Day 5

Okay! Sorry for taking awhile to get these next posts out everyone. It took a couple days for us to get out of Ekumdipe back to the city Tamale ("travel complications"). And today, I have been battling a tag-team of a stomach virus that I must have picked up in the village and a nice little fever with it too. But no worries, after a trip to the local hospital and a shot to the behind, I'm good to go! Now, it's time to give some updates on what I've been up to these past couple days. Of course, I could post everything all at once now, but that would be no fun. I'm going to leak the blogs little by little over the next few days so nothing gets rushed. I guess I'll start with the trip in...

Aug 14 - Day 5

Today we finally made the trip from Tamale to Ekumdipe. This was quite a trip to say the least. The first leg involved a trip south to the trading town, Salaga. After, we took the second leg to community. The trip took about 3 hours total (2 hrs from Tamale to Salaga and 1 hr from Salaga to Ekumdipe), however if the roads had been even somewhat decent, the trip would have taken half the time. The roads were either ruined with potholes scattered everywhere or they were not roads at all and just dirt paths. Eventually, we came up to the Daka River, which I had become familiar with by now through the many pictures I had seen over time. Finally, the truck started to slow and I knew we had arrived. At this point, I was not surprised to see the level of poverty and development in the community given that I had now been in Ghana for 5 days and had seen countless communities during our travels, however seeing Ekumdipe in person still had a large impact on me. This was the town that I had planned this project for over the past year. This is where I was going to live and work for the next few days. As soon as we exited the vehicles the members of the community immediately started to congregate towards us. They were expecting me and they knew what I had come to do. It was time to go to work.