Monday, January 10, 2011

It's been a full week!

We arose to beautiful Sunday morning. Life in the village is quieter today as some businesses and drivers are not operational. Instead they choose to go to church and take the day off. Earlier in the week we were invited to attend church with Dora, a girl we met in town, so Garrison and I took her up on the offer. It was a great experience to try out a mass with Jehova's Witnesses in Twi. One kind old man volunteered to translate some of the mass for us and Dora provided an
English bible to follow along. When mass ended we were greeted by most of the congregation and we tried getting pictures with some friends in their Sunday best. Unfortunately Garrison's camera died after two pictures and mine had been borrowed by some of the other children in the
village earlier so we had to pretend for a photo or two before everyone was satisfied.

After church the big project for the day was to meet Winnie at Valley View University. We quickly packed up and made ready to leave. As we were walking on the road looking for a cab, we ran into Sammy who called a cab for us that would take us straight to Valley View instead of following our plan which was basically to play it by ear as we hopped from place to place. Though the road we used was viciously bumpy and deformed, we arrived at Valley View earlier than if we had followed our original plan.

Since it was Sunday, VVU had very few people on campus, but Winnie and her neice solicited the help of a security guard to take us around to their source-separated bathrooms and to where they store the waste for composting. We couldn't go inside the student bathroom, but it was pretty impressive from what we could tell. They had six pipes collecting solid waste in transportable garbage containers and a rainwater collection system on the roof to supply
the sinks.

(Quick aside: Garrison and I spotted a mouse zipping behind our stuff after we finished our movie. We literally chased it around the room and forced it outside. Another point to SEAS and EWB Ghana. 11:05pm)

Next came the compost collection portion of the trip. Suraj filled containers with compost from their six storage sheds while Garrison and I helped out, but we mostly just watched and held our
breath. With all of our samples in hand we left VVU for the trek back to Obodan. By
the time we arrived it was too late to grab real food so we snacked on the never failing combination of bread and Nutella. We realized that we've only eaten 5 actual meals on the trip so far, meaning that we've been eating less than one meal a day. Further proof that the keys to
survival are chewy bars and Nutella.

1 comment:

  1. Bread & Nutella - the staff of life...
    Sounds like great work and a great experience!

    ReplyDelete