Weekend of Promotions

It’s been a busy week of investigating the manufacturing option. We had the opportunity to visit a local village, Kukuo, that is well known for its Pottery Association. While the entire country has clay soil, some of the clay is better for use in pottery than others. This particular village is located on land that is high quality clay. We took a tour of the former kiln, now dilapidated and no longer in use. Unfortunately, the kiln used too much firewood and it was not economical for the association to use it.

We are waiting to hear from the secretary of the Pottery Association for the day and time of the meeting we will have with the chief. We would like to take samples of various clay deposits to send to the U.S. to be tested. If any of those samples prove useful, Pure Home Water would consider negotiating with the chief to buy that parcel of land to use as a clay harvesting center. The local women would be willing to dig and harvest the clay as paid laborers.

In the midst of the manufacturing research, I managed to test two more water samples this week and on Saturday we had our first promotional event since my arrival here. We went to the local radio station, Fiila FM 89.3, to see if we could have airtime on their morning radio show. We prepared a small script and had 15 minutes to talk about Pure Home Water’s current products- the ceramic filter and safe storage vessels, why they are beneficial, cost, and sales locations. I’ve never been on the radio before- it’s pretty entertaining! Even more so when people told us that they heard us on the radio. I came home to the guesthouse and Sule, the main caretaker, said, “Melinda, I heard you on the radio this morning.” He thought we did a very good job.

Saturday afternoon, Hamdiyah and her sister cooked me a great Ghanaian meal. We had fufu and lye soup with ocra and guinea fowl. I really enjoyed the guinea fowl. The meat was similar to chicken, but a little darker. It fell right off the bone in the soup, so good! Fufu has a very interesting texture- it’s sticky and stretchy in your mouth. It doesn’t have much of a taste, but is quite good with the lye soup.

On Monday, we organized a booth for market day. There are vendors at the market every day of the week, but every 6 days there is a regional market day when most of the women from the outlying villages come in to sell their goods. Our stall was located near the taxi stop, so there was lots of traffic. We were able to sell only 3 filters, but we had some good interest from consumers and gave out our contact information for prospective buyers. This is such a high priced item that it’s a good activity to familiarize people with the filter, but typically people do not have that much money available to buy the product immediately.

More to come. . .I'm having trouble uploading the pictures I want to post.