Happy holidays and a happy new year all! I hope you all had wonderful holidays. Many people have expressed curiosity about what I eat here, so I wanted to write part of this journal entry on the food. I have started cooking for myself nowthat I no longer have my homestay mother to cook for me. I get most of the good from the weekly market, which fortunately there is one in my town of Lawra so I don't have to travel to get to it. A lot of the Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) are in small villages with a limited local market and end up having to take public transportation back and forth to a market where they can get a variety of foods. Mostly in Ghana public transportation means these minivans they stuff a lot of people into, and many things on top of, including baggage, bicycles, and livestock, called tro tros. For longer distance trips they have buses, some of which even have a radio and/or TV that plays low budget Nigerian films.

The items in the market are seasonal, but right now I can get tomatoes, onions, green peppers, yams (not sweet potatoes the bigger tropical variety that taste more like potatoes), supposedly fresh pineapple although it is expensive, garlic, watermelon, sweet potatoes, these vegetables that taste like eggplant but are smaller called garden eggs, oranges, this leafy vegetable called kontomire that is like spinach, okra, bread, peanut butter, black eyed peas...that is all I can think of for now. The vegetables available in the North are fewer than in the South because the North is drier and only has one rainy season, and thus, one growing season. There are 2 rainy/growing seasons in the South. However, I will go to a bigger town called Wa twice a month to use the internet and I can pick up more things there like apples, carrots, cucumber, cabbage, plantains, kidney beans, potatoes, bananas, and cheese, among others. You can find more things because Wa is a decent sized town (100,000 people maybe??) and they import food from the South.

So as far as what I actually eat, I can get rice and pasta so I eat a lot of both. I can also get canned tuna so I eat a lot of tuna sandwiches for lunch. Breakfast I have an egg sandwich or pancakes, sometimes oatmeal. For dinner some of the Ghanaian dishes I have made so far are rice with peanut soup and goat meat and this rice dish called Jollaf rice, which reminds me a lot of Spanish rice. I also made a black eyed peas and tomato dish called Red Red that is served with fried sweet plaintains and is a local favorite. I have also of course made spaghetti in all its versatile forms :)

I eat out too, especially when I am traveling. Most anywhere you can get rice and sauce with some form of meat, usually goat or beef. I can also get goat or beef to cook with, you can get chicken too but they only sell it to you live so I would have to kill it and clean it myself, and I am not ready for that yet. (give me a year :) The staple in the South is called fufu, and it is my favorite Ghanaian dish. It, like so much in this country, somehow defies explanation. But it is chewy and filling and made out of yams, plantains, and cassava in the South and just plain yams in the North. You eat a ball of it with either peanut soup or a stew they call light soup and meat, usually chicken, beef, or goat. Also when I am traveling I have had Kenke, which kind of reminds me of polenta, but it tastes more sour than that.

Even though everything is on Africa time here, it is possible to get fast food. It is either in the form of kebab (meat on a stick), which is not my favorite, or chicken with fried rice and ketchup and mayonnaise. Admittedly it sounds gross, but is actually really tasty. They have stands in the bigger towns where you can go and get your chicken and rice to go and the chicken is usually really good. They call eating out here "chopping" and places where you can get local food "chop bars" or "chop stands." You can also get rice and beans, called Waachi, Red Red, and fried or boiled plantains with a spicy sauce at chop stands everywhere.

So I have been at my site a couple of weeks now and have started to get a sense of what my work here will look like. The overall gist of it is that it is going to be a challenge. Not an overwhelming one, but a challenge none the less. Basically there are 3 parts to the project--the malnutrition center, the small orphanage, and a small outpatient clinic for PLWHAs (People Living with HIV/AIDS) which holds the monthly meetings for the PLWHAs association. The malnutrition center includes a dormitory for malnourished women and thier children and also feeds people in their homes and in the hospital. The whole project is called the Methodist Health Integrated Project and is affiliated with the Methodist Church in Ghana. My house is on the edge of the project. Since I live there my commute is nonexistent, which I love. We also do a lot of work at the hospital, going to the antenatal and child welfare clinics to identify and treat malnourished women. At first I was kind of disappointed that my work didn't have to do more with HIV/AIDS until I sat down with my boss Marjorie and found out that most of the malnourshment cases are caused by, or go hand and hand with, HIV. The connection is that when their income level goes down because of the disease, they don't have enough money for food and they get malnourished. Also when we had the monthly PLWHAs meeting I noticed that most of the women living at the malnutrition center are HIV +.

We also do home based care for our malnourished and HIV+ clients. So essentially what we do is support and care for PLWHAs and secondarily some malnutrition work. Every week I will be doing growth monitoring for the children at the malnutrition center. I will also be going into the hospital to identify new HIV and malnourished cases at the weekly clinics they hold. I will be doing some home visitation to meet with clients in the surrounding communities. The other big part of my job is going to be finding funding. We have a little funding now. The Methodist Church kicks some money in but they don't bring in enough contributions from the congregation to do much. We get food for the malnutrition center from Catholic Relief Services. Then the funding from the monthly meetings and transportation and travel expenses for our clients to receive antiretroviral therapy comes from an NGO called Action Aid. The health project takes clients to the Upper East region for antiretroviral therapy. They have to drive 5 hours to a town where they can get a CD4 count test and start on the drug if the disease has progressed far enough. The problem is we don't have enough funding to cover our current expenses.

So that is going to be my own personal challenge to myself, to help them find funding. There are a few other NGOs (nonprofits) that work in the Upper West so I am going to start there. There is a national office that funds HIV/AIDS activities, called Ghana AIDS commission. I will be putting together a big grant proposal for them in February. I would like to help them not only get into the black, but to expand their activities. I have not really done too much grant work myself, but have always been interested in it so this is going to be good experience for me. Well that is it in terms of my work, I just wanted to give all of you an idea of what I am actually doing for work over the next couple of years.

I hope all is well for everyone in their corner of the world. By the way, please have patience with me in emailing you back if you write to me. I only have a couple of hours on the internet a month, and it usually takes at least an hour to update my blog. So please be patient if it takes me awhile to get back to you. Anyway, I wish you all a happy and properous New Year.

Until the next time,
Liz