16 June 2006 Update

I came home last night a little bit late and thought the electricity had been taken. The whole area seemed darker than normal, and when I got to my house the outside lights were not on. But other lights were. We had a huge rainstorm in the morning and I think that affected the outside light switches and Akolgo was not able to get the lights to work. I fiddled with it for a minute and the lights came on and I went in the house. I have had bugs accumulating on my bedroom window at night and I think it was because of the lights there. I showed Akolgo that without the lights there were no bugs.

A little later I went into my bedroom and heard something at the window. I looked out and saw that the screen was covered with these insects. I went outside to have a closer look and saw perhaps a thousand of these fluttering around on the wall, in the light, on the screen – just everywhere. I called Akolgo over to have a look and his first comment was that he would “chop” these. Sure enough, he came back with a bucket of water and started sweeping all of these bugs up and into the bucket. A neighbour came over later and said that these were edible. So Akolgo had a feast.

We left the lights out for a while and Akolgo said that the bugs would not return until the next time that it rained. The neighbour said that these were termites. They flew in, and then shed their wings and started crawling on the ground in pairs and triplets. It was very strange and interesting. This morning, when I left for work, I found two guinea fowl in the compound having a feast on whatever Akolgo had not collected the previous night. I am sure they will find their way out when the food is gone.
I asked the cleaning lady at work how to prepare these termites for eating and I will provide the recipe, in case any of you are interested in trying them. First you fry them without any oil because they have their own oil. Then you remove any of the remaining wings. Then you fry them again to dry them out. And now they are ready to eat, just like groundnuts (peanuts). I am not sure that I will try this, but might if Akolgo was to offer me some so that I would not offend him.

This is Akolgo. After the rain yesterday morning, the temperature was quite cool, by Ghanaian standards. I met people wearing their quilted jackets to go about town. People were wearing jeans and flannel shirts. I could sense coolness in the air, but I could also feel the humidity that kept me from actually feeling cold. This morning, the temperature in my bedroom was 27.4C, and that is probably the coolest temperature since I have been here.

Not much else has happened of interest. I planned to travel to Sandema this past weekend and Susan was going to go along for the experience. She had been diagnosed with malaria, though, and had some accompanying stomach problems so we decided that travel was not the best idea at that time. Her problems have continued through all of this week, and even today I will bring her to the doctor to check for any serious bugs that might be causing her stomach problems. She has not been able to eat hardly anything for more than a week now. That has been good for me, since she often offers me her leftovers. But it has lasted long enough to be a bit of a concern.
I am still waiting on the arrival of the computers. I have spent quite some time with one office and he is pressing me to start training his team. I have no reason not to go ahead, other than my thought that I would keep all of the offices in sync throughout the training. But it would be good to get started with the work that I came to do. Another office now has a couple that are here to support the Ghana Education Service, do some teacher and management training, etc. They will be an integral part of the interview portion of my project and they are ready to get started. One drawback is that the school year is about to finish so that might delay the collection of relevant information for the finishing school year.