I actually had no idea that there are so many varieties of mangoes in the world. In my area I can get the small yellow skinned mangoes I wrote about earlier, (delicious and totally worth the effort), small forest green skinned mangoes that are somehow oval and usually slightly bigger than the yellow ones, small round vibrantly red and orange skinned ones, bright green and yellow skinned mangoes that vary in size from a can of soda to an American football, and the standard green skinned mangoes that are the grafted mangoes. I am determined to try them all. So far the small forest green ones are my favorite. They are sweet, but not cloyingly so, and they have less fiber than the yellow ones. Sometimes I can get the small yellow ones that are not quite ripe, and those are actually better than the green ones, but it’s rare that I can get fruit that isn’t totally ripe.
Actually, that’s somewhat of a problem these days. This week I have been gifted more food than I have the entire time I have lived here. I am guessing that is because there is actually food to spare these days. The rain is a time of plenty. (Unfortunately that includes plenty of bugs.) Currently I have a dozen (tiny but delicious) guinea fowl eggs, six avocados, three mangoes (I just ate three), and a loaf of bread. Of course I also have lots of onions and some small garlic (it’s costly). But honestly that is more fresh food than I have had in my house since salad season.

I am hoping that the rain will decrease our power-shedding. Have I talked about this before? It’s insanity inducing. Right now we are supposed to be on a 36 hour rotating schedule of 12 hour blackouts. It is more like whenever the hell they want it to be off they shut it off. It very loosely follows the schedule; this week I have had three 16 hour stretches without power and one 8 hour stretch. It is virtually impossible to sleep without the power on; it’s too hot without a fan. Seriously, most of the PCV’s that don’t have power go without sleep at site, falling into an exhausted sleep until waking in a pool of sweat in bed. Actually the most remarkable thing occurred to me the other day – it’s incredibly physically uncomfortable to live here. And not just for me – for the Ghanaians too. What is remarkable is that this just occurred to me. Of course I compensate, make allowances, and do a lot to make myself more comfortable here. It’s just that I take it for granted.


So today I went around the village meeting with the remaining WATSAN committees. These meetings never thrilled me, which of course is why I haven’t done them already. I feel bad about that but it is pretty boring sitting around for stretches of time while everyone speaks a language I can’t even pretend to know at all. I get translated the bare bones of the conversation, which I hate - all the stuff that is left out is what I actually think is the important stuff. They are talking about the village politics, an incredibly long back-story, (we’re talking generations here), so I do know that it is a long and tedious thing to begin to explain to me. However, I am now being forced to make decisions on plans of action and/or solutions to problems without knowing the full story. Which I hate. It makes me feel like I am doing something half-assed. And the crying shame about it all is that these people surely know more about what to do to solve these problems then I could ever hope to know. It’s just impossible to get that across. So many years have gone by where things have been imposed upon the people here. So much so that people feel like they are unable to make decisions that deeply effect their lives.

Today I had a talk with the head nurse here, the man we all call doctor, about malaria. Of course with the rain it is now malaria season. The government health office – the Ministry of Health (MOH) - has an awareness initiative out about Malaria this year. This is primarily because this year Ghana is promoting a new Malaria drug, in response to the information that 25% of the sub-Saharan African population is effected with Chloroquine resistant malaria. As if this is new information (it’s been known since the early 90’s I believe). So anyway, there is also a USAID call for proposals for Peace Corps volunteers promoting the new drugs and the MOH plan for combating malaria. The plan, by the way, is basically subsidized anti-malarials, a media awareness campaign about them, and free insecticide treated bed nets and/or re-treatment kits for those with babies under two who have been regularly attending their local child health clinic. So I met informally with Doctor and some of the clinic volunteers and asked them to think about what they thought we should propose for the grant. Doctor said what they need is a new malaria prophylaxis to replace the chloroquine. It hadn’t even occurred to me until that instant but of course it’s true. To replace a 75% effective prophylaxis with a more effective cure for the illness is not really a fair trade; so now you can be treated better for malaria once you get it but it is more likely that you will fall ill in the first place. Nice. And of course there are malaria prophylaxis’ out there that are much more effective than chloroquine. They are just very expensive. Even I am not on the best one out there – the better one (one with less side effects and slightly more effective) is prohibitively expensive for our tiny portion of the US foreign affairs budget. (We have an expensive war to finance after all!) So I explained to him that there are other prophylaxis’ out there but they are not going to get them because they are too expensive.

It was a turning point for me in that I really hadn’t begun to explain the enormity of the inequality between the quality of healthcare available to the developed world and what is available here. He knows of course, but I think it is more in the way that he of course expects that there is more available, for example, in the US and Europe in general, but he has not specifically thought about things like the actual quality of the medication that is being supplied to people here. I mean, yeah, it’s dirt cheap. But when buying you have to be really careful that it isn’t expired since a good portion of it is, and a lot of people who are buying may not know this or be able to read well enough to determine that. And the options are few. There is one drug to combat an illness. If you are resistant then that’s it, you’re screwed. [And resistance happens because people can’t afford to by a full course of drugs at a time. They buy enough for today and try and find the money for tomorrow’s course tomorrow. If it’s an antibiotic people generally feel better before the course is finished, stopping the drugs before they can kill all of the disease, causing possible mutations to happen.] But people like Doctor need to know what is happening here; I feel that the only way true change can happen here is if it comes from Ghanaians.