June 9
Today, Team 3 ended their morning in the village with the grand opening of the Community Water Solutions water treatment center in the Kpalguni Village. Being a relatively small village with a focus on farming yams, most of the children arrived promptly and proudly to fill their family’s blue buckets. The team left with an undeniable feeling of accomplishment, and they are excited for the next few days of monitoring the village.
But one day earlier….
June 8
5:00 am: The team awoke only to find gloomy clouds looming over Tamale. The team was weary about departing, but Team 5 along with Sani and the translators decided we should give the drive a shot. Due to “Ghanian time”, the van did not depart Gilbt until 6:30 am. Midway through the two-hour drive to both villages, the rain began.
7:45 am: A large pond of water in the middle of the bumpy dirt road approached the van, and, in seconds, the van halts to a complete stop. The teams found themselves stranded in the middle of the Ghanian forests without cell phone service. Villagers begin to watch as the teams wander around looking for rocks (which they are unsure as to why they need them). After about thirty minutes, the teams begin to push the van out of the pond. It doesn’t seem promising; however, after the spectators joined the effort, the van finally emerged. The sun’s rays appeared from behind the fading clouds.
9:30 am: Team 3 decides the make the walk to their village. When they arrive for a brief visit to teach the women how to treat the clear water and distribute clean water buckets, the village is not prepared. Handing out the buckets was a stressful event. All of the villagers gathered into a tight circle and began to talk very loudly over the team. While the frantic, loud gathering was clearly caused by the excitement of the opening of the center, it did not make the day any better. The team was lead to more disappointment when it was apparent that turbidity remained in the water. Clear water wound not enter the polytank that day.
12:30 pm: Team 5 began to approach the center after hours of waiting at the van only to find that Team 3 was finally wrapping up their work in the village. Both teams walked back through the village down the bumpy, muddy road to the van. Even though the afternoon just began, both teams were exhausted and bummed about the series of events of the day.
Luckily, all team members found humor of all of the parts of the day, and grew closer with the hope that both teams would make it to their villages the following morning.
-Will, Meaghan, Abby and Alyssa
We’re taking a brief time-out from our regularly scheduled programming to make a very exciting announcement:
Kathryn arrived in Tamale on Monday and we are SO happy to have her here! For the next week and half Kathryn and I will be working together to get her all prepped and ready to run the show once I leave in mid-June. I know she is going to do an awesome job! Stay tuned for her first post as Ghana Country Director.
Hey there from the Salaminga Snails! You might be wondering how we got our name. Salaninga is the local word for “foreigner/white person” and then snails because we make everyone look so slow! Our trip to Ghana has been great so far, we have been working in the village Tacpuli and loving every minute of it. This past week we have been working on setting up our treatment center and preparing it for our opening day on Wednesday. We bought our Polytank, blue buckets, and all other necessary supplies, fitted them on our beautifully crafted Polytank stand and just started the first treatment process today.
We spent the morning training the two women who would be running the center, Mariama and Laseechey (forgive the butchering of the spelling) who are awesome. They had already used alum in their water before, so the first half of the training was super easy. Afterwards we began distributing buckets to individual households in the hottest part of the day under the blazing African sun. Needless to say every member of our group came out of the field with some pretty gnarly sun burns. We managed to distribute 31 buckets, nearly half of our 68 household village, and look forward to an early morning distributing the buckets tomorrow (a 6:00am wake up is totally worth it to beat the heat). We’re also excited to keep working with Laseechey and Mariama! Tomorrow we will show them how to take the alum-ized (new word?) water and treat it with chlorine.
We also should mention that we have the best translator in CWS history, Peter Biyam. Peter also happens to have the greatest sheep in all of history, “Don’t Forget,” which we purchased from our very own Tacpuli as a way of thanking him. He promises to take very good care of her and we like to know that he will not forget us with Don’t Forget!
Overall the Salaminga Snails are having a great time in Ghana! We’re loving our village, loving our translator, loving our team, and are super excited for our opening day on Wednesday!
-Christine, Annie, Ben, and Nate
Team 7-also known as the Fufu Fighters- has been busy beginning the implementation process of their water center; however, we had an interesting start to our process.
We began our implementation process in one village, but ended up switching to a different village to actually implement in. Unlike the other teams, we had two chief meeting experiences that were completely different from each other. The first one was in our first village and it was very informal with just the chief and the chairman. The second one was in our new village and it was very traditional with the chief, chairman, elders, and any men who happened to wander into the chief’s meeting hut at the time of our meeting. By witnessing these two meetings in two different villages, we got to see how different some governmental systems are within any village in Ghana.
Our first village actually had a rain water collection tank set up by another NGO and the chief mentioned in our meeting that it was very difficult to find someone to run that operation in the village. He told us his people were stubborn and that they wouldn’t want to put in the work at our center to have clean water when they already had a rainwater collection tank. When we asked about the use of the rain tank, the chairman told us they only use it during the rainy season, which leaves them with the dugout water during the dry season. This meant that a CWS water center would still be very helpful in this village.
We left the first day, intending to come back the next day to get a decision from the chief. When we came back the next day, there happened to be a funeral going on, so we were unable to talk to the chief; however, we did talk to the chairman and he told us that the chief was not very supportive of our system simply because he didn’t think his people would take to it well. The chairman was telling us the opposite in his opinion. He said he talked to some people in the village and they were all onboard…which meant we had a slight problem. It seemed the village really wanted us to be there, but the chief didn’t. Also, the chief was refusing to let us talk to his people, so we had only communicated with himself and the chairman at this point.
Our experience in this village was SO different from what all the other teams were going through. They had enthusiastic chiefs and community meetings…so it seemed our process wasn’t going as planned, which worried me. When we reported our concerns back to Kate, she assured us that it would be possible to implement in a village with a difficult chief, but we’d need to work really hard and overcome many roadblocks along the way.
After a team meeting and a thorough evaluation of the situation, we decided that our water center would probably be more successful, at least at this time, in a different village. We figured since rainy season is just beginning, it would be hard to compete with the rainwater tank anyway. It seemed to make more sense to implement this village in the dry season when they are running out of rainwater. So, CWS is going to keep this village on their list of villages to visit later when: 1. It’s dry season and 2. The chief’s more supportive. Hannah went back to that village and told the chairman our decision, as well as encouraged him to try to get the chief onboard for when CWS does come back.
So, after this slight set back, the Fufu Fighters worked hard to make up for lost time. We ended up having a great chief meeting at our new village-with a chief who is very, very enthusiastic about the project-as well as a meeting with the community about the center. In fact, the chief said something that basically embodies everything CWS stands for. He said, “Clean water is life. And every person deserves life. Since you are bringing clean water, you are also bringing life to this village.”
We’ve been working hard, and getting dirty, for the past two days building our polytank stand. Our new village is really excited for the center and we feel very welcomed by everyone. I think I can speak for everyone on my team when I say that we had an unusual beginning, but ended up catching up and making a great decision in terms of switching villages. The community support as well as the chief’s support is very important in order to make a CWS water center successful. We feel as if we have the greatest support in this new village-hopefully, in time, the other chief will be influenced to support a center for his people as well.
-Christina, Cassie, Xi and Heather
So our team, Team Pineapple Express, started off our Tamale adventure really strong, winning the scavenger hunt with a prize of pride, but hey, we also found Barack Obama underwear, which is a prize in itself. Our team is Stephanie, David, Matthew and Abena and we all come from different backgrounds and came to Ghana for different reasons, making our team a really interesting and dynamic grouping!
Everything has been really great so far. After visiting two different villages that already had worked with CWS, we were really excited to finally visit our own village, Jabrang (which we are still working on pronouncing). Although its one of the farther villages, we’re really excited to be paired with this village, which has about 33 households and lots of enthusiastic members and adorable kids! Our chief meeting went really well; he was really excited to have us and all the elders and other present members could not wait to get working and get the project off the ground. The dugout water is really dirty and full of algae and bacteria. We’re really happy that we can assist this village clean up their water.
After our initial meeting with the chief, who by the way is awesome, we held a village-wide meeting the next day. With the help of our trusty translator, Wahab, we explained to men, women and children who we are, what CWS does, and what our partnership would look like and how we are able to help them. We explained in detail the implementation process and how the water business operates. We also brought with us water samples, both clean and dirty, to help all the villagers visualize what we were talking about. It is an understatement to say that they were all on board, excited, and extremely grateful. They gave us a round of applause in the end and wanted us to start immediately! We’re so happy to have a village that is so thrilled. We know we can really make a difference in Jabrang!
Yesterday we started the building process: manual labor day one! Fortunately for us, Wahab is a great mason and takes the polytank stand construction very seriously! He requested a lot of pictures to be taken, mostly solo shots! But he really did a great job! We had a crowd of about 25 people, men and children mostly, watching the stand being built and just coming around to show their support and see if we needed any help. It was great to see such a good turnout from the community. The kids are also finally warming up to us! Can’t wait to play!
-Stephanie, David, Matthew and Abena
Last night, CWS hosted our first-ever Casino Night for the Summer Fellows. Normally I prefer to use the online casino at UFABET, but I kept an open mind. We were a little worried that it would feel like summer camp or an all night-grad. party gone wrong, but it was so much fun! It was an intriguing casino and they had some games I hadn’t even seen at https://www.bcasinoreview.com/. Nonetheless, it was a really fun experience that I would happily do again. Everyone got into all of the games and we all had such a great time! If you enjoy casino games, take a look at casino.com bonus.
Tomorrow we are going to start our “voices from the field” series where the fellowship teams write about their experiences in the field. First up, Team 5 – Stephanie, Abena, David, and Matthew H. Stay tuned!
Another day, another guest blogger! Here’s what Fellowship Leader Hannah Stonebraker has to say about Day 4 of the Summer Fellowship Program:
And they’re off!! As of yesterday all seven teams are out in their villages!
In the morning we heard presentations from two UNICEF officers, highlighting their Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programs as well as their Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) initiative. The presentations sparked everyone’s interest, and resulted in a fascinating question and answer session as we all expanded our knowledge on the sanitation situation in the rural villages.
After a thoroughly Ghanaian lunch of groundnut soup and rice balls, the fellows and respective translators all loaded into vehicles and headed to the field to check out their villages for the first time:
All teams returned pumped for the progress in their projects, as they all get one step closer to providing more people with direly needed clean water!
Today we are lucky to have another guest blogger: fellowship Leader Hannah Hill! Here’s what Hannah had to say about Day 3 of the Fellowship Program:
Yesterday’s agenda was so action packed and so full of excitement that I have not been able to write about everything we did until just now. The fellows awoke with the roosters for their earliest morning yet – a 5:30 am breakfast for a 6 am start. Each team went to monitor water sales at a different CWS village. You can really see the leadership, initiative and creativity that the 28 Summer Fellows have as they go beyond monitoring to fix leaky buckets, bandage wounds, and quickly problem solve all obstacles that arise.
After a rejuvenating lunch of chicken and rice – a Ghana favorite – the teams practiced for their chief meetings and rotated through the lab, testing the dugout and treatment center water they collected from their village that morning.
You can really see how the fellows are getting more comfortable with each other and around Tamale as they spend their free time partaking in competitive games of Bananagrams or exploring the Cultural Center and the town market.
After a long day’s work, the group went out for a celebratory dinner at Swad, a CWS favorite. Whether eating the American pizza they craved, the Indian restaurant’s signature Tikki Masala, or a more traditional tilapia and banku, everyone had a wonderful time. My favorite part of today has been that no matter who I’m talking to, or what I’m talking about, every conversation ends with, “And I’m so excited to see my village for the first time tomorrow!” As I write this blog now, the fellows are headed to the field to see their villages. I cannot wait to hear their stories when they return!
– Hannah H.
ONLY 15 DAYS LEFT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE EARLY BIRD TICKETS
The CWS Benefit is just around the corner and we could not be more excited!
Cocktails. Live Music. Dancing. Auction. Awards.
Why wouldn’t you be there?
**Discount codes available for Fellowship Alumni & Students**
Today we have a guest post from Fellowship Leader Annie McBride! Here’s what Annie had to say about the second day of the Summer Fellowship Program:
Today all seven teams got one step closer to bringing clean water to seven new villages around Tamale! We started the day with a brief icebreaker activity that took a little longer than expected.
The first group quickly unwinded limbs,
While the second group seemed to struggle a bit…
Feeling a little closer to each other and I think a little more wary of partaking in future icebreaker activities, we continued on with orientation. Each group learned how to roll alum balls and the proper swirling technique from their translators.
And then roll played to practice household visits…
After lunch, each team headed out to visit past CWS villages to practice household monitoring and to get a better understanding of the water treatment center they will soon be implementing in their own villages.
All in all, it seemed that every team had a great initial experience in the villages and are looking forward to beginning their own projects. We are very excited to see each of their projects develop over the next three weeks!
-Annie