Rain?!

So I have to post this morning instead of last night because a storm came in and knocked out the internet. I observed a rare event yesterday for March. This is the hot season of Ghana (the temperature today should reach 100, and 104 tomorrow) and it rarely ever rains, but it did yesterday for a full ten minutes. They were huge and sparse drops, but nevertheless it rained and cooled it off. Yesterday, and today as well, I am focusing on working on my country report of Ghana. I got about a third of it done yesterday, and while I don't plan to finish it before I leave Ghana, I do want all of it written up so when I get home I can just polish it. I got to see a day in the life of Dianne right now - she has taken over as head of finance temporarily until they find someone to replace her.

It is utterly crazy. Finance is an area where you have to be picky and detail oriented - Ghanaians are most definitely not! And so, Dianne is having to sort through a completely unorganized set of books and budgets trying to make sense of it all. To make matters worse, a man from the Netherlands came yesterday to audit GILLBTs finances - the donors in Holland are wanting to see where their money is being spent, but the ledger is so ambiguous that of the three different donors from Holland, any money brought in was put into the first account that came to mind. So once the money comes to GILLBT it cannot be tracked. As Susie (the woman who runs the "microcredit" unit here, more later) said, Westerners want all of the details. Ghanaians don't care how it is done, as long as it is done, details don't matter.

As for Susie, I met with her to disucss my trip out to two of their microcredit sites. In reality, GILLBT's focus isn't on microfinance (or credit) but on empowerment of women. And so they take a different approach. They have about 7/8 sites (or villages) with their presence, all based on sites where they have translated the Bible into the mother tounge. Around 3,000 women are currently in the program. What happens is GILLBT comes in and provides seminars to these women. They are interviewed and the amount of their loan is discussed. They typcially run between 500 and 1,000 Ghana cedis, around 375 - 700 US dollars and their success rates for the varying villages run between 96-99%. The talk was good and it got me excited about our visit next week.

So after a long day at work, I got to try some more Ghanaian food last night. Their food here is very heavy: plaintains and cooked dough are a big part of their meals. For example, one lunch it was a spicy soup with some cooked meat (not sure the meat, but some pieces were a little off and they don't remove bones) over a big glob of a white pastey cooked dough. I, thankfully, asked for half of what they were serving since it is not easy to eat. Last night I was given kinke (I think that is how you spell it: pronounced like kinky). It is a fermented dough that is boiled and then, using your hands, dipped into a bowl of spicy pepper sauce. It was different, the fermented dough wasn't the best but I certainly liked it better than plaintains. And the fact that a dead fish was laid in the bowl didn't make it too appealing. But Dianne only let me try it (thankfully) and had hot dogs for Jiffer and I. Apparently, Jiffer loves kinke but also loves hot dogs. Their housemaid has been here but two days, she just never shows up on time and Di and Dan won't give her a house key because then she will just come when she wants. Unlike the south, like Accra, the northern part of the country has a culture that doesn't see time as so important. The southern part of the country is very much like the west, the northern is still a totally different culture.

So there will be another update this evening. Tomorrow I can sleep in (!!)