Village Visits

I took my last water sample on Tuesday and finished my last water quality test with the solar water bag yesterday. I am so happy to be done with this portion of my project. I always knew that I wanted to do implementation work, but this just confirms that I’m not cut out for research. It’s not necessarily because I’m not meticulous enough, but rather because it’s kind of boring.

I started visiting the villages to set up the focus groups for the next week. I will be getting a feel for water practices and knowledge about water-related diseases and then explaining the technology and getting people’s opinions about the design of the bag.

In some of the more traditional villages it is customary to visit the village, find the secretary to the chief who will then send you to visit the chief. Frequently you need to offer kola nuts or a small amount of money ($1) when visiting the chief to ask permission to conduct your survey, focus group, etc. within the village.

I will digress a little here for some context. A few weeks ago I briefly referred to a time when I went to visit a bunch of dams with a Ghanaian working for the Guinea Worm Eradication Project. He showed me three dams and the last one we visited was the closest to Tamale and required that we ride the motorcycle through the village on a path to get to the dam. I took a GPS reading and some pictures before leaving. We were there very briefly, maybe 10 minutes or so.

I decided this past week to return to that village, Gbanyamni, to take a water sample from the dam. Most of the places we have collected water from are in urban areas where people don’t care if you take their dirty dam water or they are in rural areas directly off the road and don’t require any kind of village visit. I asked Wahab if we needed to visit the chief of Gbanyamni because I knew we would have to walk through the village because a taxi could not bring us directly to the dam. He said it wasn’t a problem because we weren’t really doing anything in the village with the residents.

So we arrived at the village last week, hopped out of the taxi and started to make our way through the village. When we passed by a group of men hanging out under a mango tree, one of them stopped us and started to talk to Wahab in Dagboni. Now, I could tell from the conversation that the man was not very happy with us. From Wahab’s reaction, sometimes a little too hesitant and timid, I knew we may be in some trouble. The man yelled at Wahab for awhile and then told him to translate for me.

He had said that we should have asked permission to visit the dam because they don’t know what we’re doing- we could be poisoning their water source, etc, etc. I told Wahab to apologize for the misunderstanding, we didn’t mean to offend them, we would like to fetch some water from their dam for an experiment and if it was not convenient at this time then we would happily return at a more appropriate time. Wahab promptly translated for me and the man accepted our apology and sent us on our way. It wasn’t scary per se, but I just knew we were going to have a problem because of the location of the dam. Wahab said the man was being too traditional and it was not customary to ask permission to fetch water- but that’s beside the point.

Now, back to today…we decided to conduct the focus groups in villages where I had tested the water. Wahab thought it would be a good idea to return to Gbanyamni to do a focus group. I asked, “Are you sure it’s a good idea to go back to where the scary man is?” And then I thought, yeah, but what’s the probability that we’ll run into this man again anyway- the village looks pretty big. (This is when you want to knock on wood.)

We took a taxi to the village and sent it away- because I didn’t want to pay for it to wait for us, I figured we would just walk back out to the road it’s only about 40 minutes or so. We asked a group of local men if they could direct us to the secretary to the chief or an assemblyman. They told us to turn around because the assemblyman was right there. Low and behold, I know it’s pretty predictable, it’s our good friend that gave us a spanking the week before. I almost died.

Of course he remembered us, who could forget the white lady fetching dirty dam water. He seemed suspicious of us still because he wondered why we sent the taxi away. Wahab told him that they would return to pick us up, because he thought it would be suspicious if we said we were walking back. Hmm..ok.

We explained to him what we needed and asked to see the chief. He sent us with some men to visit the chief, but he had traveled far to farm, so we were unable to speak with him. We returned to talk to the assemblyman and he agreed to help us organize a group for Monday of 7-10 women for the exercise. Because we spoke to the assemblyman and not the chief, there was no need to exchange money. He asked a few questions about where I was from and such and then we were on our way.

So maybe this story is anticlimactic, but this man makes me feel uncomfortable. He is stone-faced and very serious and while Wahab says he speaks English, he will only speak Dagboni and wait for Wahab to translate. It simply makes things a little awkward especially if he is as well-educated as Wahab seems to think he is.

I’m not gonna lie. . .I’m not looking forward to going back on Monday, but what can I do now.

Off to see animals tomorrow. . .I'll try and post pictures early next week.