 people and it’s quite small and run-down…hence the fact that we are here.  It is much smaller than our homestay town where we’ve been for training.  The Western Region gets the most rainfall of all the regions in Ghana and that is certainly evident in the surroundings.  There is a lot of dust, the red kind you see in movies, and jungle all around.  There is no market and not many business-type places, like a phone credit place, one spot (bars), a seamstress, a “cold” store (no fan ice!), or a cloth store.  Goats are a taboo, so they aren’t here, but there are a lot more dogs.  It’s a large cocoa farming community that has a lot of mining activity in the vicinity.  Our home is a large house, with four bedrooms and a large living-area with an indoor bucket bath area and a private latrine and a borehole (water-source) close by.  I would say it’s very nice, even with Peace Corps expectations.  We have electricity, but the locals say it tends to go out for days at a time…so we’ll enjoy it when we can, and are thankful that we even have it.  Upon arrival, our counterparts facilitated a meeting with the chief and elders of the community and told them our mission.  The next day we went to the District Assembly office in Enchi and met the Health and Planning Officer.  They promised me i'll be named "Queen of Development" by the time I leave.  We also met the head of the hospital and the Police Chief, who promised us peace and no fear.  He told us about a married PC couple at his elementary school in Ghana in the 70s, he still remembered them by name.  We were happily welcomed by all.  The locals are very nice and it seems like they will accept us.  We sit on our porch and get a lot of stares and returned smiles.

We go back to Tamale for the rest of our pre-service training.  We swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers on April 20^th, then we will be at our site for two years.

Pics: 

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100832211807694.2805761.3323693&type=1&l=9676a8b2dc