Kpsani Village

For the last week I was staying in Kpsani Village just outside of Yendi. Because things at my workplace in Saboba were not yet ready, I decided to get out in the field and do a village stay. The point of this village stay was to get a little experience with Ghanaian farmers and start to understand their livelihoods. I went to a Kunkomba village which was perfect because they form the majority of the population in Saboba.

The Kunkomba people are very welcoming. It is just in their culture. One example, is that for a visitor, all households must provide for them, not just the household they are staying in. How this affected me was that every time I visited a compound, I was provided a meal to eat. After 3 days of eating 8 meals a day, I explained to my translator that if all households needed to provide for me, then they could only do so for one meal a day.

After my first full day in the village, my body was aching all over. I had blisters on both hands from my first day of using a hoe to harvest yams, my feet were still burning from the bare foot soccer match I played, and my shoulders were aching after a long day of learning how to weave grass. That was only the first day. After that biking 30km a day became the norm because we were fetching water from the local dam 12km away.

And that was the pace of most of my days. Trying to engage in as many of their activities as possible in order to better understand how they live and why they do what they do. Having as many conversations as possible with people to find out what the constraints around their community’s development were, and what role the government was playing. Finding out what they needed and wanted in terms of government services and gaining a better perspective on farmer realities.