Life on the farm begins around 6am. The roosters are crowing, the men are up to head to the fields, and the women are up to make breakfast and begin their household chores. The kids go to school from 7:30 until 3.
After the men and children leave, the women usually take a trip to the market to get some daily goods and spend basically the rest of the day making food. A Ghanaian meal literally takes hours to make, so when they’re preparing for lunch AND dinner, it takes a good chunk of the day to accomplish. (Their meals don’t even consist of three or four courses, they have one main item that they make, like spaghetti, rice, yams, plantains or fufu and then have a sauce or soup to go with it – on a good day there will be chicken too.)
The casaba and plantains need to be peeled; any sauces need to be puréed, which they do by hand. Spices need to be grated, because all the spices they use, ginger, peppers and whatever else are ALL grown here, so you just buy the plant and prepare it yourself. Then, all soups or veggies are boiled outside on a charcoal bowl, with a charcoal pot set on top of the hot coals. You have to fan the coals with a plantain leaf fan to keep it hot enough. It all seems rather tedious work to one us lazy Americans – but they do it every day. It’s amazing! It’s good for us to learn how to live more simply.
Anyway - The men come home sometime after 4pmp and dinner is served between 5 and six. After that, it’s social hour! Visitors come knocking, friends come to chat, and until it’s dark everyone stays outside and enjoys the cooling of the day. It doesn’t take long though after dark to empty this place out, and even though there are still tons of people at the village market still, the Abu home goes to bed not long after 9. This leaves the four of us Americans burning the “midnight” (or 10 o’clock) oil, and by 11pm even we are asleep.
Now, this schedule is not really “our” schedule here – Emily and I are working on setting up our English classes at one of the local schools – we’ve spent quite a bit of time exploring – and Spencer and Joey have been very busy putting together their business classes curriculum together, and setting up their plans to take this village by storm with the micro-loans. So the consensus so far: Abomoso is a pretty great place! Here are some pictures of the farm!
Right off the tree coconut! It was wonderful!
The baby puppies when they were only 3 days old
I told you the goats could do the Irish jig :)
Loved this little chick following it's mother around.
Even the pineapples are babies right now
No comments:
Post a Comment