Three and a Half Day Program

Wednesday, June 7th, Day 34 - "Do you think you can finish by today?"
"I thought we were going to finish tomorrow?"
"We'll just have the closing ceremonies tomorrow"
"Okay I'll hurry through it then I guess."



   It's funny when Courage is here we seem to go from around 9am to 6pm Monday through Thursday and then finish at noon on Friday, long marathon sessions and usually I'm left stressing about how I'm even going to fill all the time. Without Courage here first it was proposed that because it took less time than usual to organize everyone on Monday we could wrap up Thursday. So that made sense there's usually about a three hour delay of "they're not even here yet" on Mondays so we could eliminate the three hour session on Friday sure, but I was visualizing we'd go till five or six on Thursday. But now Thursday is just that three hour session, so this has only been a three day program.

   Well I was able to cover all the material, only finishing half an hour over target time Wednesday. And it would have been on time if I didn't do the business unit that I'd kind of only added because I felt like I had more than enough time and needed more material, but by now it feels like part of everything.



   Anyway I'm not really complaining, it was less stressful then being unsure how I'd fill all the time, and I think I was able to adequately impart all the necessary knowledge.
   Also as a result of this I guess we'll have a 3.5 day weekend. Which I kind of feel like maybe I OUGHT to do something really adventurous with it. Especially since for example that guy W T Lanier was really recommending I spend three days at Mole National Park which is not far from here. But I kind of feel like just going on a day trip so I can take my colleagues along. Spending three days and several hundred dollars to go there by myself just isn't feeling very appealing to me. I don't know, not to be like "shrug" about safari but I've been on safari before, I'm sure it's lovely but I'd rather go with friends than alone.
   So we'll see what ends up happening but I might just spend the time "relaxing" here in Tamale. Which often isn't terribly fun as there's often daytime power outages and hotels, especially this one as we've seen already, don't often feel motivated to run their generators during the day, assuming their guests are out doing something -- so if you're just here during the day you find yourself just sweltering with no AC and nothing to do but try to read a book.



   "Are we here to take pictures or are we here to do beekeeping o?"
   Anyway we did have a field visit this afternoon. It wasn't nearly as far at the day before. We took the big red bus to an outlying village not far out of Tamale. Parked the bus and we were all trudging along the trail to the outskirts of the village. And there's this native mint that grows naturally beside the trails and when a lot of us are walking it gets trod upon and makes a nice earthy minty smell.
   But as we were walking suddenly someone from the village was calling for us to stop. It turns out a representative from the village chief had interdicted us because no one had told the chief what was going on, so there was a few minutes delay while our leaders discussed with this representative, and then on the way out they went to see the chief.
   Village chiefs are obviously a big part of culture and tradition here, but I get the sense that a lot of more progressive Ghanaians are quietly a bit eyeroll about their place in society. Imagine the person who had lived in your subdivision the longest made everyone's business their business and you had to respectfully check in with them for whatever you wanted to do. Sometimes they conduct themselves with dignity and gravitas, but as with one chief we met with last year he seemed kind of barely there mentally.



   Dr Courage returned here last night so I'll be kind of curious if he tightens the gears on things immediately.

Chief of Dreams

Thursday, July 8th, Day 35 - Today we just wrapped up this training session, including maybe an hour of discussing yesterday's field visit and answering any other questions.

   Then we went to lunch, and I wish I had looked at the time when we got there but I didn't, but it was more than an hour before our food came out, by which point both Williams and I had fallen asleep at the table.

   Speaking of falling asleep, because it is often very warm people do occasionally nod off during training. The amusing countermeasures undertaken for this are (1) Williams who often is going around taking pictures anyway, jokingly threatens every group that he'll take photos of them sleeping and we'll put them in a slide show the last day; (2) If it happens while Courage is talking he likes to go address the formerly-sleeping person directly, in a jovial manner inquiring if they got enough sleep the night before and incorporating their answers into ongoing running jokes; (3) if my translators notice someone sleeping they like to ask everyone to applaud until the sleepers wake up, this is amusingly indirect, the people don't direct the applause at the sleepers, so they may or may not realize they are the cause; and (4) a more recent joke was that at the end we'll vote from among those who had fallen asleep during session to elect one as the Chief of Dreams.

   Dr Courage indeed came back last night. Today I learned from him that we're going tomorrow to a distant community some of the trainees came from to see a potential pilot apiary site (I suspected there was a reason we'd cleared the Friday schedule!) and then tomorrow (Saturday) we'll all go to Mole National Park

I didn't have much occasion to take any pictures today other than the usual end-of-session photos with participants. Again I will exclaim about how I can't believe people are so bad at keeping a phone even a semblance of straight. Sometimes it's fixable:


And sometimes it's not:

Maybe I should get one of those AI photo programs though, as I'd imagine AI could easily replicate the brick patterns in the lower corners and fill in clouds in the upper corners to fix a picture like this.