Before the Loan

These are some pictures taken of some of the loan recipients and their equipment BEFORE using the loan to get new stuff.

These speakers are President Twum's old speakers. I can't even believe that sound came out of these things.

This is Daniel's corn mill. This thing looks pretty ancient and I guess it's quite the gas guzzler too. It puts out quite a bit of exhaust! Luckily his oil press is not gas powered!


This is Dompreh's pharmacy. He has just gone and bought some of the new medications with his loan money. The shelves are the before pictures and the stuff on the ground is some of the new drugs he's been able to pick up. YAY!





Cute picture of Spencer holding Elvis. Although he looks quite concerned about the tall white man holding him, at least he's not crying!

Yay For Visitors!

A day of visitors!

On Thursday the house was more like a revolving door of visitors – it was so much fun! There was an American guy from Draper here to talk to Stephen about a farm he is supervising for him, Stephen’s brother, Doctor Kessee (the man who brought the church from England to Ghana and introduced Stephen to it) and his sons. Those were the first of the morning. None of them even stayed for lunch!

The next of the visitors were Daniel (the head master at Presby/loan recipient) and Christie (the teacher of our first Presby class). They came to us with presents!

Last Sunday, Daniel stopped the guys at church and told him that we all needed to go to the school the next morning to get our “measurements” taken. Joey was convinced it was for our coffins/burial clothes – but it wasn’t! They took Emily and I to a seamstress and the guys to a tailor and had dresses made for us and shirts made for the guys to thank us for the teaching and help we’ve given them here.

In only 3 days they were at our door and ready to present us with the goods! I couldn’t believe they were all done so fast – but I was positively thrilled!



I wanted to try the dress on right then and Christie wanted to see us all in them.
I love it!!!

Aren’t the shirts pretty awesome too?


Here’s Emily and Joey in their African garb.

All of us together with Christie and Daniel! What wonderful people!

Only about 5 minutes after Daniel and Christie left, Stephen Abu Jr., his wife, Sonya, their 2 kids, Ria and Koby, Brother David McKonkie (who surprisingly enough knows my grandma and grandpa Smoot AND Spencer’s dad. Pretty sweet!) and then 3 other farmer men who for all I know were just along for the ride.

Everyone was really excited to be there.

It was quite the full house and again, we had a feast! Sonya and Jr. even brought cake and ice cream and a little present for Stephen Sr.’s birthday. Aren’t these shirts adorable!? I am totally going to make shirts like these for my parents with our kids’ faces on them. It’ll be the BEST!


We had so much fun playing with Ria and Koby too! They were so excited to get out of the car and get right into the dirt. This place is a child’s heaven – they have all the room in the world to play.


Even Yaw loved watching the kids play

Sadly enough, even this visit didn’t last much longer than an hour before they said their goodbyes.

What a good daddy!

Everyone was in and out of this house before 3:00pm and it was eerily quiet again. But what a good day! It was fun to see some new faces and meet so many new people.

Some of Our Favorite People!

On Sunday we took a picture after church and I just love it! This picture has so many of the wonderful people we spend out days with and I never want to forget them!

From left to right
Top: Sister Margaret Abu, Brother Stephen Abu, Stephanie (one of the 2 World Joy teachers who were here this last month doing some training workshops), Emily Stocking, Joey Stocking, Susana
Bottom: Gloria, Me, Christian (Susana's son), and Spencer

I love all these people so much and I am so grateful for all the time we have had to get to know them and spend time with them! What a wonderful experience we've had here! We have learned so much from each one of them and hopefully become better people because of it.

Final Loans!

Over the course of the last couple days Spencer and Joey have completely finished giving out the rest of their business loans. YAY! They were able to fund 4 more projects on top of the 3 they have already done.

The first is Dompreh. He owns a Pharmacy which is very nicely located in a place where the surrounding villagers don’t have to walk all the way to the center of the town to get their required medications. His problem though, is that many times each week people come to his pharmacy looking for drugs that he is unable to buy. He requested the loan money so that he would have the opportunity to expand his inventory and provide the villagers with more of the medications they will need.

Spencer and Joey really liked this project because it is really important to get the medications you need when you are sick and many of the villagers have had to travel to some of the surrounding, larger villages to get what they need. It will be wonderful for them to not have to travel in order to get what they need.




Faustina came next.
She is a wonderful, hard working lady, who has worked many years with Stephen on his farms. She hasn’t had much opportunity to be anything but hired labor and with the opportunity to receive a loan she plans to buy tomatoes and onions to sell to the people she lives around. Apparently onions and tomatoes have a much larger demand than the current sellers can supply, so Faustina has seen this and is very confident that she will be able to make the money she needs from doing this.

Spencer especially likes being able to fund her small business because he feels like this is the kind of person he always envisioned helping when he learned about coming here. She is someone who really has no other means of improving her situation, but she is so smart and very driven – so with this small boost (only about $160) she will be able to begin improving her life.

She has it all planned out. Her net income is going to start out VERY minimal – but each little bit she makes, she plans on re-investing half of it into expanding her supply of onions and tomatoes until eventually she will be making enough that she will be able to expand to other types of vegetables like plantains or casabas. If only everyone who has set up businesses had a mindset like hers – there seems to be so many cash-flow problems in the businesses, but if they turned around and re-invested half of their net income into their businesses I believe things here would be MUCH different.

Anyway, here are some pictures of her receiving the loan! We are so excited for her to get started!





The next loan recipient was Sampson. He and his wife have a sort of business making and selling a local food favorite called kenkey. It’s a type of corn that has been ground, fermented, boiled, mashed into balls and then wrapped into plantain leaves. According to everyone around, Sampson is the BEST kenkey maker in all of Abomosu. They have a massive pot in which they cook all of the corn, and they just can’t make it fast enough for all the people who want it. I personally think kenkey is one of the grossest things I’ve ever eaten – but hey, to each his own.

Anyway, Sampson asked to receive a loan because apparently in the off-season, when corn is not grown so readily, the price of corn doubles or triples. This significantly reduces their ability to earn money off what they sell when they make the kenkey, and if they tried to charge more no one would buy it. So, in order to compensate for the higher price of corn, Sampson would like to purchase many bags of corn in advance, while the price is still low, so that they can continue to make a reasonable profit. By getting a loan this year, hopefully he will be able to make enough next year that he can do the same thing again – but buy the corn with what he was able to save.




Last, but definitely not least is the branch president of the LDS Church here. I honestly don’t know his first name because I’ve always just called him President Twum – so that’s how you’re all going to know him also :)

President Twum owns and runs a DJ business. It’s a very big thing here to hire a DJ for a funeral, engagement or wedding, and President’s equipment has been getting quite old and worn. He has already saved up a good portion of what he needs to buy new equipment, so with just a little bit of help President will now be able to buy himself new speakers and system to run his business.





Yay for all these wonderful people! I am so happy for all of them and I’m so proud of Spencer and Joey for all the hard work they have done here. They had such a hard time deciding who and where the money should go. They decided once and had to change about 10 times after that. It’s been a crazy process, but so good for everyone involved. Even all the people who got turned down for a loan this time around have benefitted from the time Spencer and Joey have spent working with them. Hopefully they will all be able to take what they have learned and apply it so that they can all now start to help themselves better their situations.

Stephen’s Birthday Celebration

Yesterday was Stephen’s birthday! This amazing man is 67 years old now.
Here he is with Nana in the middle (the queen mother of this side of Abomosu and very close family friend) and his wife, Margaret, on the far right

A complete feast was prepared in his honor, including fried rice, fried noodles, fried chicken, watermelon (thank heavens that wasn’t fried also), boiled eggs, the sugar cane we got from the farm earlier that morning, and the snickerdoodles that Emily and I made as our little treat to him. (Those have been his favorite treat so far that we’ve made)

Many people came over to celebrate!

Including Elder and Sister Terry, who had quite a busy schedule, but still made time to come by for dinner. What a great couple!


Quick lesson on the consuming of sugar cane as a treat.
This little guy here is a piece of sugar cane.

Sugar cane is quite the interesting treat. I never would have imagined that people would just chew on it raw – I thought for sure it was something like cocoa beans and basically worthless until the sugar (or cocoa for the cocoa beans) was extracted. It has the consistency of a really soft wood, but tastes very sweet! When you bite into it you get a complete mouthful of sugary goodness… but beware, ONLY SWALLOW THE JUICE! You will get all sorts of splinters down your throat if you swallow the rest of it – not fun! You just chew on it until all the juice is out and then you spit. I find it all so fascinating! Good times!

Our Ghanaian Safari!

When most people think of Africa they think of the savannas and large, roaming, wild animals ever where – Ghana’s not really like that. In fact, the last time a lion was seen on the only real game reserve Ghana has, the next day it was killed by a poacher. Pretty cool huh? We honestly haven’t seen much wildlife, other than lizards and squirrels, at all.

Stephen is a farmer, a very prosperous one compared to others in the village, and he is very proud of his farms and the vegetables and fruits he grows. All together, he has 7 farms with a total of WELL over 100 acres of land.
Knowing this, and knowing that Stephen spends most of his time going from one farm to another, making sure his workers are doing the work they’re supposed to, we wanted to take an adventure to see and experience life on the farm.

This is the Ghanaian safari as we know it here, and we are quite satisfied with the experience. Funny fact – the first time Stephen saw a giraffe was in the Hogle Zoo… If the Ghanaian we’re living with hasn’t seen that kind of wildlife, why should we? (It doesn’t even exist here)

In order to get to a from the farms before Spencer and Joey needed to go to Asunafo this afternoon, we woke up at 5:30 am and headed to the farms at 6:00.
Emily, Joey, Spencer, Gloria and I all piled into the Rhino with Stephen. It was quite snug there in the back (not that I’d know because I was told I was to sit in the front, but it sure looked tight back there).

And the safari began! We passed right through town and headed past the farthest edge of the village. It was really neat to see the true outskirts of an African village. These women had set up shop under these straw huts.

We then followed a trail through farm after farm and had quite an enjoyable time getting through all the puddles and bumps along the way.

We really felt like we were roughing it here. ;) Once the trail ended, Stephen just kept on going through the brush, bush-whacking his way through with the Rhino.

Hold on tight guys! It’s gonna be a rough ride!

Once there wasn’t enough room to bush-whack with the Rhino we got out and bush-whacked as we walked.

Okay, so Stephen was really the only one doing any whacking – he was the only one with a machete.

But we had fun anyway.

We walked… and walked… and walked… (anyone feel like their singing that pioneer song from primary? “The pioneer children sang as they walked, and walked, and walked, and walked”… anyway…) Just when I thought we were in the middle of nowhere and that we were completely out of reach of any civilization the phone rings. That’s right, both Gloria AND Stephen received phone calls! I couldn’t believe it! Pretty sweet range of cell phone service!

Can you see them both on the phone?

We got to be good friends with the bushes and the trees and they seemed to be rather fond of us too.

Along our walk we happened upon this wall of dirt. It honestly looked like someone had just piled mud up to make a wall. It’s not a wall though! It’s a fallen tree – we’re looking at the roots. I found it so fascinating that I made Spencer stand by it so I could document the evidence.

We also learned much about the farms and how people keep track of whose land is whose. Instead of using fences to mark their boundary lines, they have boundary trees. So if you want to make sure people know where your land starts, you plant this tree and your territory is marked.

At last, we made it to Stephen’s first farm!

You could almost instantly tell a difference in the quality of farm land when you walked onto his property. He makes sure his farms are well taken care of and it pays off. In the next couple years, Stephen will be the largest producer of cocoa beans in the whole area.

When the family’s farm land was divided up among all the brothers and sisters of Stephen’s family (there were 12 of them, but only 11 living), he said his brothers all took the very best, most fertile parts of the land – so when Stephen was left with the property that included the house that they all grew up in, he told them that he didn’t want them trying to come in and take the house away.
He has since left the house and everything EXACTLY as his parents left it. He has wanted to preserve the memories they had there and also help to remind him where he really came from.
Here is the house.

This is where they all slept – the house only goes out a few more feet from the bed here. It’s incredibly small and almost impossible to imagine so many children growing up there with their parents.

When Stephen was young and lived out here, he said that they would arise at 5am every morning and walk with their father (barefoot) all the way to the village so they could attend school. The kids who lived in the village would make fun of them for not wearing shoes and for living out in the bush. They called them “villagers”, which is quite derogatory here, but Stephen just laughs about it now because all those people that laughed at him then are now envious of the possessions and life that he now leads. Him and his brothers and sisters have accomplished so much, and they are proud of where their lives began. It is really incredible and very humbling to witness.


After walking through this property we were off again to head to Stephen's "far away farm". The farm is about 8 miles from his home in Abomosu and is the farthest away of all his farms.
So we walked... and walked... like little pioneer children again... and just when I thought there was no sign of civilization ever to be found - except for the ants crawling up the legs of my pants and biting me - THIS jumped out at me! No lie - I about had a heart attack!

I know it's just a goat, and a little baby goat at that, but when you're searching your pant leg for the little tiny creatures like ants and then have something jump right out in front of your face, pretty sure I wouldn't have been the only one to jump and scream like I did. The others had a good laugh at it at least :)

It was then that we realized why there would be a goat there in the first place. We had made it to the far away farm!!!
Because most of the workers have to walk from Abomosu to get to this farm, Stephen has set up and built a place for them to stay while working there. It's a great little place out in the middle of the bush.

He's even built himself a little room of his own that only he is allowed to stay in when he comes for an extended, overnight visit.

We had fun going around this farm. It is over 60 acres of land! I can't believe it! Stephen showed us the first well that he had dug there. This one has since caved in and he is now waiting for the dry season to come around so he can install this pump into the new well he has dug.

We also made many friends.
Joey caught this little chick. Isn't he cute? (referring to the chick)

The grasshopper just loved Stephen's hat. We told Stephen that he just wanted to be his friend and his reply was, "NO, You cannot be my friend!" as he took off his hat and whacked it with his machete, about slicing his hat in half.

Stephen then decided that we needed to take a venture through the "real" forest. And I thought we were bush-whacking through the farms. Nope! Out came the machete and he literally cut us a path through the forest.

It was so fun!

Here's Spencer and I. I couldn't believe how dense the forest was. So many trees and vines! I loved it!

Spencer especially had to duck in many of the areas.

But we made it through! And when we came out and headed back to the main part of the farm, Spencer picked me this pretty little flower! What a sweetheart! I love him!

Stephen also decided we needed a little treat - so he cut us one of the sugarcane stalks that he's placed randomly throughout the farm to catch the grass cutters (gross rodent things that slightly resemble extremely large rats).
Gloria had a fun time with it!

And just couldn't wait until we got home to eat it.

So 2 farms down and 5 more to go... we headed back to the Rhino before reaching the next ones.
After the 3rd farm I was quite exhausted and grateful to be back in the Rhino. When everyone got out to go to the 4th farm I decided that I would be the one to stay and drive the Rhino up the road to meet everyone when they were done with the walk-through.

I felt so powerful behind the wheel!

The fifth farm was the citrus farm. All the oranges you could ever want or ask for! Now, most of the oranges will probably not be completely ripe for another month, but there were these really cool hybrid oranges that have finished! They aren't orange though. They are green! And if they turn orange then they have become TOO ripe! Crazy huh? It was kinda weird to eat a green orange, but it was delicious!

And then back into the Rhino we climbed!

It was about 11:30 by this time and the guys needed to get back, so we skipped the last 2 farms and headed on home. I was tired and exhausted, but so grateful that we got to spend that time having Stephen show us around! What a great man!