Author: Penny

Congratulations to Mame Martha Arko, who has just won the prize for the best kept latrine in Gyetiase, beating the likes of Opanin Mobe, Amazon Gyambia and Opanin Yaw Adu.

She won a small cash prize, and the runners up won even smaller sums, all to be presented at the next village meeting.

The news is that our part of Ashanti’s expecting a bumper crop. A couple of years ago, the land was so dry that crops were destroyed by wildfire. Luckily, things are looking up.

We visited Nana Ababio, Chief of Bimma and a beneficiary under our farm support scheme. He’s growing a mixed crop of corn, yam and cassava, and we’re told he’s very excited about the harvest, which he thinks will be great.

When we first went to Ashanti, some fifteen years ago, the children were always hungry, and many were severely malnourished. As a result, we started free school lunches for children under five, who were most at risk.

To our surprise, this didn’t seem to make a lot of difference to their health and on investigation we found that, because they were being fed at school, their parents reserved all the food at home for their older brothers and sisters, who weren’t. So we added free school breakfasts to the dinners and now the children look fine.

We are very lucky this year to have found a donor to continue this work on our behalf.

We are distributing solar lamps to villages in the north of our area of operation. These villages have no electricity, but depend on battery powered lights or kerosene, which is harmful to the health. The lamps have kindly been donated by BasAid.

We’ve been inspecting some of the farms on our farm support scheme. This provides training in modern farming methods as well as small loans for the farmers to buy good seeds, tubers, farm equipment and wellington boots to protect them from snakes.

The good news is that not only are the crops doing well, but some farmers have even broken an old taboo and are now using organic compost or even poultry droppings as compost. In the past, these were considered out of the question – unhygienic and unpleasant. Today, crops are already much improved, but are set to get a lot better still.

The photos are of Mr Dwumoh’s tomato farm and Kofi Obeng’s green pepper and ground nut farm.

New Saviour Benin now has corn and cassava mills. The corn mill was originally installed in Mprim village, but became the subject of many disputes. We decided it was beyond us to manage this sort of thing, and removed the equipment completely.

We gave it to New Saviour Benin village, where the people are very poor but seem more disciplined. We built a new shed for the machines and bought a new lister engine. The old one was repaired and is now in good shape.

The leader of the village (it’s not an ordinary village, but based on a religion) already knew how to run the machines, so he trained the other two operators. They will all be taught book-keeping skills in one month’s time. Now it just remains to see what happens.

The photo shows, on the left, Emmanuel, our favourite taxi driver, receiving money sent by Paul and Dawn. They’ve very generously offered to fund an operation for his little daughter, who has a hole in the heart. As soon as Emmanuel got the money, he rushed off to Accra to register his daughter at the hospital.

Paul comments: “It’s not often people have the opportunity to completely change the course of a life and to make such a difference to a family. We should be grateful for that opportunity.”