Walking to a local church service on Palm Sunday. Mrs. Johnson is on the left, our in-country guide from Project Okurase, Powerful, is on the right, and Powerful's son is holding our hands in between.
Five students from our group decided to join the MA leaders at the church service. The others stayed back at Nkabom House and took some sabbath rest time after some busy days of working on our projects in the extreme heat. We were invited up to the front of the service to dance during the praise and worship time. It was really memorable and a powerful time of praise!
Holding Powerful's son while up in front of the service as the MA group members were introduced to the congregation. He was really sleepy at that mid-morning time during church.
The church service was amazing, and I'm so thankful to have had that very meaningful opportunity. The congregation was really praising God with everything they had, and you could tell there was a beautiful sense of community, strength, and peace in that church - it was extremely touching. Towards the end of our time at the church, the pastors called us up and prayed for our group - it was very moving and a wonderful feeling of solidarity with them through our mutual faith in God. Usually church services in Ghana can run up to four hours long, but our group stayed for just over an hour on Palm Sunday.
One of the pastors gave the MA leaders a Bible to follow along with the scripture readings during the service. I thought it was interesting that on the inside cover of the Bible was a Ghanaian flag on one side, and on the other side of the page a letter from the First Lady of Ghana, the President's wife. It was saying how she and her husband love God's word and are committed to its practices. She hopes that the reader will enjoy reading the Bible and grow closer to God through the scriptures. She ends the letter by saying, "God bless our homeland Ghana as we commit ourselves to the principles and standards of God's Word, the Bible."
From what I have read about Ghana, religion is often an important part in various government affairs on an informal level. This was interesting for me to think about as an American knowing the age old debate on what exactly Thomas Jefferson meant so long ago when he spoke about the separation of church and state in America.
Back to Nkabom House after church to participate in a batik workshop led by local batik artists. Batik is a dying technique applied to white cloth where you use dots or lines to trace around a stenciled shape with wax. Where the wax is applied, that area is then resistant to any dye, so it stays white/outlined to your original design shapes. We started off with white t-shirts provided by our guests - it was an all-day process, but the outcome and final product was amazing to see at the end of the day. You'll get to see the whole process in this post, from start to finish.
After applying the wax around the stenciled objects, then we used sponge brushes to paint the designs that we each chose for our shirts and give them some color. The dye is an interesting process because the color you paint onto your shirt is much darker than the final color that it becomes after the oxidation process takes place while it sits and dries. A bit of science involved here!
Everyone seemed to really enjoy working on their shirts. The batik artists were taking their work very seriously, so it was hard not to have their enthusiasm and dedication to their craft rub off on us too. They mentioned that they had been doing batiking work for years because they loved it, and they would rather do something that they loved and enjoyed than be doing work that they didn't enjoy. Food for thought...!
The batik artists that helped us create the shirts explained that the patterns are traditionally used as a form of symbolic expression and even communication. Some in our group chose designs for their shirts based on meaning and symbolism, others chose their design just based on what they liked or how they wanted to remember our Ghana trip.
Here is a picture of some of the shirts oxidizing and drying in the sun from the first round of wax and dye. We were also able to add other designs in wax (from sponge stencils) around the shirt. Then later on, when we go to dye the whole shirt, those designs in wax will stay white, while the rest of the shirt becomes a deep jeweled tone and color. It was definitely quite the process!
Below are a few pictures of the images that our group members chose from the available stencils to put on their shirts. A few of the pictures are sideways - sorry about that. It wasn't working for me to edit and turn them around, I tried.
While we were waiting for our shirts to dry, before our t-shirts could move on to the next step in the lengthy batik process, we participated in a jewelry making process. All of the beads we used were handmade locally from recycled glass - some were hand painted, other beads were a raw colored glass. Each group member either made two bracelets or one necklace. Like the batiking, the group took the jewelry making workshop as more than just fun, but a chance to show our creativity and care in each bead and color combo we chose for our piece of jewelry. It felt cathartic for me to be creative through the batik and jewelry making workshops, and to have that time set aside to do something enjoyable and artistic with the group.
A view of the Nkabom House (pronounced N (sound) - kaa - boom) buildings from the courtyard. The 2-story building on the left is where the MA students stayed, the leaders stayed on the lower level of the house in the middle (behind the tree), and we ate all of our meals in the open air structure on the right in the middle (next to the white board with our daily schedule). The bathroom structure (toilets, sinks, and bucket showers) are on the close right side just behind and out of the picture.
Playing with some of the local children, outside of the small shop on the Nkabom House grounds
where local artisans can sell their crafts.
Good buddies! :)
Back to the batik process... the dried shirts (still mostly white) will now be soaked in a certain color of dye (each person got to pick what color they wanted for their shirt).
Next the dyed shirts are put out in the sun again to dry. You can see where the wax stencils were placed on the shirts - those areas stayed a lighter shade when soaked in the dye.
And then it's time for more waiting...!
The last step in the batik process is to dip the shirts into the liquid in this boiling pot, which takes off the wax to show the final product. Amazing!
You'll see what some of the finished shirts look like at the end of this post - they turned out so nice, and the batik experts who helped us were very kind and sincerely happy to help us make the shirts, and for us to take that very special memory home with us to remember our trip.
Moving on... to helping make our dinner for the night! Our group told our Project Okurase leader, Powerful, that sometime we wanted to try the Ghanaian staple food of fufu. He said that most Ghanaians eat fufu every night for dinner, and it is a favorite food of many in Ghana. He also said that most of the groups that he's been with that come to visit Ghana really want to try fufu for the experience, but 9 out of 10 visitors generally will not really like it. Powerful told us that we would have a chance to try it sometime on our trip, and this night happened to be our chance.
I did some reading on Wikipedia, and here is what I found: fufu is a staple food with deep roots in Ghana's history and is common in many countries of West Africa and the Caribbean. A popular method of preparation is to boil pieces of cassava or another tuber and pound it together in a large wooden mortar using a wooden pestle. In between blows from the pestle, the mixture is turned by hand and water gradually added until it becomes slurry and sticky. The mixture is then formed into a ball or a rounded slab and served. Fufu is eaten with the fingers of the right hand, and a small ball of it can be dipped into an accompanying soup or sauce. Popular soups eaten with fufu include palm nut soup or peanut soup, and sometimes can include a meat like pork or chicken. The word fufu comes from the Twi language from the word fufuo, meaning "white", due to its appearance.
Several from our group took their hand at pounding the cassava to make the fufu. It is actually harder than it looks! The wooden pestle has some weight to it, and you have to keep a consistent pounding pattern to get the proper consistency just right. The woman in the orange shirt with the scarf on her head was helping to flip the fufu with her hand every time it was pounded. She was also the person who cooked our meals while in Okurase, and she did an amazing job every day!
You can see Powerful standing in the background (with the striped shirt), standing next to Mr. Johnson. The look on his face is a classic "Powerful face" - smiling and happy. He seemed to enjoy being with our group, and the feeling was mutual. One of the days in the village he had to drive back to Accra to get some supplies and he was gone all day - the students definitely missed his presence with us that day. He definitely has a positive and friendly energy to him and made a significant impact on all of us - a great guy and a memorable part of our trip.
The woman sitting down in the orange tank top is named Nana, and she is one of the Directors of Project Okurase. She is an amazing, selfless, caring, kind woman - someone that made a huge impact on me during our few days in the village, simply because of the kind of person she is.
Our Ghanaian friends seemed to get a kick out of Mr. Johnson pounding the fufu. I couldn't quite tell if this was because this is usually something that the females prepare, or just because he was pretty good at it from the get go. They said that he was doing a really great job - leave it to the P.E. teacher!
Below are two pictures that I found online of fufu - I didn't get a chance to take one during dinner that night, but the bowl with the soup is pretty much exactly what it looks like when served.
This little sweetheart was fast asleep and so comfortable. She enjoyed being carried around and played with all day, and our students enjoyed being with her as well.
Back to see the final products of our batik shirts. Don't they look great?!
Here is my shirt - I love it! I chose the center Africa graphic, but the man holding the shirt, on of the batik masters, helped me place the rest of the white marks. He was such a caring man, talking to me through the process making the shirts, telling me all about the various steps, talking to me about being a teacher, and more.
You can tell by the look on his face that he really enjoys and is proud of his work!
Here is my special buddy, Prince. Each person in our group brought a few children's books from home, and we set them out in the courtyard area for the kids to look at when they came to visit us at Nkabom House. This day Prince wanted to read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which is a book I loved. The kindergarten classes at MA do an annual program on this book - they memorize the words and do cute actions to the book while they recite it for the parents. Last year one of our daughters was a kindergartener at MA, so we must have read this book 100 times at home leading up to that program. So, I had a lot of fun reading this book with Prince because of my past experience with this same book.
This last picture is of a birthday celebration for our SAGE guide, Sarah. In Ghana it is a tradition to get water thrown on you on your birthday. This mainly happens among children. This was Sarah's third straight birthday in Ghana, as the past two years she lived and worked in Ghana with the Peace Corps. Powerful and drummers brought out the drums, and there was lots of drumming, singing, and clapping while several people walked up and dumped buckets of water on her head. A fun tradition!
Happy Birthday, Sarah! I think she liked the celebration. :)
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