Leaving Ghana

I’m preparing to leave Ghana. The plane will take off in a few hours and I will be home with my family and friends this week. There will be a few more posts on the blog about the closing up of work on the Agriculture As A Business program we’ve run with the Ministry of [...]

Visit Sarah’s Blog Days….

Welcome!
From February 29th to March 2nd, I celebrated one year in Ghana by inviting everyone I could manage to reach through email and facebook to visit my blog. With 301 views over the three days, it was truly a great party! The aim is to share this experience with my social network (you) while generating [...]

The Details of a Monday Morning

 
 

Terimba sweeping the courtyard
I wake up around 6 am under a mosquito net. The cloud of white screens the room away. I stretch and avoid my laptop while rolling the netting up to hang out of the way. My stomach is still feeling full. The fullness is normal since I ate a heavy meal [...]

National Health Insurance Scheme

Charity, Mme Lardi (Second Wife) and Lauretia, her youngest daughter
Ghana has a national health insurance scheme and soon my hosts, of the Tikaha Family, are going to be registered members. My host father Patrick, as a civil servant, is entitled to a discounted rate with NHIS. A fact that he was not aware of until [...]

At home in Tongo

This photo show can hopefully convey that there are a bunch of great things going for me at home at the moment.

This is my home from afar at dusk. It’s the house under the tree with the tin roofing and the Baobab tree to its right. There is a thatch roof house in front that [...]

A snapshot for the holidays

 
 (this message was written for the EWB message board at www.myewb.ca as usual I chose to post it here as well for your interest!)
 
This Christmas snapshot is a gift for EWB… from the children in my family here in Tongo, the Upper East Region of Ghana. (I was really luck to be the EWB member [...]

Zanliergu Gardeners

 
The Gardeners surrounded by a healthy onion crop.
 
 
 

The first farmers I met in Ghana were a group of 9 men gardening about 2 acres of land during the dry season. In the shadow of a half completed dam, they produced two crops of onion. It was March 2007, during my first weeks in Bolgatanga. We [...]

A New Baby

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
It was around 2pm in the afternoon when the phone rang. It’s my very good friend Justa. Justa works as a Nurse’s Aid in the Tongo Health Clinic, and she’s calling me from work. She greets me and then blurts out – “Saraaaah, Charity is in labour! Here, I will pass her the phone!”
 
I [...]

Visits to the Field in Navrongo and Sandema

Martin, the acting M&E officer in the Bolgatanga office, teaches a young extension agent who is interested in becoming a technical officer how to take a bearing

Please accept the following pictures of my time in the field with the Regional Monitoring and Evaluation team as a replacement for the FULL post that I really owe [...]

A loss in the Office

Here are some pictures from a recent funeral. One of my colleagues in the Talensi-Nabdam District office, a Veterinary Technical Officer named Ben Sabill, died suddenly about a week ago. He leaves his wife and six children. I have mixed feelings about writing about this experience.
Beyond my sorrow for the loss of a talented, kind [...]