An Answer

Thank you all for reading my blog. I'm amazed at the number of people that are following along and sharing their great inspirational feedback. Thank you so much.

I've left Tamale and am now in Cape Coast in the beginning of our "educational tour". For the next three weeks will we go city to city spending a few days, hearing some lectures, doing workshops and activities, and seeing three more regions of Ghana before returning to Accra to launch our independent studies. Our schedule is very packed, but I will try to at least put a couple of more posts before starting the project.

Cape Coast so far is pretty incredible. Visiting slave dungeons and cells was powerful in ways I never expected. We have another visit to another dungeons and a lecture on slavery today, and I will gather my thoughts and share them soon.

For now, I want to answer  a question I was emailed. What is up with all the children having short hair?

By law, but also by tradition, all children, male or female, who attend a Ghana school must have short hair until they finish secondary school (19-20 years old). There are very very few exceptions in private Westernized schools, but in general children and teenagers have short hair. It is a way of identifying them to the community as children, that must be protected. A child is considered the entire society's responsibility, and marking them with short hair makes it easy to identify them. Especially for teenage girls, although their bodies may look like adults, they are children, and the short hair ensures no one approaches her inappropriately.

So that's what's up with the short hair on the children.

I promise to share more when I get a bit of a break. Academically this is a jam-packed time. I will announce that I finally have completed my independent study proposal, I was going back and forth with ideas the last few months.

On our incredibly bumpy 5-hour unpaved ride to Mole National Park for an extraordinary safari experience, we went past many villages. As I mentioned before the Northern Region of Ghana is home to an astonishing level of poverty, and it's particularly evident in the rural areas. A common problem due to weather and traditional barriers is food security, a lack of knowledge on food preservation techniques, and the staples of the traditional diet, make the dry season a season of hunger for most people in this area.

I was surprised to see many of the villages marked with a sign from the Ministry of Agriculture's recently developed Food Security program.  The official policy paperwork sounds fantastic, but in the field it doesn't seem like it's really doing much. Developed hours away in Accra, by people with a completely different language, religion and culture, it certainly has its issues.

My project is going to be an through field assessment of this program in 2-3 remote villages (exact locations are still being determined when I hear back from the Ministry of Agriculture's list of participating and 'problem' villages). Working with the communities themselves and NGOs that have been working in this area for decades, I hope to be able to determine the key barriers and help make some recommendations for improvement.


My advisors and the district office of the Ministry of Agriculture is beyond excited for this project. It's the kind of assessment that the Ministry simply does not have the resources to do themselves. Actually taking the time live these villages and understand the food insecurity issue holistically is going to be a challenge unlike anything I've ever faced, but I am excited to face it. For now, I have 3 weeks to pack as much Dagbani into my head as possible, enough to at least greet and get by. It's quite a complex langauge, so wish me luck!

That is all for now. I look forward to sharing some more stories and pictures soon. Thanks for all the incredible support. This experience would be impossible without it.