Day 11: Materials

Sitting around the breakfast table this morning over tea and lemongrass-milk we certainly didn't expect the exhausting day that followed. What a day, “gee-mah-nee” as Matt would say.

First thing, we drove to Bolga to visit the bank and source a few items. These few items turned into a truck filled with the entire solar array support structure and 45 lengths of PVC pipe. The truck driver was a nice man, that patiently tried to translate the labels on the broken cassette tapes from the passenger side door, that I obnoxiously began reading aloud. He also explained to Matt and I how rice and tomatoes were grown in the region between Bolga and Sirigu. The water comes from a large reservoir nearby, and they sow seeds in a small area and transplant them into the fields later.

Kate, Max, and Moses remained in Bolga to find some extra supplies as Matt and I went to pick up the support structure. We went to the welding yard with Henry, our technician, to get it. They were still working on it when we arrived, so we watched fascinated at the resourceful welding techniques used to make the remaining holes in the frame. What a place! A fury of metal, heat, and wires.

Once we arrived in Yua, the workers balanced the holes in the ground to exactly match the dimensions of this large beastly metal frame. We supported it to stand up through the night, but could not cast the concrete footings as we had planned, as there just wasn't enough sunlight. This was slightly disappointing since we needed the time for the concrete to cure enough before much more construction could continue. So we agreed to pour the concrete the following morning and install the solar panels on Saturday.

What was most interesting, was that in the Yua market near where our work was being done a large bus was being filled with goats, pigs, chicken, and guinea fowl to be brought to Kumasi that night. How they fit so many goats in such a small space on the roof of this vehicle, within it, and underneath in the cargo, is beyond me. It was most definitely an acquired art, a long and careful process. How loud it was too, the goats scream like children, and the squealing of pigs was deafening as they were dragged across the ground and into several pairs of hands that would lift them up and onto the top of the bus. A village girl who is around 18, Edna, sat with me as we watched all this go down, the English she learned in school wasn't enough to sustain a good conversation and my Fra Fra is far from useable but talking with her was nice all the same. Our driver, Phillip, also came over and told me that he was going to drive the bus all the way to Kumasi and back because the current driver was sick. He told me he was going to do this so that he could have enough money to marry Edna. I believed him, and really wish the language barrier didn't make jokes so difficult to catch on to.

Anna