Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates

Africa Trip, 2009

2009-08-24T14:57:00.001-07:00

This year, the trip lasted only 10 days in order to cut costs. Two young women accompanied me, Anna Nakayama and her sister, Katie Nakayama. Anna was my student in Cal Poly Chocolates, and after hearing about my trips, she was determined to come along this year. Her sister Katie, who had just spent 6 months in South Africa, wanted to get a taste of West Africa and possibly do her senior project using the material gathered during the trip.

A MAP OF OUR JOURNEY

Below are two maps--of Ghana and of Cote d'Ivoire--to help you know the locations of our visits.

Map of Ghana with West African Inset. Note that the red path denotes last year's trip. Click on the image to see more details.

Map of Cote d'Ivoire with West Africa Inset. Again, the red line denotes last year's trip, when we had a week in each country. Click on the image to see greater detail. We passed through Divo and Lakota (!) to get to Issia.

WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED--A list of the trip's highlights

1. We spent 2 nights in Ebekawopa. We donated a dryness meter and 50 cocoa storage bags. I was enstooled as development chief. The general chief gave me 3 acres of land.

2. We visited Maker Faire in Accra, where we learned about low-tech inventions that could improve the quality of village life.

3. We visited six villages in the regions of Issia and Daloa and delivered 2 dryness meters plus cocoa storage bags.

4. We toured the Saf-Cacao plant in San Pedro to learn about quality grading of beans, various lab techniques, and large equipment used to produce cocoa liquor.

PARTICIPANTS

As usual, I (Tom Neuhaus) led the trip. This is my seventh time in West Africa. I bring people along in order to teach about the complexities of the cocoa business. Both Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire have some child slavery/WFCL (Worst Forms of Child Labor) associated with cocoa production. My view on this is that such practices would be a lot less common if the farmers received a living wage from cocoa production. It is to promote that view and to spread awareness in order to counter ignorance and bias, that I conduct these trips. For more, see my NGO, Project Hope and Fairness.

From the left: Katie Nakayama (a student at Washington College in Chestertown, MD); Peter Joy Sewornoo (my assistant in Ghana for the past 3 years); Anna Nakayama (who majors in Nutrition at Cal Poly University); Padmore Cobbina, an old friend; and Alex (in the back), our intrepid and supernice driver in Ghana.

Albert Kouassi Konan, my current assistant in Cote d'Ivoire and former director of Kavokiva, one of the two Fair Trade-certified cocoa cooperatives in Cote d'Ivoire.

Saturday, August 8

I left San Luis Obispo around 5 PM and drove south to Los Angeles. On the way, I encountered a huge plume of smoke extending out over the ocean north of Santa Barbara. By the time I entered Santa Barbara, the plume was covering the setting sun, which had turned blood-red. Not being of the superstitious sort, I did not take this as a sign.

I arrived at the LAX airport around 9 PM and checked into the Hilton, where I had arranged to park/sleep/fly. I parked the car at the lowest level (closest to the devil), where the temperature was easily over 100 degrees. I paid a valet to help me with the luggage, as I had two large suitcases plus a large cardboard box containing the three dryness meters.

I fell asleep around 11 PM and woke up at 4 AM. Little did I know that Anna, Katie, and their parents were already at the airport, waiting for me! Oops!. I reasoned that it was a local flight (that is, to NY), so arriving 2 hours in advance would be sufficient.

Sunday, August 9

However, when I arrived at the terminal a little after 5 AM, I discovered how wrong I had been. The terminal was PACKED, criss-crossed with lines of desperate travelers. We stood in line for probably a good 45 minutes before we could check in, then stood in line to put our suitcases into the security system another half hour, then stood in line for maybe 20 minutes to get through security. By the time we made it to the gate, the flight was just starting to board.

We arrived in NYC around 3 PM. As we landed, I text-messaged Juliet (my daughter) and James (my son) that we had just arrived. This turned out to be the right thing to do, as I had emailed from the hotel room announcing our arrival "tomorrow", which meant Monday to people three time zones in advance. So, James, Juliet, and her fiance Cem jumped in a cab. By the time we had retrieved our bags and found a nice lounge in Terminal 1 (International Terminal), they were well on their way.

Evariste Plegnon, who is currently living in NYC and who worked for us in previous years, also joined us at the airport. We spent several hours together.

Around 6 PM, we checked in and boarded the flight at about 8 PM. We took Royal Air Maroc to Casablanca, Morocco.

Monday, August 10

We arrived in Casablanca at 8 AM. Fortunately, our baggage had been checked through to Accra, so we didn't have to think about it. I changed a few dollars and we exited the terminal.

There are new security measures, so cars can't come close to the terminal. We had to walk several hundred feet in the blazing sun. There were dozens of taxis lined up in the parking lot, but no one approached us. Instead, I asked the first person I met for a taxi. One man agreed to take us to Casablanca. This was the beginning of a big fight that lasted a full 30 minutes, during which we were shunted from one taxi to another and over 40 drivers engaged in a brawl, throwing fists, hurling Arabic epithets, lifting the taxi up to prevent the wheels from touching the ground, jumping onto the taxi, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the police did virtually nothing. Turns out that there were two groups of drivers: those for taxi rides around the airport and those for all-day excursions into Casablanca. Because the rule of law is nonexistant due to the easy corruptility of the local constabulary, we were witnessing a continuing saga, never to be resolved, because for a few dirhams, a policeman will ignore the law and look the other way.

The issue was eventually resolved by driving away at the first opportunity and we proceeded to drive to Casablanca. The cost of the day-long trip was a follows: 300 dirham to Casablanca, 300 dirham for the day, 300 dirham back. Altogether: $130.

During our stay in Casablanca, we visited the Hassan II mosque, a souk, we ate a fine Moroccan lunch, visited two bakeries, and we drove along the coast to see how the Saudis live.

We started our day in Casablanca at the Al Mounia restaurant, which means "The Desire." I asked our cabbie to take us to a restaurant that would serve typical Moroccan food, not too expensive.

We sat in the patio under a lovely tree that filtered the rays of the harsh Moroccan sun.

I ordered four classically Moroccan foods: Mint tea, Pigeon Bastela, Brik, and Tajine. Mint tea is made by putting a giant cube of sugar (2 inches by 2 inches by 2 inches) in a tea pot, adding dried mint, then ramming a fistful of fresh mint. Boiling water is added, and the whole is steeped. The result is one of the best beverages you will ever drink.

The second food, Pigeon Bastela, is the forerunner of the "pastry." During the Middle Ages, "pastries" in Europe were mere copies of Bastelas the Crusaders encountered during their murderous rampages in the name of Jesus. The English mincemeat pie has for pedigree the Pigeon Bastela. This is a flaky pastry stuffed with pigeon (not the poisonous pigeons in the park), dusted with powdered sugar, cinnamon, and toasted almonds.

The third food, Brik, is the forerunner of puff pastry (Napolitana or Napoleons) and the Austrian Strudel. It is a circle of thin dough folded around a raw egg and ground meat. It is deep-fried and served as an appetizer.

And the fourth food we tasted was Tajine or stew. In this case, we tasted lamb with olives and salted lemons. The Moroccans preserve both with salt, and the flavor combination is exquisite.

After dining sumptuously, we headed over to the Hassan II Mosque. This is the third largest mosque in the world, and its minaret is the highest. Designed by a French architect, the building materials are mostly from Morocco. It holds over 20,000, and the cedar roof pulls back to reveal the night sky and allow hot air out.

Underneath the mosque are baths designed for doing ablutions before entering the sanctuary. The interior is very high, the floors heated in the winter and the pillars and walls covered in all sorts of Moroccan marbles

This is my third time visiting the mosque. The tour guide was very impressed that I knew that all the 20-foot high doors are made of pure titanium (the metal used in nuclear-tipped missiles), although I should know something after hearing the commentaries thrice.

After the mosque, we drove along the coast to watch the wealthy bathe. We then visited two bakeries, one specializing in almond-based pastries, and the other the village bread baker.

This photo shows just one of dozens of almond-based pastries.

In the same neighborhood, we found this bread bakery. The oven is heated with wood. The woman in each household mixes bread dough each day, and the children carry the dough to the bakery, where the oven tender bakes it. Thus, each family makes its own bread and eats it fresh every day.

Moroccans love olives (me too--I must be Moroccan at heart, or maybe stomach). They shop for olives in stores dedicated to just that one item. Of course there are many varieties. They ferment olives in these enormous barrels. The old man with his back to the camera is in his 80s. As they say in the field of medicine, "use it or lose it." He's still using it and hasn't lost it.

On our way out of town, we passed the camel butcher shops. Note that they use the head for advertisement. Camel is quite delicate in flavor. This does not match the camel's personality, which could hardly be described as delicate.

We drove back to the airport, boarded the plane, and flew over the Sahara to Accra, Ghana, where we landed at 2 AM.

Tuesday, August 12

After clearing customs in record time, we exited the terminal only to find... no Peter! We stood around until 2:45 AM, at which point, I decided to hire a cab and go to the Mensvic Hotel, a place that we had decided not to frequent because it's become too expensive. In fact, all the hotels around the airport are now $100 per night instead of the $50 when I first started visiting Ghana.

We drove to the Mensvic, but it was full. We then tried a few others before finding a hotel that had two rooms. But they cost as much as the Mensvic. By that time, I had called Peter's phone at least 5 times, and this time he answered. He and Alex, the driver, came and met us and we drove to a much cheaper hotel. It turns out that Peter had misread my email and thought we were landing at 3 AM. Then, on the way to the airport, they got stuck at a police checkpoint. Alex was wearing slippers, which signified to the police that he was a burglar (as house burglars in Ghana wear slippers.) That's why they were late.

We slept from 4 until 8, then rose, ate breakfast, and drove to meet friends (Bob and Mary Kate) from upstate New York. He works for USAID in the field of education, and two of their daughters were there. We reminisced about old times for an hour, then drove to north Accra to pick up cocoa storage bags from Agrimat.

While we waited to finish the transaction, I took pictures of sprayers and chemicals. The fact is, almost every cocoa farmer I've ever met is dying to spray chemicals on his crop. Many of the sprayers are back-mounted, and children often do the spraying, usually without protective gear. As a result, the chemicals enter their bloodstreams and cause hormonal disruptions and eventual cancer. There is no substitute, however, for proper trimming of the cocoa trees to minimize insect and fungal damage, and there are organic pesticides that are not dangerous to children or adults--such as neem.

We drove from Accra to Cape Coast. We arrived in the late afternoon, visited the castle, and then ate dinner at the restaurant next door. The castle is a World Heritage Site. There are over 40 castles on the Ghana coast, but only two are in good shape--this one and Elmina, which is located 20 miles away. In 2003, I met Peter at the Cape Coast Castle; he was my tour-guide. For more than 200 years, the Cape Coast castle housed more than 1000 slaves at a time. The Swedes, Portuguese, Dutch, and British used it to trade in gold and slaves.

After visiting the castle and eating our dinner, we drove north to Ebekawopa. This takes about an hour, as it is just a couple miles south of Kakum National Park. We arrived around 9:30 PM during a light rain. As a result, there was not the customary welcoming bonfire, so we prepared to sleep in our customary dormitory--the floor of the church. We all took our African showers, which consists of walking behind the church into the "weeds" and pouring buckets of cold water over ourselves in the pitch darkness. Samson, the Lutheran minister, had rented mats for us to sleep on, so we felt rather comfortable (if you forget the multitude of possibly malarial mosquitoes buzzing about).

Wednesday, August 12

We started the day by visiting Pastor Samson's cocoa farm. When you walk onto his land, you realize that he trims his trees better than most farmers. There are fewer black pods on the trees, and little excess foliage below 6 feet off the ground. Pastor Samson demonstrated the use of a pole for cutting pods that are higher off the ground.

Here is a brown pod. This happens when the pod is injured and fungal spores are able to gain entrance. Like so many plants, the cocoa tree produces a brown cuticle to prevent fungal inroads. However, a simple abrasion can facilitate entrance of the spores, which germinate and send their hyphae into the sweet plant flesh. Brown pod is a sign of humidity build-up during misty weather and poor trimming techniques, causing the foliage to block life-saving air circulation.

The picture below shows a cocoa pod that has been damaged by myrids, small flies that bite through the pod's cuticle, infecting each spot with fungal spores that germinate and begin to suck out juices, killing the plant cells around the center of the bite. It is to control myrids that cocoa farmers beg me for sprayers.

On the way back from the farm, we stopped by the village's palm oil factory, essentially a roof over some rather dirty-looking equipment. This woman is preparing to boil palm fruits in order to extract the fibrous pericarp that is then pressed to make the highly colored palm oil. The hard center is the palm fruit's kernel, cracked and roasted to extract palm kernel oil which is used in many European chocolates.

Below is a picture of a press used to extract the oil from the boiled pericarp. In default of such a press, families just boil the fruits to separate the pericarp from the kernels, discard the kernels, and then boil the fiber until all oil has been extracted and is floating at the surface.

We continued to walk back to the church, where our breakfast awaited us. Just outside the church, one of the villagers showed off his latest catch for the stewpot, an animal whose name escapes me but that is found in West African forests, clinging to trees.

After breakfast, we walked to the school, where we had a little donations ceremony. I was dressed in chiefly garb and "enstooled", meaning I was formally made chief of the village. This involved being sprayed with talcum powder and women waving scarves in my direction and chanting. I was set on a stool that had been carved for the occasion and that will remain in the village (I didn't want to carry it home) for my use during future ceremonies.

This picture shows me presenting a dryness meter and 50 cocoa storage bags to the general chief, who in return gave me 3 acres of land. This is exciting, because we might be able to set up a cocoa studies center and a program that can be attended by university students, faculty, and cocoa farmers.

After the ceremony, we drove to Cape Coast in order to visit the castle, have dinner, and walk on the beach. We returned to Ebekawopa and spent a second night.

Thursday, August 13

Today, we went to Kakum, which is located about 2 miles north of the village. We did the usual canopy walk, which consists of seven frightening, swaying, "bridges" connected to 8 large trees by metal cables. I always do the walk, but reluctantly, as I have to summon reserves of courage and determination to walk out over the forest floor at an elevation of 100 feet. Afterwards, Peter demonstrated how in pre-colonial times, forest peoples sometimes took shelter among the buttresses of certain species of tree. This particular tree is small, so the shelter is a little tenuous.

In the late afternoon, we left Ebekawopa and drove back to Cape Coast. Along the way, we stopped at a hotel/restaurant that sits over and around a crocodile-infested lagoon. Peter, Padmore and I did the touristy thing and petted the varmint, kept preoccupied by a piece of raw chicken dangled above its snout.

Friday, August 14

We left Cape Coast and drove back to Accra in the morning. There, we stopped by the home of personal friends, Kapil, Tara, and Karan. Jayant, Kapil's father, was there as well. We spent a couple hours talking. During this time, I learned that neem is commonly used in India as an insecticide and that the neem tree is a popular plant that also grows in West Africa. In fact, there are two neem trees in their yard!

Peter re-confirmed our tickets to Abidjan and we headed for the airport. When we arrived, we found that the flight had been canceled. After much consternation, we met the Air Ivoire manager, who assured us that he would make sure we would be on the passenger list for the next day's flight. This meant we would lose an entire day in Cote d'Ivoire. I called Albert using Peter's phone and let him know. We spent the night at Kapil and Tara's house.

Saturday, August 15

The next morning was spent visiting the Maker Faire, which was being held all weekend at the Koffi Annan Center of Excellence. Participants were young African inventors, some of them MIT students.

Sign at the entrance...

Below is a cocoa and grain drier that relies on black tubes heated by the sun, convected air wafting into the central cavity where the beans are heated by the sun's rays. The cover of the drier is a sheet of plastic held in place by gravity, and trays of grain or cocoa are inside. If it rains, no problem. One of the biggest problems in producing quality chocolate is molding, which produces a dirty flavor and excess bitterness.

There were many other inventions--such as:

metal disk that attaches to lightbulbs. Disk holds pyrethrin-soaked materials. Pyrethrins kill mosquitoes. Problem is, there are no lights in villages.
Corn shuckers: small pieces of metal tubes that easily remove kernels
Toilets: a pressing need for villages, which usually have nasty latrines.
Refrigerator: powered by the evaporation of water. Good for keeping vegetables cool.
Chlorine generator: electrolysis of salt water produces chlorine gas that can be used for sanitizing

At noon, we ate at a South Indian restaurant specializing in Dosas. What a treat!

We went to the airport and by 4 PM were flying to Abidjan, where we landed at 5 PM. Albert met us at the airport. We stood around for an hour because on of our suitcases, carrying gifts for the villages, had not showed. Unfortunately, it never appeared, so we drove to the Golden Hotel, where we checked in.

At 7 PM, we drove across Abidjan to eat at a restaurant, and we were joined by several of Albert's brothers.

Sunday, August 16

We used a fancy jeep to get around. Here, Albert (my assistant) and the driver (Arsene) fit the luggage inside. We left at 7 AM without even eating breakfast, as we had a lot to get accomplished. We drove fast (don't ask) and made it to Gagnoa around 1 PM.

Below is a picture of the Cargill cocoa treatment plant, located in Gagnoa. Two companies control 75% of the beans entering the U.S.--Cargill and ADM. And those beans come from Cote d'Ivoire.

We continued driving Northwest toward Issia, our first destination the village of Djahakro, which is Baoule. You know this by the suffix kro, which means "village" and Djaha, which is a family name.

Before we turned off, we stopped to look at this plantation owned by SOA Societe and which is, according to Albert, certified by Rainforest Alliance. Many American companies (e.g., Kraft, Mars) are avoiding Fair Trade (too expensive), electing instead to use products certified by Rainforest Alliance. Large corporations such as SOA Societe can buy tracts of land from the Ivorian government that are partially forested, then plant cocoa under the remaining overstory trees. A quick way to make a buck and to apply a little greenwash, but it tends to work against the interests of the villagers, who would benefit more from the Fair Trade system.

Here is a sign erected to remind people not to use children for growing and harvesting their cocoa, posted on Rainforest Alliance land, a short sermon about child labor. This is quite the joke, however, as virtually all children in cocoa-growing villages work with cocoa. The RA land is owned by a corporation and necessarily hires farm labor. The surrounding villages, however, are so impoverished (having no deep pockets like the corporations) that they are forced to use their children as farm labor. And since there are no educational or job opportunities, what else should children do with their time? There are no TVs to watch.

We turned off the main road onto a a very iffy dirt road. We drove about 2 miles to reach Djahakro. This was one of three villages to receive a scale, thanks to Shana Dressler's chocolate tasting held in Manhattan on Valentine's Day. Shana started an NGO called Global Giving Circle. We are talking with her about enlarging the campaign to "6000 Scales for 6000 Villages."

The village was ready to receive us: the scale in the middle and the villagers facing us as an audience. The oldest man and the oldest woman were introduced to us. In West African society, age garners respect, and people who make it to a ripe old age merit attention.

The ceremony started as do all in West Africa, with an exchange of "News". This means that the village chief first asks us why we are there and what's new in our lives. Then he responds with news of the village. Then we drink palm wine to cement our relationship.

We also drank some Coutoucou, which is a brandy made from palm wine.

After that, 3 people and I went into the bush to make video clips of how the scale will benefit them. I interviewed a young cocoa farmer, an old cocoa farmer, and a woman. While the two cocoa farmers discussed how the scale would promote a more honest relationship with the middlemen (pisteurs), the woman talked about how the scale would help her and other women make more money selling produce (yams, cocoyams, corn, rice, bananas, plantains, and sweet potatoes).

I took a number of photos unique to this village. Below, for example, is a unique way to dry corn. I've seen corn drying in cribs, but never hanging off a pole like this...

Ateke is a popular starch in Cote d'Ivoire. lt is made by shredding raw cassava, letting it ferment lightly, and then drying it. It is steamed and served with stews. The pictures below show two ways of shredding cassava--by hand or by machine. The shredding machine in this case is mounted on a bicycle, and the young man makes a living traveling from village to village. An unanswered question: is there enough cash in a village's economy to even support this? I got the sense that the women were not too keen on paying someone to shred their cassava when they could do it themselves.

Ateke shredded by hand...

Ateke shredded by machine...

We took a bunch of group photos. The village was thrilled to host its first "white people," so they had hired a photographer and they were forming all sorts of groups in order to have some "memories". In this photo, we are posing with some of the village's women.

We left Djahakro after two hours and continued in the direction of Issia. Our next village was Zereguhe, part of a clump of villages we visit every year. It is located about 3 miles outside of Issia. Zereguhe already has a scale and a WC, so this year, we gave them a dryness meter and some storage bags. The scale is still in good shape, still being used, still saving the farmers money in their dealings with the pisteurs or middlemen.

Here's the scale, now over 3 years old...

We spent the night in Depa. I did not bring any gifts this year, as they already have a WC, a scale, and a dryness meter. The chief informed me that thanks to the dryness meter we brought last year, their cocoa was recently recognized as the "Best in the Department of Issia." And because of this, he has been made chief of the whole department and will be meeting the country's president later this month. Laurent Gbagbo is running for re-election, and M. Seri Justin, Depa's chief, is now recognized as being politically quite important. He was so happy, in fact, that he made me chief of the village. Here I am in my chiefly regalia... I publish this with a certain trepidation, because I don't want people to think that it's all gone to my head (so to speak.)

Monday, August 17

We woke up early this morning to have a ceremony, as we had arrived too late. While waiting for the ceremony to begin, I took this picture of women just outside our house drawing water.

And here they are schlepping heavy, sloshy plastic basins of water, spilling nary a drop.

The ceremony began at 7 AM. The chief, Seri Justin, spoke at length about how useful the dryness meter had proved to be and thanked me publicly for the past donations. He said that he was at a loss on how to repay me, so he had decided to make me village chief, the only repayment that he considered of sufficient value. I told him that just getting video of farmers extolling the usefulness of scales and dryness meters was sufficient repayment for me, for without those testimonials, I cannot move forward with the "6,000 Scales for 6,000 Villages" campaign.

We said our good-byes and headed 1 mile down the road toward Issia to Pezoan. Here, we were merely visiting and interviewing, and the chief was not happy that he had not received as much as the chief of Depa. He went through the motions, but his face was set in a scowl. The Pezoanese, on the other hand, were very warm and happy. Below is a picture of the WC paid for by Skyline, the Cal Poly business major who accompanied me last year.

And here is our very short ceremony where I presented the chief with the little I had brought (seeing as the suitcase with the Tchotchkis was still in the possession of Air Ivoire.)

After we left old sourpuss, we drove in the direction of Daloa, which is about 60 miles northwest of Issia. Our first stop was the village of Broguhe, the chief of which I consider to be a good friend because he has such a good attitude. He wants to make things work. I still haven't gotten his wife's sewing room electrified (you can donate to Project Hope and Fairness and earmark your donation.)

This year, thanks to the efforts of Shana Dressler of Global Giving Circle, we were able to dig a well for the village and give them a dryness meter. The well is 90 feet deep. It takes quite some time to lower a pouch and bring up the water. The water is clear, however, unlike the water of the old well, which is about 300 feet from the village and is full of thousands of bugs. Often villages will have two wells: one for bathing (murky water that is drawn close to the surface) and one for drinking (deep water).

Here is a view to the bottom of the well...

In this photo, we are donating a dryness meter to the chief of Broguhe.

And this photo requires no explanation...

We left Broguhe and drove to our next village, Abekro. This is where Eugenie lives. She was at one time on the board of directors of Kavokiva, at one time a viable Fair Trade cooperative. Both of Ivory Coast's Fair Trade cooperatives are in serious financial trouble. This is a direct result of American complacency. In Britain, 8% (and actually far more now that Cadbury and British Mars have made their marvelous commitments) of all chocolate is Fair Trade. In the U.S., about 0.2% is Fair Trade. So Kuapa Kokoo and other Fair Trade cooperatives in Ghana are doing quite well because England traditionally purchases Ghanaian beans. The Ivorian Fair Trade situation is bankrupt because the U.S. chocolate industry, which purchases 75% of its beans from Cote d'Ivoire, has snubbed the Fair Trade system. Anyway, that's the truth, and you can take it or leave it. Most of the Fair Trade chocolate sold in the U.S. is manufactured in Germany from Ghanaian beans or Dominican beans, or Peruvian beans. Not Ivorian.

I would love to start a line of Fair Trade Ivorian chocolate. Several years ago, I spoke with the Vice President of Aramark, the world's largest catering company, about the possibility of committing to ALL chocolate sold in all 450 of the universities they service (including Harvard) being Fair Trade (not organic) just to jumpstart the FT business in Cote d'Ivoire. He responded that it would be impossible because Aramark has no control over the identity or the quality of their ingredients. Some catering company. I know when I've been blown off. Some day, maybe somebody here in the centrally isolated U.S. will do the right thing. As Winston Churchill once said, "You can count on the Americans to do the right thing. After they've tried everything else."

Abekro is quite far into the bush. Below is a picture of a woman pounding cassava to make foutou, the Ivorian equivalent of the Ghanaian fufu...

And here is a photo of the donations ceremony. The people of this village were so unaccustomed to the idea that someone from outside their community would actually care that they sat, stupefied, and only slowly warmed up to the realization that they had been given a marvelous tool!

After Abekro, we drove down the road in the direction of San Pedro to a village famous for its monkeys. The story goes that in the 19th century, when the French colonialists were capturing able-bodied young men and women, using them as forced labor on their farms, a village doctor made a potion to turn his entire family into monkeys. Unfortunately, he was in such a rush that his reverse potion didn't work, and the entire family stayed as monkeys. Hence, it is not permitted to kill these monkeys, of which there are about 600. I've been to this village 3 other times, but I wanted Katie and Anna to see them.

We drove into Daloa where we visited the only scale manufacturer in Cote d'Ivoire. They manufactured the three scales we delivered this year. A 200 Kg capacity scale costs $400 and then you can add on about $100 for delivery costs.

We spent the night in a nice hotel, where we got to wash up and prepare for the voyage home.

Tuesday, August 18

As usual, an early morning. We drove rapidly south. At 9 AM, we stopped at a friend's of Albert's and Arsene's, who fed us breakfast. He is the doctor of a clinic; he does everything except surgery involving general anesthesia. In the picture are the doctor on the left, Katie and Anna in the middle, and the doctor's wife and youngest child on the right. They are both Muslim. One's religion is not a big deal in Cote d'Ivoire, and Christians and Muslims blend seamlessly--at least in my experience.

After a lovely breakfast of omelet with baguette Nescafe (an Ivorian product) and condensed milk, we continued our drive south. By noon, we had reached San Pedro, the major exporting port for Cote d'Ivoire, through which most beans for American chocolate pass as well as the many tons of tropical hardwood that go into building European homes.

We walked around the port quickly so Katie and Anna could see for themselves how cocoa beans are exported. Then we drove back to Saf Cacao. Owned by Ali Lakiss, a Shiite from Southern Lebanon, Saf Cacao is the fourth largest cocoa buyer in Cote d'Ivoire. Numbers one through three are, respectively, Cargill, ADM, and Barry Callebaut. Years ago, I poked my head over the wall surrounding Saf Cacao to take a picture. A window opened in the administration building, and Ali stuck his head out and said, "Come on in and take your photos! We have nothing to hide!" Needless to say, American and European companies would never do such a thing.

Ali Lakiss in his office in August, 2007...

Ali assigned his son to take us around. We started at the QC labs, of which there are two, one for testing the FFA (free fatty acids) of cocoa butter and the other for quality grading the beans themselves. Every truckload that enters Saf-Cacao is tested for quality and payment is predicated on it.

In this photo, the lab technician explains the method for determining TTA or titratable acidity. First, you dissolve the fat in ether and then in alcohol. A standardized solution of NaOH is dropped into the flask containing the sample and 2 drops of phenolphthalein. Simple Chem 101 methodology. No hoods are in the lab, so pay attention with the ether!!

We then entered the cocoa drying building, which houses about 30,000 tons of cocoa beans bagged up for export. Each section is identifiable by quality, so if you buy from Saf Cacao, you specify the quality you want (% moldy, slaty, etc.) At one end of the enormous warehouse are the drying ovens which drive the moisture of the beans that have arrived from the country to 7%. At that temperature, they will keep for years. The drying ovens heat the beans to about 180 degrees F, hot enough to kill bugs but not so hot as to alter flavors. Needless to say, really high quality cocoa is not dried this way. But Cote d'Ivoire doesn't supply the quality market. When you eat Easter bunnies, candy bars, Easter eggs, and Halloween chocolates, you are eating Ivorian beans. Period.

Our next tour was of the new building behind the warehouse. Ali is going to be producing chocolate liquor (100% chocolate) within a year. His is one of the very few grinding plants in Cote d'Ivoire. Traditionally, beans were exported to ports with large grinding companies such as Philadelphia and Rotterdam. Today, as energy costs rise, it makes sense to process the beans in the country of origin. Shipping costs are based more on volume than weight, so the more you fit in a tub (aka ship), the lower the shipping costs. Here's one of the mammoth machines that have been installed...

About 1 PM, we set out for the 6 hour trek back to Abidjan. We knew the road would be bad, and we also knew that it is highly unwise to travel at night, because there are people who dig up the roads, cause accidents, then steal everything in the car. About halfway through the trip, however, the driver got a little too close to the soft edge, and our car roll into the ditch, its occupants dangling upside down from their seatbelts. People immediately stopped and helped us out, then rolled the car back over. One person cut down a lot of weeds, and Arsene was able to drive the car back onto the road. Every side window was busted and the windshield heavily cracked. But other than a couple cuts, we were all fine

We left the scene of the accident (because it's not safe to "be vulnerable" after dark) and drove to the nearest large town (Grand Lahou), where we spent an additional 2 hours dealing with police. One of Albert's friends met us there, so Katie, Anna, and I rode with him while Albert and Arsene drove the jeep. We arrived in Abidjan at 9 PM, ate a fine meal of anteater and fish, and then headed to the airport.

There, we picked up the lost piece of luggage containing the tchotchkis, then said our good-byes at 11 PM. This of course could not be the real end of the adventure. Oh no. More had to happen...

We stood around until 1 AM with several hundred others. They finally let us check in, and we sat and snoozed until 6:30 AM, when we boarded the plane whose arrival had been delayed by a pilot strike for 5 hours. Needless to say, we missed our connection to NYC, so we slept on the floor of Terminal 4 in JFK for 6 hours and paid an additiional $1020 because of the Royal Air Maroc pilot strike to Delta Airlines, and finally made it to LAX, 12 hours late.

But, all's well that ends well....

Trip to Africa, 2008

2008-08-11T21:06:00.001-07:00

Introduction:
------------------------

This year's trip consisted of two, one-week trips, the first to Ghana, and the second to Cote d'Ivoire. We accomplished the following:

1. We built a solar drier in the village of Ebekawopa.
2. We distributed 200 pairs of boots to 5 villages in Ghana.
3. We distributed 200 pairs of boots to 5 villages in Cote d'Ivoire.
4. We distributed 100 SuperGrain bags
5. We donated two dryness meters
6. We donated 1 scale
7. We discussed a new system for increasing cocoa farmer profitability

This year's trip consisted of the following actors:

Tom, trip leader, and president of Project Hope and Fairness and Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates, Inc.

Skyline Lau, student in Accounting and International Finance at California State Polytechnic University.

Peter Joy Sewornoo, Ghana representative of PH&F and master's degree candidate in trade law at a school in Bern, Switzerland.

Padmore, friend of Peter and Tom, who is finishing his training in refrigeration and air conditioning engineering.

Alex, driver in Ghana, who has worked for 12 years, driving and entertaining visiting British dignitaries.

Evariste , Ivory Coast representative of PH&F, responsible for planning details of Ivorian visit.

Maury, Ivorian driver and over-all super-conscious employee who washes the car's motor before he eats his own breakfast.

This year's trip was made possible by the following donations...

$4,000 raised by Amy Cheng of Seattle, Washington, to pay for the 400 boots donated to 10 villages.
$2,500 donated by Joanne Currie to offset general expenses
$1,000 contributed by Don Maruska to offset the cost of the scale donated to Dawayo-Chantier
$1,000 contributed by Skyline Lau to partially pay for a bathroom in Pezoan
$500 by Ernie Roide to help pay for 1 dryness meter
TMTTA (too much to talk about) spent by Tom Neuhaus to pick up the slack

Friday, August 15

In the morning, we left San Luis Obispo on the bus. Our flight to Minneapolis left in the afternoon, and in the evening, we took a KLM flght to Amsterdam and arrived early Saturday morning. We boarded the next flight, to Accra in the late morning, and arrived in Accra at 6:30 PM, a very sane time to arrive in West Africa.

We waited for the luggage for about 45 minutes. Three of four suitcases had arrived, but not the fourth. I ran outside (past all the immigration officials) to let Peter know that we were experiencing problems. The baggage people traced the bag back to Amsterdam. This was an unfortunate setback, as it meant that something our schedule would have to be sacrificed.

We checked into the Mensvic Hotel, located near the airport. Since the car was parked at the hotel, we jumped in and drove to a pharmacy, where I bought enough toiletries to get me by for a day.

Sunday, August 17

The suitcase is to arrive in the evening. We divide the day into two parts: the morning when we visit Nkrumah's mausoleum and the afternoon when we drive up the coast to hopefully visit a homeopathic malaria treatment clinic.

For anyone visiting West Africa, it's important to know some rudimentary history: the Scramble for Africa, the colonial period, independence, and post-independence. The visit to Nkrumah's mausoleum is a chance to learn about Nkrumah's attempts to balance the First and Second worlds against each other in order to obtain development money. The mausoleum and museum are downtown. The museum is especially valuable for its display of Nkrumah's copious writings and the large pictures showing his life and efforts at uniting Africa.

Peter, Skyline, and Padmore joining Kwame Nkrumah in his pursuit of African independence and development.

I had the "address" of a woman who is running a homeopathic malaria treatment clinic, located about 50 Km west of Accra in Senya Beraku. We set out on a day trip to a town on the ocean. After several hours drive up and down roads, attempting to follow emailed directions, we never found the clinic. We did find: 1) a live snake; 2) an enormous compound on the ocean belonging to the president of Burkina Faso; and 3) an attractive oceanfront hotel.

We passed children in one hamlet who were playing with their "pet" snake.

We spent a few hours at this small resort (Till's Hotel) on the ocean, popular with European tourists, one of whom was parasurfing.

Although we were told to just wait until the baggage service called us, I decided to phone at 11:30 PM, as they had not called and the bag should have arrived at 6:30 PM. Good thing. They would have closed at midnight and we would have had to seek out the bag in the morning, cutting further into our schedule. We made the right decision, as the bag was there. Never believe everything people tell you. God helps those who help themselves.

Monday, August 18

We left for Cape Coast at 11 AM, the back of the 4X4 loaded with boots, and the top rack filled with our luggage and still more boxes of boots.

We spent an hour talking to the president of Agrimat, which distributes Grainpro products to farmers, including the SuperGrain bag, which I bought 100 of in order to talk to farmers about the concept of modified atmospheric storage, where by drying the product and storing in an O2-impervious bag, one can cause a CO2 rich atmosphere to form, thereby preventing oxidative rancidity and killing all insects. Then they can sell when they have enough product to demand a good price. These bags only cost $2 each.

We arrived in Cape Coast at about 3 PM, then toured the slave castle, and ate right on the beach in the usual place. I had boiled plantain, vegetables, and chicken. Some of the best roast chicken ever! So flavorful compared to what we get in the U.S., organic or non. The vegetables were cooked in palm oil. Very delicious. And we had a bar of Ghanaian chocolate for dessert.

We headed to Mmaniaye, our first village in the early evening. A village of maybe 100, it has one well, no running water, and no electricity.

The children of Mmaniaye greet us. Skyline is an instant hit, as she is quite exotic to look at, and she has a very pleasant demeanor with the children, despite the onrush of hands poking and prodding her.

After our arrival, we celebrated with a large bonfire, music, and dance.

Tuesday, August 19

The next morning, I took this picture of three men getting ready to spray cocoa trees. The government of Ghana provides assistance to cocoa farmers in order to keep their orchards healthy. Cocoa is especially vulnerable to myrids, an insect, and black pod.

Padmore takes a shower.

Processing palm kernels into oil used for deep-fat frying.

Women preparing the palaver sauce for our lunch. It is made of greens minced by pushing them with one's palm against the cutting edge of a cutlass or machete.

Skyline befriends Soledad, who is 16 years old and whom we met last year.

Young man wears last year's t-shirt.

PH&F donates 40 pairs of boots to Mmaniaye.

The ceremony was over at 2 PM, and we drove to Adiyaw, a neighboring village. The heat was almost unbearable, and I was feeling the one hour of sleep I had had the night before, sleeping on the hard ground. We donated the 40 pairs of boots, t-shirts, and chocolate and quickly moved on, as we were really tired.

We drove to Cape Coast to do Internet, then back to Ebekawopa, our next village. We arrived in the evening, after dark. The road to Ebekawopa was more treacherous than last year. Heavy rains had caused extensive damage, and the last hill before the village was treacherous and slippery. Nevertheless, we arrived, and we immediately sat in the open area in front of the village school to enjoy another bonfire accompanied by dance, songs, and a skit.

Wednesday, August 20

Ebekawopa means "It will affect your waist", meaning that the village is so far away from anything that going there causes you to lose weight.

We slept on the concrete floor of the church. I slept soundly and snored loudly, disturbing the sleep of my companions. In the morning, we started with the usual Ghanaian breakfast--boiled yams (African yams which are 2 feet long, 4 inches in diameter, and quite starchy), boiled plantains, vegetable stew complete with hunks of salt fish swimming under the usual sheen of bright orange palm oil. The flavors are as usual marvelous, although the vitamin A-rich palm oil tests the mettle of your gall bladder.

This was to be the day I was going to build a solar cocoa beans dryer. The Lutheran Pastor, Samson, had arranged a meeting with the carpenter. The carpenter had arrived at 6 AM, but I had to do my bathroom routine. But first, a trip to the toilet. This consisted of walking about 400 feet down a path, past the palm oil "factory", past a cocoa grove, past several houses, to the school, through the classroom with its mud floor, behind the school, through the weedy schoolyard, to a mud and palm structure whose interior consisted of large planks over a 5 foot deep trench. You removed your bottom clothing (in full view of anyone curious enough to look out the back of a classroom), squatted over the trench. No running water to wash your hands. Oh well, that's why you use your left hand and eat with your right.

Following the bathroom routine, I met with the carpenter. I showed him a structure (a pantry) on which to base the design.

While the carpenters labored, we participated in the donations ceremony. I was presented with a chiefly shirt and named "Chief of Development", to be "enstooled" next year. This pictures shows us donating the 400 boots to the village.

All day, the carpenter and his assistant worked. First, they had to get nails. They rode their bikes down the 3 mile long road complete with the muddy "cliff" back to their village and found a bag of formerly used nails and screws, quite rusty. They also brought several rough hewn planks of tropical wood (local product :=)). They spent the day sawing those planks BY HAND and planing them with two hand planers. Just like the old shipbuilders.

.

Two planks brought in by bicycle

The carpenter's sawing technique.

By the end of the ceremony, at about 1 PM, this is how far the carpenters had progressed.

The carpenters made these frames and we covered them with screen so the cocoa beans would dry from both sides.

By the end of the day, we had the structure, which is 32 X 32 inches (they use inches because they have an American tape measure) and about 5 feet high. The top and sides are covered with plastic, there's a door on the front, 5 trays that slide in and out, each made with a frame covered with plastic screen. I inserted the solar powered fan and whoosh off it went.

We anchored the machine next to the "main street", a path and filled it with cocoa beans. Samson will email me periodically to let me know how the machine works. I think it will work well. The sun heats up the plastic covered chamber, causing the air to gain capacity to hold moisture. The fan sucks the warm, moist air out and sucks cool, dry air through the 5 trays. At night, the dryer works more slowly as convection occurs naturally.

Thursday, August 21

The following morning, we set up the machine. Sampson, the Lutheran minister, is loading cocoa beans into the machine.

A close-up of the beans on their trays and the solar-powered fan.

Padmore Cobbina reflects about how one could set up a business distributing the hardware to make these driers possible.

We left about 10:30 AM and drove to Gyaware, which means "Too Far to Come MArry You". We were 2 days late, so only a few farmers were there. I did my usual dog and pony show and Peter translated into Fante, the local language, which is quite beautiful.

Donating the boots.

I also gave my customary talk about the dryness meter and the grain storage bags. With every talk, I give the village 5 SuperGrain bags. We are postulating that if the cocoa farmer knows the dryness of his beans as well as the true weight, he is able to deal from a position of strength and knowledge rather than weakness and ignorance. Here is a summary of what we discuss:

1. The dryness meter, which costs $550 in the U.S. and $1,000 in Ghana, is useful for ensuring that the cocoa beans are truly 7% humidity before they are stored in the bags. This prevents molding.

2. The dryness meter will allow the village to dry commodities to moisture levels just under what the middleman/buyer wants. That way, the farmer/village earns more money, because they are selling more water--clear profit.

3. The grain storage bags are useful for cocoa, rice, corn, cowpeas, soybeans, dried coconut, and any other dried commodity. They set up a high CO2 atmosphere which kills all animal life, meaning that the commodity can be stored indefinitely or until the farmer or village decides to sell.

We finished the morning visiting Jukwa, donating boots and discussing our new system. Picture is of donating 5 SuperGrain bags.

Afterwards, we headed north to Kakum National Park. This is a 300 square kilometer preserve of virgin forest. Its most famous feature is the canopy walk, which we did. This was my first time, and less courage is required to complete the trek 110 feet above the forest floor.

We spent the rest of the day driving north to Kumasi, where we stayed in the Treasure Island hotel. The rates are very inexpensive, the plumbing works, and there are two internet-connected computers in the lobby. Handy.

Friday, August 22

We started Friday by driving to Lake Bosumtwi, a 10-mile-wide meteor impact crater. BTW, a meteor is the rock while it is still in space. A meteorite is the mineral that results after the meteor has contacted terra. So, it is not correct to say "meteorite impact crater."

Lake Bosumtwi is a tourist favorite. It is quite beautiful, and there's a splendid mythological tale connected with it. Do not believe the tale that people at the edge of the lake tell you about why it's shrinking. They want your money. They claim it's to plant trees to minimize evaporation. It's all a scam.

There is a lovely hotel that costs only $45 per night right on the lake. The grounds are very nice. You can rent a log to float out on the lake. Kids fish for tilapia and move their logs through the water by using their flipflops as oars.

We arrived in Accra around 8 PM and had dinner with a friend at the American Embassy. He is connecting me with potential donors and perhaps next summer he will invite me to present my work at the embassy.

Saturday, August 23

Today, Skyline and I flew to Abidjan. We arrived at 3:30 PM. Evariste and driver, Maury, met us at the airport. We immediately set out for Gagnoa, as the drive would take about 5 hours. We arrived at 11 PM, only 1 hour from our destination of Galebre.

Sunday, August 24

We set out early and arrived in Galebre at 9 AM. Dr. Brou and Toty were waiting for us, and after a half hour getting acquainted, we set out for our destination that day, Dawayo-Chantier, a village where we had put a new roof on the schoolhouse and which was one of our target villages. Dr. Brou is an evangelical preacher whose church is based in Abidjan. His natal village is Dawayo, and Dawayo-Chantier is about 6 miles in from the main Gagnoa-Galebre road.

We had a bit of a problem finding the road because once the sun sets, it's hard to find people to ask: Every time roads split or cross, there is no sign to tell you the way: Also; the police and military are out in force bleeding the poor people dry while letting the wealthy zoom past in their fancy 4X4s, smug in the plush comfort of their vehicles, their heavy gold jewelry and airs of superiority: Every time we got stopped, we had to pay. Driver's license no good and will have to forfeit. $20 gets it back. Last night was the culmination. on the way back into Abidjan, they were playing their usual nasty tricks. Open the trunk. Want to search your luggage. "T-shirts? Oh, I want one. Why are you so selfish and horde them only for the farmers?"

I give out one. Suddenly; the car is surrounded with thieving military. So I stood up and yelled, "I didn't come thousands of miles to help cocoa farmers only to have the military pilfer my suitcases!" They stopped theiving and we drove away. I felt good; like drinking Turkish coffee: What a buzz.

The schoolhouse with its new roof.

The elders from Dawayo-Chantier and from 3 other villages were waiting for us. We quickly assembled in one of the classrooms of the new school. Dr. Brou gave a talk about the importance of making this experiment work. He introduced me and Toty. I (through PH&F) donated the tools and thought up the system, and Toty will implement it by visiting the village every month and by recording all financial transactions so that we can gather data documenting how knowing the weight and the dryness of cocoa beans empowers villages to earn more money and ultimately to lift the cocoa farmer out of poverty.

Dr. Brou and I discussing the plastic bags that will allow farmers to store their beans as long as they wish.

Evariste Plegnon and Skyline. Evariste has been working with me since we met in 2004.

Cocoa beans drying the natural way--under the sun.

Children of Dawayo-Chantier.

The new weighing scale, donated by Don Maruska.

We had a delicious lunch back at Dr. Brou's house of Chicken Kedjenou and local rice. By 2 PM, we were back on the road, heading toward Abidjan. Another 5 hour drive. We spent the night at the Golden Hotel in Abidjan.

Monday, August 25

Monday morning, we went to the American embassy to apply for Evariste's visa. We spent 2 1/2 hours there and then drove to the Lebanese quarter, where we ate fabulous Lebanese food, stuff I've never had. For example yogurt mixed with toasted bread (yes i know), olive oil, fava beans, and tongue. Lovely olives and pickled vegetabls. Finished with Turkish coffee.

Skyline and I went to do the Internet Cafe thing. Skyline and I then sat in the cafe waiting for Evariste and Maury, our driver. They were supposed to drive to Port Bouet and load up the boots. So we did 90 minutes of internet and then another 90 minutes of sipping Oranginas.

Finally, they arrived, and Evariste informs me that only 12 of the 20 bags of boots fit in the car and on top. I looked at the car and exploded. "I didn't fly 6000 miles to only deliver 2/3's of the boots!, I yelled." So we drove back to Port Bouet and loaded ALL the rest of the boots. We stacked 5 packs on the back seat between us. Later, I found out that Evariste had "forgotten" the 20th pack in his bedroom, along with the LOVELY Lebanese pastries we had purchased for the road. Slippery fingers (and sticky).

Skyline with Evariste's daughter. Whenever we encountered children, Skyline was there cutting little squares of paper and showing them how to make origami birds and flowers.

The car properly stuffed, we started out toward Yamoussoukro: First, we're stopped by the police just at the border betzeen Port Bouet and Abidjan: 5 dollar bribe. Then, we're stopped again in Abidjan: 10 dollar bribe. Stop at the bank to get more (sic) moula. Drive 10 minutes north. Stopped. 15 dollar bribe. Always the reason is we're too overloaded but of course the real reason is we're fat flies in the path of the lizard's tongue.

It was by now dark: We stopped for dinner after one of the checkpoints; Skyline and I enjoyed some spicy grilled mutton. The head honcho of the checkpoint was quite nice and told us to find a hotel rather than continue: We continued. Around 11 PM, we reached a town just south of Yamoussoukro. We check into a filthiest hotel I'd ever seen. And worst construction. Evariste was eaten by bedbugs all night. But the electricity and the plumbing worked.

Tuesday, August 26

Skyline and I enjoyed a little breakfast while wating for Evariste and Maury to wake up. We sat at a local maquis and enjoyed the usual omelet and bread, sipping condensed milk cafe au lait (I love the stuff). Across the street, a wooden building started to smoke and there were loud popping sounds followed by bangs. An electrical fire accompanied by involvement of the surrounding wood structure. After 5 minutes, the "fire department" arrived, which consisted of a pickup. They took one look and sped away. Moments later, the electricity was off in the entire quarter. I guess fuses and circuit breakers are not used.

The building's occupants quickly put out the fire by slinging bowls of water onto the roof of the building. Necessity is the mother of invention.

We drove to Yamoussoukro, the capital. Fun things to do? Visit the crocs! We drtove to the presidential palace, which is on a manmade lake full of crocodiles. We were allowed to film them as long as we don't take a picture of the palace (hasn't been used in 15 yeqrs--cost billions). I took video of a live chicken tossed to the crocs. A young yellow one caught it: The 12 footers were too lazy: One feather remained on the croc's lower lip, a reminder of the chicken that was. We paid the old man/keeper to jump in and teaze a croc by pulling its tail.

Predator and prey.

After the excitement, we continued on to the basilica, the largest church in the world. Constructed by President Houphouet Boigny in the 80s using World Bank money, it is a replica of St. Peter's in Rome. The pope at the time called Houphouet Boigny and asked him to make it smaller than the original. Houphoet Boigny obliged by making it 1 meter shorter, then erected a cupola on top to make it taller. A 100-foot-high statue of the president is on the inside. I have never had time to visit.

We continued to Daloa, arriving at 4 PM. We checked into our hotel and then drove out to Batteguedea and Broguhe; where we delivered 80 pairs of boots and I talked about next year's project, which is to deliver a dryness meter and plastic bags so they can store products and get higher prices for larger amounts sold. We enjoyed Bangi (palm wine) which proved to be a powerful laxative. Went native.

Meeting with members of the village of Broguhe.

Donating boots to Batteguedea.

Wednesday, August 27

This morning, we set out for Issia and the villages in its vicinity. The drive takes about 2 hours. On the way, we met someone who had just hunted this large rodent, called a Grasscutter in Ghana and agouti in Ivory Coast. We ate it the next day, Kedjenou style.

As you enter Issia, you see a large granitic hill on the east side of the road, reminiscent of Ayers Rock in Australia and Enchanted Rock in Texas. It's essentially a large inclusion of magma exposed as 500 feet of surrounding sedimentary rock wore away and flushed out into the Gulf of Guinea.

The story about the rock is as follows. A man visits a village located where Issia now stands. He asks for shelter but is refused. In retaliation, he turns the village into a rock.

Apparently, Mary, mother of Jesus, appeared at the foot of the rock, so there is a large retreat center now located there. We spent an hour there, feeling the peace and silence.

We strolled on the paths among the trees, listening to the service taking place al fresco in the small structure at the top of hundreds of stairs. Faithful sat on benches here and there, praying or singing. Thousands come here every year.

When we came out of the retreat center grounds, I took this picture of a lad herding cows through town.

We continued to Pezoan, the village where Skyline and I had paid for the bathroom. We spent a lttle time, did our usual presentation, unloaded our luggage, and then headed down the road to Zereguhe. There, we conducted the usual ceremony--donation followed by discussion of new system for ensuring dryness of beans. After 2 hours; we drove to Depa, where we began our meeting on lawnchairs in front of the chief's house. It began to sprinkle. I suggested we ignore the sprinkles, but the elders thought that to be a bad idea, pointing to the horizon. Within a minute, we had a deluge of diluvian proportions. Noah would have been impressed. Fortunately; the chief's meeting structure held us all.

The new WC in Pezoan. It is a solid, concrete block structure with a concrete pad on the inside. There is lots of space to take a bucket shower, and the "pit" is deep enough to last a hundred years, according to the builders.

Donating boots, SuperGrain bags, and t-shirts in the Pezoan's chief's outdoors living room. He built it himself. Although the picture does not do it justice, the craftsmanship is quite impressive: every connection tight, every cross piece neatly in place. The ceremonial aspects were kept short, as we needed to head down the road to Zereguhe and Depa while it was still light.

We joined the people of Zereguhe and sat on plastic lawnchairs in one of the communal areas.

Afterwards, we drove to Depa. We started our meeting "outside" but it began to rain, so we collected under the chief's outdoor living room. It poured, and rivers of water rushed down the hill. There is no drainage system in the village, so water follows routes it has carved in the soil. This picture, a little fuzzy because of the low light, shows me donating the second dryness meter. I donated it to Depa, as I feel a special bond with the chief there and so I made Depa the last village we would visit.

Depa gave us this rooster in exchange for the boots, t-shirts, and dryness meter.

We celebrated our friendship with Ivorian whiskey: Yum.
By the end of our meeting , it was dark and still raining. We got into the now empty car (rooster excepted) and slid/drove back to the highway, then back to Pezoan. Here; we had dinner of a second grasscutter, the one we'd bought and plunked in the trunk. I showered in the new Turkish toilet (hole in one corner with lots of room to take a nice African shower; which means pouring the contents on your head.) We retired to the chief's sleeping quarters. I slept in the chief's bedroom.

Thursday, August 28

This morning; we started with coffee and bread for breakfast; Arsene, who is from Depa, asked for money to help pay for his child's medicine. I gave him 20,000 CFA, which amounts to $50. This equals about 3 months of earnings for the average farmer.

The chief arrived and performed a bobo ritual on Skyline. This consists of passing a fowl around your guest, then serving the fowl to the guest for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

We went into the ceremony structure and listened to music performed by the youth. I learned one of the songs and amused people with my lame rendition of it. We then ate breakfast, which consisted of the bobo hen. This was followed by still another music and rhythm period. It was noon before we left Pezoan. We drove back to Depa; because they had a "surprise" for us. It consisted of my being named "village chief", which means I now have a vote on their council, and I also have chiefly dress and a scepter, which consists of a goat hair brush. Skyline also has chiefly garb: I guess such a thing should go on one's resume! I will post the picture as soon as I get it from Skyline's camera.

Depa gave us two goats after the ceremony. Maury is tying them (live) to the roofrack. Later, we moved them to a more comfortable berth inside the car.

We left Depa for San Pedro and drove south for most of the afternoon. Only stop was a rubber plantation to show Skyline how latex is collected. At 5 PM we arrived in San Pedro and immediately stopped by Saf Cacao; which is owned by Ali Lakiss. It's the 4th largest cocoa buyer in Ivory Coast. The plan is for Ali to accept beans from the 5 villages and grind them into cocoa liquor, which we will turn into chocolate. This is a longterm plan for a separate line of Fair Trade only chocolate, made from the beans of Project Hope and Fairness villages. We will pay for quality, and thereby pass more money onto the farmer.
We're stayed in a Vietnamese hotel tonight and ate Vietnamese food, which Evariste proclaimed to be "expensive and lacking substance."

Ali Lakiss's new grinding plant at Saf Cacao. We were shown around by his new supervisor of production in the new grinding plant.

Friday, August 29

Yesterday, Friday, we set out from San Pedro at 8 AM for the 7 hour drive over rutted roads. Maury put my two black suitcases on the roof and made a little padlock complete with African grass in the back for the two goats. During the trip, whenever we finished a banana, we tossed the goats the peels. Ever see a smiling goat?
At 9 AM, Maury slowed down, as the road was lined on both sides by people standing around. They were standing in mute respect for a 30 year old woman whose body lay on the side of the road, under a blanket. We stopped to inquire and show respect by not just driving through. The woman had been hit by a car at 5 AM. Her mother walked up and down the road flailing her hands and crying out.
We gave one of the people a ride to the next village and we continued on our way.
The trip was otherwise fairly eventless and we entered Abidjan at 4PM. Our hope was to visit Bart Willem at SACO in order to talk about the upcoming bean certification system that has been proposed and that may be implemented to combat child slavery and abuses of child labor. Unfortunately, he was too busy.
We drove to Dr. Brou's house. Dr. Brou started Kedesch; the school for children of cocoa farmers in Galebre. We are working wirh his assistant to set up a system of ensuring that farmers know tyhe weight and dryness of their beans before they enter negotiations with middlemen.
Dr. Brou's house is a large concrete villa populated with close to 20 people. 4 of them are his family. The rest are church members and their families.
We drove 1 hour over kidney-crunching dirt roads to visit Dr. BRou's church. He has 27 pastors, dozens of deacons, and a congregation approaching 2000. Tuesdays through Fridays, hundreds sleep in the sanctuary and pray. The sanctuary; surrounded by the usual rutted dirt, is an enormous roof on poles. It and the surrounding buildings are under construction. When we arrived, the entire site was pitch black because the city had just cut the power.
We returned to Dr. Brou's, ate a dinner of beef and rabbit stew (last year he fed us monkey stew).
The next morning; Saturday, we ate breakfast with Dr. Brou and listened to his grandiose plans for building an enormous church complete with church businesses, hospital, school, etc. He left us at 10 AM to lecture to 60 pastors at his church.
Although I have no interest in promoting Dr. Brou's evangelistic ambitions, I have found someone who cares about the cocoa farmer and who can work with me aqs I plan to work with him.
"This trip is effectively over. I don't expect to report any more adventures, as the plane leaves in 4 hours. What could possibly happen in that time? Maybe it's bad luck to even ask such a question. ", I said in an email. Nothing untoward happened, and the trip back was eventless. An auspicious end to a successful trip. I hope you, dear reader, consider coming with us in the future. Tom Neuhaus

Africa Trip, 2007: Introduction and First Day

2007-09-11T21:55:00.000-07:00

This blog is about a trip taken by four individuals: Tom Neuhaus (the 57-year-old narrator of this blog), Stan Thompson (a 70-year-old photographer and writer), Mark Phillips (a 50-year-old engineer), and his wife, Kate Montgomery (a 4th/5th grade school teacher).

The trip began with the above four individuals meeting in Casablanca, Morocco. We spent two weeks, from August 9 through 25, touring the cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.

This is my fifth time in West Africa, my second trip with others paying to come along. In the past, I have described the trip as motivated by a need to know just how difficult the life of a cocoa farmer is. This time, I came to the realization that even though cocoa farmers have short lives and their children have minimal opportunities at an education and a life away from the village, they have some things we do not have: a true sense of community, a non-linear sense of time, and a peaceful way of life.

Whether you are of the mind that tropical farmers deserve to be treated fairly or whether you see more the innate nobility of their way of life, if you have an open mind and a relatively sound body, you will love coming with us. There is no better experience than waking up in a village, walking from home to home, watching women cook, children play, and men build this or that. And because you are bringing valuable tools in the form of boots, machetes, t-shirts, or bathrooms, the transaction comes out even. They share their way of life with you and you provide them articles that make their lives a little easier and a little more pleasurable.

During the trip, we also interview Fair Trade cooperative officials at Kuapa Kokoo in Kumasi, Ghana and at Kavokiva in Gonate, Côte d'Ivoire and buyers such as Saf-Cacao in San Pedro. At the Saf-Cacao plant's Quality Control Laboratory, we learn how to grade cocoa beans. In Ghana, we visit the port, Takoradi, from which most of Ghana's cocoa is exported and we watch the stevedores run with 141-lb bags of cocoa from the warehouse into the container. The one thing we do not do is find slaves on the cocoa-growing farms. While there have been reliable reports of slavery on some cocoa farms, I personally have never seen them.

This trip is sponsored by Project Hope and Fairness, a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation and Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates, Inc. I am trying to stimulate interest among Americans, Canadians, and Europeans in the life of cocoa farmers. The purpose of this non-profit is not to do charity, which sometimes implies the superiority of the giver. Instead, it is an exploration of ways to to build social, spiritual, and commercial links between consumers and producers. Our long-term goal is to move the cocoa business from its current post-colonial exploitative relationships to the new business model called "social entrepreneurship."

THIS YEAR'S CAST
---------
Tom Neuhaus, president of Project Hope and Fairness and of Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates and tour operator. Uncanny ability to find available WCs.

Stan Thompson, photographer and columnist for the Morro Bay Sun Bulletin. Excellent traveler and superb wit.

Mark Phillips, Engineer Extraordinaire, Dancer Extraordinaire, and SLO peace activist.

Kate, elementary school teacher and a valuable link to children and to women of the villages, who swarmed her every time Kate emerged from the car.

Peter Joy Sewornoo, our Ghanaian guide who found the villages, talked to the chiefs, and made all the transportation of sleeping arrangements. Peter has been accepted at a Swiss institute to earn his Master's Degree in economics.

Padmore Cobbina, the youngest member, who provided rap and levity at judicious moments. Padmore will be studying air conditioning and refrigeration this fall. We all agree that this is particularly congruent with his cool personality.

Evariste Plegnon, Tom's "Frere Ivoirien" since August, 2004. Miracle worker: deliverer of scales, builder of WCs, and shrewd "politicien."
Favorite phrase, "Je ne suis pas un politicien!"

Ray, Le Croc.

To commemorate fast food, we quote...

"How Doth the Little Crocodile" by Lewis Carroll

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On ev'ry golden scale
How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws...
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws.

Cheers. And enjoy reading the blog of the Second Annual Project Hope and Fairness Trip to Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.

The success of this trip made possible by:

Joanne Currie--monetary donation to Kedesch to build classrooms
Members of the following churches, who bought t-shirts and chocolates, raising $2300 for machettes and boots
Mount Carmel Lutheran Church, San Luis Obispo, CA
Mission Catholic Church, San Luis Obispo, CA
Trinity Lutheran Curch, Vermillion, South Dakota
Farmer's Market, San Luis Obispo
Stan, Mark, and Kate, who each contributed $1,000, making possible the beautiful WCs of Zereguhe and Depa

Friday, August 10

2007-09-11T20:07:00.001-07:00

We arrived in Accra around 4:00 AM. It took a while to get through customs. Peter and the hotel chauffeur were waiting for us outside. I paid $40 to the porters and $10 to the driver from Mensvic. I also paid $10 to the woman at the front desk. We arrived at 5:30 AM. Peter met the man with the rental car and I went to meet them at 7 AM.

I slept until 9 AM and met the others at breakfast, which I was in no shape to eat. We decided that we would all go downtown to purchase the boots and cutlasses (machetes).

We drove to Tudu area close to the MTTU (Motor Traffic Unit) and to Novotel and purchased 180 cutlasses and 82 boots (Wellington boots.) We paid $600 for the cutlasses and $600 for the boots, approximately. It took hours to get this done--perhaps until 1 PM. Owners of stores were both Lebanese and were very nice and efficient.

Tom purchasing rubber boots (called Wellingtons because Ghana was a British colony.)

The boxes of boots were quite voluminous; fortunately we had a roof-rack. Peter and I walked through an outdoor market, looking for the appropriate material. We found a large net designed to hold vegetables and made out of nylon. We also purchased some nylon twine. We paid someone $10 to help us find these items, which cost only about $5. We jammed the boots and machetes into the interior and drove back to the hotel.

We arrived back at the hotel at around 2 PM and the hotel doorman worked with Mark to attach the boxes of boots to the top of the car.

We left Accra and drove slowly through heavy traffic toward Cape Coast. We arrived at around 6 PM, ordered dinner in the restaurant next to the castle, then took a half hour to walk on the beach. We then ate dinner, my meal arriving a full 30 minutes after everyone else had gotten theirs. We had dinner with Abdullah.

We then set out for Jukwa, arriving around 9:30 PM. People were still waiting for us, amazingly enough. We had a short ceremony, agreeing to come back the next morning to disperse boots and cutlasses.

We drove further north and turned off the blacktop onto a rutted dirt road. This was fine until we came to a large lumber truck blocking our way. We drove with the left wheels in the forest, then turned back onto the road and negotiated somewhat challenging dips until we came to the village--a total of perhaps 2 km. It was 10:30 PM and the village was completely black. However, Peter was able to find a few persons who were awake and, within 10 minutes, we were surrounded by people. We hung around the porch of a small house that we were supposed to sleep in. Our hosts lined the floor with plastic sheets covered with cotton sheets.

Meanwhile, quite a lot of hullaballoo was happening on the porch. Some people brought this kerosene lamp for light. Lots of people came and sat on the porch with us.

Kate had already gathered children about her and was enjoying their company. Here are some children who were very excited to meet a white woman!

After about a half hour--near 11 PM--a bonfire was started with ends of bamboo, and the village crier went around with the "Gong-Gong", waking people up with a brass gong and a stick.

The bonfire was very bright, and dozens of people began a singing and dancing and drumming session that lasted until 2 AM.

Around 1 AM, being extremely tired, Peter and I took a shower at the well (borehole) in the dark and I went to bed. Kate and Mark continued dancing but were quite tired the next day. We all slept in the same room on a "concrete" floor with thin sheets covering it. I slept badly from about 1 AM until 5 AM when the roosters began to crow and the women were out sweeping the dirt.

Saturday, August 11

2007-09-09T14:47:00.000-07:00

We spent the morning hanging around MManiaye. Peter went in the chapel and sorted t-shirts. I walked around and took a few pictures.

I went to the village Mens Room. This consisted of a 20 foot long pit with a roof over it. Along one side were corn cobs and shreds of paper. Use your imagination for what they're for, but suffice it to say, spent corn cobs were used in 19th century America for the same purpose. It's hard for a soft 57 year old to squat. It's also challenging to miss the chickens poking around underneath. What is the appropriate greeting when others join you? I just said "hello!"

This girl is selling smoked, dried fish. It is used to flavor sauces based on palm oil, onion, chilies, tomatoes, or any combination thereof. A nutritionist would also appreciate that smoked, dried fish represents a valuable source of essential amino acids and a food scientist would appreciate how this method of preservation allows one to enrich the diet without resorting to refrigeration.

Oil palm fruits are removed from oil palm trees in these clumps.

They are then teased out of the clumps. Note the palm kernels lying around on the ground behind her. They will eventually be gathered up and taken to the processor, perhaps a grinding machine in a nearby village. A couple guinea fowl are eating scraps by her feet, and a broom lies at the ready behind her.

Oil palm fruits are processed by boiling the fruit, rubbing of the fibrous exterior, and cooking this in water to extract flavors, carbohydrates, and palm oil. A picture of women in the process of extracting the oil can be seen later in this blog (Wednesday, August 22--scroll down 2/3 of the way).

A basket of oil palm fruit. Sometimes, you'll see dump-trucks piled high. In western Côte d'Ivoire, oil palms extend for dozens of miles in every direction--the foundation of the European margarine, chocolate, and soap industries

When you walk through a village, assuming there hasn't been an assembly called, you will find people doing a wide variety of things. This young man is sewing shingles. They are dried and then stacked and stored until a house is being built or repaired.

Gari is an important staple. Made from shredded cassava or manioc roots that have been fermented until sour, it is packed into jute bags and then pressed to extract moisture. Bags of fermented shredded cassava are pressed between logs that are fastened together at one end, and then tied together at the other--like a nutcracker. Juices flow out onto the ground and the little streams of sour-smelling gari juice are green from the growth of blue-green algae.

Off to another side is a long trail a fierce, biting ants. The rooster doesn't seem to be interested.

Afterwards, it is shredded. This is a gari shredder in the neighboring village, Adiyaw. The man is clipping the heads off of large brads, then pounding them into a cylindrical block of wood.

The machine is actually a gasoline-powered lawnmower engine, attached via rubber belt to a whirring cylinder set at the bottom of a wooden box. Fermented cassava is introduced at the top and a powder falls out at the bottom.

The powdered pressed gari is then dried in large, flat pans over wood fires. The large pot in this picture holds something else. But this is a gari-drying shed. They set the flat pan over the fire and seal it to the stove with wet mud, thereby increasing the heating efficiency.

This woman is transplanting plantain cuttings which she will transplant. Plantain is made into fufu, roasted whole, or fried in bright orange palm oil.

We walked to a small cocoa grove and were given a lesson in proper pruning techniques and how to cut pods off the trees.

The block spots on the pods which aren't quite ripe (they turn yellow when ripe) are caused by myrids, a small fly that lives on the undersides of leaves. The common way to control myrids is by using a chemical spray. Every 1 of the 10 villages we visited asked for gasoline-powered sprayers. The organic control takes more time: trim overhanging branches and destroy myrid nests.

This pod is ripe. Note that it tapers and has a pointy end--meaning that it has a little more Criollo blood than pods that are more round.

On the way back, Stan took a picture of this bird cage on someone's porch. It's made from the pithy center of a plant they call "bamboo", although it's plain to see that it is not at all a bamboo, which has a hollow center and a segmentation.

And he also took this picture of a young man stucco'ing the outside of someone's house. You can tell that ciment powder is expensive--looks like he's using very little, if any.

Sweeping the dirt. Every morning, women take these brooms made of the central spine of a palm frond dried and bound and sweep up the detritus of the previous day.

This man decided to get us some coconuts. I was out of water, actually, so fresh green coconut juice really hit the spot! Here he is, climbing the tree...

Here he is getting ready to cut some coconuts to bring down.

Mark and I enjoy fresh coconut juice. There's about 12 oz of very healthy juice on the inside and about a quarter inch of gelatinous coconut meat that you scrape off with a spoon fashioned from a piece of coconut shell. Fabulous!

These are other pictures that Stan took of Mmaniaye villagers...

Mother and her two children...

Beautiful woman.

New father.

After a few hours of hanging around and taking photos, we finally had the gift-giving ceremony. Members of the village sat or stood under the canopy or ramada. Someone brought the chief's stool, and he is about to sit down on it. Every chief has a different stool.

The rhythm section, composed of young men playing old plastic jugs, supplied a beat to which people sang and danced. It was terrific to listen to.

The chief and I cross machetes.

After the exchange of gifts, Peter and I Peter started by talking about our mission and invited cocoa farmers to discuss what their problems were and how we might help in the future. As with all subsequent villages, they were open to future visits, and welcoming any stranger who would like to learn more about their ways of life.

We finished with the scarf dance. This includes more rhythm and music, and women dance in with the cloths they wrap on their heads and deposit these cloths in a tower. They then dance in, in reverse order, and pick their respective scarves up with their teeth and dance back out. This is all greeted with much hilarity.

We left Mmaniaye to a rousing send-off and drove back down the road toward Cape Coast until we reached the substantial and prosperous village, Jukwah. Many people had been waiting there for us, and of course we felt very apologetic. We had a nice ceremony, exchanging comments about how difficult the cocoa business is, etc. The two men in the picture are the first two people Peter and I contacted last year when we planned the 5-village tour. Ironically, Jukwah is the most prosperous of the 5 villages; the houses are made of concrete block.

We also visited the old chief of Jukwa.

We drove back toward the turn-off to Mmaniaye in order to meet the welcoming committee at Adiyaw, our third village to visit in one day! On seeing our car arrive, the rhythm section rapidly assembled. Here they are, hitting various lengths of bamboo on stones. The sound was quite nice.

These young men had fun making eyeglasses--one from bamboo and the other from a cut up can.

Men and women joined in dancing.

Much hilarity ensued.

Following the music, we had our donations celebrations. Here I am donating several dozen Project Hope and Fairness t-shirts to the village chief.

Stan plays with the camera and makes faces while the children watch.

Adiyaw has a large gari-drying shed. In Mmanaiaye, they used circular drying pans. Note that this one has three circular and one large rectangular pan.

We left Adiyaw and drove to Elmina to meet Padmore, an old friend. He was originally planning to join us on the first day of the trip, but he came down with malaria--thanks to the festering lagoon right next to where he lives. So, it took a couple days of medication before the fever subsided and he was strong enough. We met him by the side of the road and I gave him a digital camera and some money to take the bus to Takoradi the next day so he could join the rest of our trip.

We drove back to Cape Coast, unloaded a lot of vegetables that we had been given by the villages, then did errands--bank, Internet. We spent some time shopping in the castle gift shop and walking around the grounds.

Stan is standing on the ramparts, from which slaves were tossed when they got sick and obviously couldn't make the voyage to the new world.

This is the dungeon in which over a thousand men were kept. Directly over this room was the Anglican church. White men could speak personally to their God sitting smugly 20 feet over the heads of poor pagans who had not yet been saved. The "staff" of the slave castles often had African wives; the town around the castle has many European homes built to house these wives and their children. When their tour of duty was over, they returned to England, leaving behind a town of children named Smith, Jones, etc.

We drove north from Cape Coast about 10 Km and ate at the Crocodile restaurant, a popular tourist spot run by a family that had lived in Germany at one time. The restaurant was really an inn, and included small buildings that projected over a pond filled with crocodiles.

After dinner, we drove north and turned off the road within 2 Km of the Kakum Reserve. After several Km of very challenging and rutted dirt road, we arrived in Ebekawopa--after all the lights had been turned off--about 10:30 PM. Peter knocked on a few doors, and gradually more and more people started to show up. Before long, people had put down mats and sheets in the church. We each set up camp there. Stan slept next to the altar; perhaps he was feeling insecure. I took an African shower (bucket of cold water poure over head) on the lawn; it was dark, so no one could see my nakedness.

I slept especially well this night because instead of concrete floor with a 1/16 inch thick mat plus sheet, I had an inch thick piece of foam under me.

Stan slept next to the altar--for good luck? Or to stay far away from someone who was snoring?

Sunday, August 12

2007-09-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

The following morning, we woke up to a bustling Ebekawopa. Roosters crowing, women sweeping the dirt into little piles of detritus dropped the previous day, children happily playing. We had been told that the ceremony would begin around 9 AM because some members of the village had to attend a funeral one village over.

One of the cocoa farmers took us on a tour of his property, which was extensive. We discussed the need for sprayers, the ever-present yield-sucking myrids, and other tactics for controlling their damage. The pods on this tree are red, long, and pointy--a sign that they contain some Criollo blood. Most West African cocoa is predominantly of the Forastero variety.

Here's a picture of the farmer, who is the son of the Cape Coast area chief, showing us a pile of ripe cocoa pods. In his left hand, he is holding the pod of a hybrid tree. Note how much larger it is. Hybrid cocoa also yields sooner--often in its fourth year of life.

As we walked through his farm, we came to a low spot where was situated a little shack occupied by a ruddy old man tending a primitive still.

He was feeding a wood fire, and a copper tube extended from the still through an organic pond. He happily showed us the first drops that were coming off the still and falling into the dirty yellow bucket. We happily shared tastes of palm wine and Koutoukou or Schnapps, our pre-breakfast apéritif.

After an hour of this, we returned to the village, where the cermonies had begun. This included young girls daubed with kaolin clay, alternating between line-dancing and breaking out into individual dances.

We ate breakfast while the bamboo percussion orchestra warmed up and the young girls danced. Our breakfast consisted of red-red: aloto or plantain fried in palm oil, cowpeas into which one stirred onions browned in palm oil (absolutely scrumptious!), fufu, and chicken stewed in hot pepper.

Accompanying the dancers was this rhythm section that consisted of old plastic jugs serving as drums as well as lengths of bamboo jammed onto rocks to produce their own percussive sounds. The plastic jugs are not seen in the photo.

Many adults also joined in the dancing. We joined in the dancing, and Mark, as usual, received rave reviews for his abilities to move with the music. I, in contrast, inspired mirth as I stomped my feet quite ungracefully to the music.

After the dancing and music, we presented the machetes, boots, t-shirts- and chocolate to the village. The man receiving on behalf of the village is the Lutheran minister.

The rest of the morning was spent walking around. Each of us walked around the village taking his own pictures or interacting in his own way.

These women were preparing fritters. You can see the wheat flour in the large bowl, ready to be made into fritter batter. The fat woman (obesity probably related to the huge goiter in her neck) is stirring the fritters as they fry. Oil for frying is usually palm kernel oil, which is clear and colorless. Palm oil is bright orange. Goiters used to be common in the U.S., but thanks to our current health-care system, such problems are now uncommon. West African villagers, who make less than $200 each per year, cannot afford trips to the doctor. They rely heavily on native medicine.

In the kitchen next to the church where we slept, people were preparing fufu, made by boiling cassava or manioc, then pounding it in a large mortar with a pestle. You can see mortars and pestles for sale along the road in some villages. Fufu is very gluey and takes on the flavor of the sauce it sits. Most Americans, accustomed to potatoes, do not like fufu, complaining that it is too gluey and heavy--worse than overcooked oatmeal.

Stan took this picture of cocoa drying--right at the beginning, when the beans have been transported from the farm in a plastic bag and spread out to dry on this bamboo mat. If it starts to rain, then simply roll the mat up.

This is a pantry--a raised box with roof surrounded by wire mesh. It allows free exchange of air, so things don't mold and it keeps chickens and other varmints out. I never saw a lock on one, so the varmints are not Homo sapiens.

Two sisters enjoying a plate of cowpeas for Sunday breakfast. This picture illustrates a miracle of West African village life: living on dirt while wearing very clean clothes. How do they do it? After 5 years of visiting villages, I still do not have a good grasp. Laundry is done in large, plastic tubs. The Dutch company, xxx, has a large share of the detergent market.

Sisters

As our stay at Ebekawopa drew to an end, Kate got to play African mom.

Affection

It was time to leave Ebekawopa; we did so amid much celebration and proceeded north to just 2 Km before the national park. We turned off onto another dirt road, which became quite rutted. Four-wheel drive wasn’t even enough; the ruts were quite deep. I made the mistake of letting my right wheels off the rutted road, thinking that I would get more friction on the grass. The edges turned out to be quite soft and my vehicle sank on the right and the sides of the car wedged against the sides of the embankment. Switching into the various forms of 4 wheel drive did not help, and the tires began to smoke as they spun uselessly against the gravel and dirt.

It was hot and muggy, no time to do physical labor. We tried various combinations of rocks under the tires. To no avail. Then several of us found some lengths of bamboo, which we wedged under the back tires. I backed the car down the road and with a combination of wheel turning and jerking, managed to get all four wheels back on the heavily rutted surface.

Now much smarter about maneuvering heavily rutted roads (i.e., don’t think the shoulder is better just because it’s smooth), we proceeded down the road. After another couple of kilometers, we arrived at Gyaware, which means “Too far to come to marry you.”.

After some pleasantries, we left on a walk toward the Kakum reserve, walking about a km to an area often visited by elephants. Most of the plants had been trampled. We were told that elephants came out of the reserve to feast on the goodies, despite a wire strung in their path and despite all effortts at noise-making. “When an elephant is hungry, no noise will deter it.” we were told. This problem might be perfect for some young student engineer: how to outsmart an elephant with a high-tech machine run on solar energy?

The boundary between the fields and the reserv; the sheer thickness of the forest was astouncing--although there were clear tunnels where elephants had pushed through the undergrowth, destroying all in their paths.

In this picture, shock is written on our faces. It's not that we spotted an elephant. We're just gawking at the damage a single elephant can do as it lumbers (more accurately, barrels) through the forest, crushing so much vegetation.

We returned to Gyaware and had our customary ceremonies, including dances and music.

The usual donation of 40 machetes, 20 t-shirts, and a dozen boots being received by the chief, who is a very talented mimic of elephant calls. He had regaled us earlier while we were tromping around in the bush, with his sophisticated and complex repertoire of elephant noises.

Stan took this picture of a fetching young woman in another gorgeous African dress.

Another one of Stan's gems.

Afterwards, we returned to the main road, picked up Padmore, a young student whose education I have funded for several years, and drove 1 hour to Takoradi, where we checked into the Naakoff Chinese Hotel and dined at a restaurant that specialized in Ghanaian food.

Monday, August 13

2007-09-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

This morning, we visited the port of Takoradi. We wanted also to visit a grinding plant, West African Cocoa Company, but they were unwilling to cooperate. The port tour was very worthwhile: we watched three ships being unloaded. I took videos of men hurriedly loading 141-lb cocoa bags into containers by carrying them on their heads. We also watched a container-lifter pick up the 76,000 lb metal box as if it were a toy.

This container has been set down so that cocoa bags can be loaded into it. The system must be somewhat complex, because you pay your money sight-unseen and have faith that the quality of cocoa you ordered actually ends up in the container.

These men are standing in the cocoa shed, waiting for their next job.

The men are running with 64 Kg (140 lbs) bags on their heads. They are very athletic.

The wharf holds three ships. Takoradi is one of the most efficient ports in the world, having won prizes for it. At the time we were standing there, there was this blue, Italian container ship and a grain ship that was off-loading wheat. Takoradi has an export-to-import ratio of 7:30. It exports wood, cocoa, and bauxite. It imports oil and wheat. We saw warehouses of wood and cocoa and piles of bauxite. We also saw the oil pipeline leading away from the port and wheat being offloaded into dumptrucks.

In the afternoon, we ate lunch at the Africa Beach Hotel and enjoyed walking on the beach which was littered with junk, including this dead sea-snake. Even though we had enjoyed excellent West African food, Mark seemed drawn to this snake.

A rogue wave washed up and soaked Stan while he had his back turned. Despite that, I managed to capture Mark with this defunct lightbulb.

The beach showed obvious signs of heavy erosion, and a major chunk of the restaurant’s property had been eroded since last year’s visit.

Tuesday, August 14

2007-09-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

This was an action-packed day. We drove back to Cape Coast, and then north to Kakum Nature Preserve. There, we did the canopy walk, which takes a certain amount of nerve, walking over 100 feet above the forest floor while zephyrs of wind vibrate the wires separating you from a fatal plunge. Does one scream when one falls head-first? They say not. The total walk is almost 1 km and there are 7 suspended bridges.

If you can suspend your fear, you can truly appreciate the beauty of the environment in the canopy of a rainforest. I looked up from time to time, but mostly I was concentrating on not feeling fear.

After our escape from the Jaws of Death, we also took a little hike through the rainforest, which is pretty much in pristine condition. We talked about various types of trees growing there, including one whose bark fosters virility, another used for deworming, and another pounded to make clothing.

In the early afternoon, we drove south to Cape Coast and then took another northward route to Kumasi. This was a long drive--over 5 hours. We were stopped once for speeding (although it’s almost impossible to know what speed to go because it’s hard to know where a village starts and where it stops.) The officer started to write us up for a court appearance in Cape Coast on Friday.

I explained to the officer that we would be in Ada Foah, about 200 Km east of Cape Coast on Friday, and that we had just visited 5 villages, donating boots and machetes to them. He stared at us, saying “that’s nice” and then asked us to give him $20. I did this quite readily and thanked him profusely.

The last 50 km before Kumasi was murder. The road had been removed from last year and was abominably rutted. We had to drive very slowly, so our progress was frustrating.

It was dark when we entered the city limits. It took a full hour to find the Treasure Land Hotel, located in a small neighborhood just off the road to Accra. Peter was in contact with the owner of the car, who graciously provided us navigational information.

We spent the night at Treasure Land Hotel. There was a computer with internet in the lobby, and the connection was the fastest I’ve seen in West Africa. My room was quite nice--roomy, excellent appearance, balcony, and gorgeous Ghanaian furniture. However, the plumbing didn’t work--no hot water. Most Ghanaian hotel room bathrooms have a large bucket and a small bucket in the corner. You fill the large bucket with cold water, then you use the small bucket to pour the cold water over your formerly warm skin. Of course, in the tropics, this really isn’t the torture you might think.

Wednesday, August 15

2007-09-07T17:20:00.001-07:00

We met with four officials of Kuapa Kokoo at around 9AM. My old contact, Nicholas Agyei-Gyan arranged the meeting. The meeting started on a defensive note, as the assumption of the Kuapa Kokoo people seemed to be that we were somehow a threat to them. They asked some pointed questions, which I answered, assuring them that Project Hope and Fairness is devoted to the welfare of the cocoa farmer and not in any way intended to compete with them. We talked about the Fair Trade chocolate business. I asked them what percentage of their cocoa is sold Fair Trade, and they answered “4%”, which is double that of several years ago.

There are those in the U.S. who criticize Fair Trade, claiming it does not accomplish what it claims. In my opinion, how can you judge the effectiveness of a system when the consumers won't even purchase the product? 4% is a pathetically low number, and that's WITH the sales to the Day Chocolate Company which manufactures the Divine Bar. Until Kuapa Kokoo's numbers are closer to 50%, I don't see how one can fairly criticize Fair Trade as a system.

Exterior of Kuapa Kokoo offices. This cooperative has around 40,000 members and represents one of the largest fair trade cocoa cooperatives in the world. Conacado in Dominican Republic is of a similar size, except it is also certified organic. Unfortunately, Kuapa Kokoo is not organically certified--partly because of the Ghanaian government.

These doors to our meeting room represent the excellent wood-carving skills in West Africa. The adinkra symbols at the base of the doors represent the most important of all the symbols. Translated, they mean "Except God" and they refer to the belief that only God knows all.

Before embarking on our afternoon trip, we started with lunch. Stan and I ordered Green-Green. Up until then, Stan was quite interested in eating whatever I ordered. However, this lunch represented a threshold for him and from then on, he was a little more circumspect. Green-green is all about vegetation and the varmints that eat it. The sauce is green, and it bathes the cooked corpses of two vegetation consumers--the Grasscutter, which is a relative of the porcupine, and the African snail, which is about 100X the size of a French snail. In the picture, you can see the foot of the snail projecting above the sauce, like Sydney Opera House above the harbor. Grasscutter is very musky tasting, and green sauce sort of plays up the earthy under- and overtones.

This is a grasscutter. The wild one is quite large. When dead and held by the feet, it is almost 3 feet long. This domesticated version is quite a bit smallesr. The grasscutter is a favorite--consumed at almost any meal. Its flavor, however, is unpleasantly musky.

These are pictures of snails growing on a farm in Cameroon. Throughout West Africa, growing snails is an important way of diversifying one's earning power.

We also asked if we could visit one of their villages, and they assigned one of their members to act as a guide both to the village (KokoFu) but also to Lake Bosumtwi.

We stopped off at the Kokofu society shed. In Ghana, a society is another name for village. This shed, which is "downtown", is really quite small, as you can tell from the picture. It is empty because we are at the beginning of the dry season and the cocoa has all been delivered to Kuapa Kokoo depots, which are regional warehouses.

We then continued to KokoFu. The visit being spur of the moment, we only garnered about 25 farmers. They were not a particularly cheery lot--probably because we were not bearing gifts--and the children were especially disruptive. We stood in an airy screened in building used for raising Grasscutters and had a conversation with the farmers.

After about a half hour conversation, we continued to Lake Bosumtwi, where we were accosted by the usual stream of “guides” all looking to make a buck. Is Lake Bosumtwi an exploded volcano or a meteor impact crater? I think the latter, but for some reason, the matter has not been settled scientifically.

After paying off the lads who had washed our car, we returned to Treasure Land Hotel in the evening.

Thursday, August 16

2007-09-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

We started out early--by 10AM--in order to reach Peter’s hometown, Ada Foah, before dark. On the way, we stopped at a kente-cloth weaving village. We were driving down the road and off to the right we espied three children sitting in their looms, weaving. Kente cloth is typically Ghanaian, but the weaving machines are also found in Côte d'Ivoire.

Padmore holds up one of the kente cloths. Typically, weaving is a child's business, as children have the nimblest fingers. It's a good way to earn money for going to school. In the U.S., children earn money for football uniforms or musical instruments. In West Africa, children earn money to pay for books, pens, and school uniforms.

By noon, we reached Nkawkaw, a bustling town near an escarpment that separates the Kumasi side of Ghana from the Volta region. Everyone but Kate and I went off in search of lunch. They didn’t return for the better part of an hour, which was a little worrisome. They never did find the grilled meats which were to be our lunch.

As we continued south, we ran into a group of young men selling bushmeat. This is a common sight in West Africa, where people hunt the wild animals and sell them in order to make a little money. Some of the animals are getting close to being considered endangered--the antelope, for example, which is on the left. The animal on the right, which is still quite alive, is a pangoline, a scaly anteater. It's quite delicious.

Around 3 PM we entered the northern Accra area and traffic slowed to 0. At one point, we spent almost 45 minutes not moving an inch. Finally, drivers started getting out and physically hindering those who were cheating and looping around causing us honest folks to make no progress whatsoever.

By 4 PM, we were on the one piece of superhighway in Ghana, the link between Accra and Tema, the other deepwater port. We sped along to Tema, then turned east toward Ada Foah. As we drove east, the countryside turned to grassland, and baobab trees started to pop up. First time for me (other than the National Geographic).

We immediately drove to Peter’s mother’s village and were introduced to her. As the light was dwindling and we wanted to do a boat ride on the Volta estuary, we told her we’d come back to see her in the morning. We drove to the fanciest hotel in town, situated right on the water. It’s a favorite spot of Europeans seeking cheap but luxurious surroundings. Although the river is quite suitable for swimming, the pool is “safer”.

We boarded the traditional West African boat, which could have seated 10 more and we tootled toward the mouth of the estuary, passing within hailing distance several villages. We drove past the mouth of the river, and felt the Atlantic swell surging under our feet. We then turned back and in pitch darkness motored past several islands, each with its own fishing village.

There are hundreds of villages on islands, and such boats serve them. In fact, one craft passed us with about 50 islanders returning from selling at the market in Ada Foah.
Peter informed us that islanders communicate with each other by drum and that regular sentences can be transmitted in this way. We did not have the privilege of hearing such transmissions, however.

Friday, August 17

2007-09-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

After breakfast, we drove to Peter’s mother’s compound. We met Peter’s brother and we got a tour of Peter’s room, which he shared with his mother when he was young. The house is covered in aluminum, and Peter said that when it rained, you couldn't hear yourself talking.

When he still lived with his mother, she slept on the bed and he slept on the floor, right about where he's standing. He's holding a straw mat, which is about 1 inch thick.

Peter's mother was busy cooking cowpeas for the market. Like most residents of the area, she makes a living by selling things at the local market. People come from islands across the estuary to buy and sell.

We then drove to Tema, where we visited a warehouse of Kuapa Kokoo. This is used when cocoa is rejected by the state. If it’s too moist or too moldy, it gets rejected, and Kuapa Kokoo has to “recondition” it, which means to spread it out under the sun and dry it further.

We met an official of Kuapa Kokoo there and he talked about the purpose of the warehouse. Because the whole cocoa trading system is controled by the Cocobod (pronounced Cocoa Board), cocoa beans go directly to the government from the depot warehouses. However, sometimes the beans need "conditioning", which could mean drying or it could mean gassing to kill bugs or it could mean processing to remove defective beans. That's where this warehouse comes in. We stood next to an enormous pile of bags of cocoa beans covered with a large rubberized sheet. The contents was being gassed to kill insects.

We continued to Accra, where we immediately checked into the Mensvic hotel There we ate lunch, refreshed ourselves, and then drove downtown, our plan being to get more money (so I could pay Peter), drop Padmore off, fill the car with fuel, and get it washed.

As we were approaching Nkrumah’s Mausoleum, I swerved out of my lane to avoid colliding with the back of a dumptruck. This was safe, because no one was to the left of me. However, a policeman observed the maneuver and blew on his whistle. I stopped, and he got into the back, pushing Kate and Mark over. He instructed us to drive to the police station, which turned out to be a shack on a dirt lot. There, Peter negotiated with him and got him to drop his bribe to $20.

After this exercise in corruption, Peter and I dropped Mark, Kate, and Stan off near Nkrumah’s mausoleum, then proceeded to accomplish our tasks, which took until 7 PM. We returned to the hotel and met the folks who lent us the car. They balked a little at the scraped up right side (fairly minor, but there nonetheless), but decided not to demand payment as they hope to do business with us next year. I was very pleased with their attitude and I plan on doing business with them in the future.

Saturday, August 18

2007-09-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

I'm saying good-bye to Peter. We all left Ghana feeling such a sense of loss. Both Peter and Padmore were so much fun to travel with. Just recently, Peter informed me that he has been offered admission to pursue a Master of International Law and Economics at the University of Berne, with a scholarship.The package was granted by the World Trade Institute headquartered in Berne, Switzerland! Hopefully, he will be able to apply his new academic skills toward improving the lot of Ghanaian cocoa farmers, who are treated so badly by the international cocoa trading system.

We got up early and arrived at the airport around 7:00 AM, well in advance of an 8:50 AM departure. As we stood at the counter, chattering cheerfully, the woman behind the counter was staring at her computer screen a look of puzzlement on her face. After a few minutes of clicking and squinting, she announced that, even though our tickets stated “confirmed”, that in fact none of our names were in the database. She asked us to sit in the corner of the room and wait until they could get a passenger list of our flight which was already enroute from Lagos, Nigeria. After 15 minutes of silent agony and self-recrimination for not having re-confirmed the flight, I asked to talk to the manager. He explained that the fault was that of my travel agent. He asked us to please be patient and wait another 30 minutes until he could get a passenger count . At 8 AM, I asked him again, and he called Nigeria. He was told a number that led him to believe that there would be places for us and he instructed us to go ahead and check in. Eureka! What a relief!

The trip lasted 1 hour and during this time, they managed to serve us a breakfast--a daunting task considering the hop-scotch nature of the flight. Unlike years past, we actually waited in line to show our passports. Other years, Evariste paid someone off and we scooted around passport control. Security must have tightened. Or, Evariste had lost some power.

We entered the main hall, having successfully passed through customs only to find no Evariste. Koffi, Marius was waiting for us, however, as were a few other people. A couple minutes later, Evariste appeared. We went out to the parking lot and found the car and driver. It was an old Peugeot station-wagon. Large enough to hold us, but disappointing compared to our Ghanaian vehicle. We pushed it through the parking lot, the engine caught, and Vroom, off to Port Bouet, Evariste’s home.

This was quite a downer for my companions. No Peter, no Padmore, and, gee, a hunkajunk! Oh well, vive la différence!

At Port Bouet, a seaside community located near the airport, we met Evariste’s mother, wife, daughter, brother, and the latest addition, Petit Tom.

Evariste, his wife, and Petit Tom. I have known Evariste since 2004, and we have been visiting villages in the regions of Daloa and Issia since then.

Evariste's mother and le Petit Tom. In 2005, I sent Evariste's mother the money to purchase a freezer so she could earn money selling frozen water and bissap (African hibiscus drink) in their compound. Recently, she has become ill, and is no longer able to run her business.

We walked around Evariste’s neighborhood and then crossed the highway to spend a little time on the beach--all strategies to get us off our duffs while the driver went off to find a roofrack for the old Peugeot.

Evariste's daughter (right) accompanied us on our walk. Here we are standing next to a little store selling vegetables.

We crossed the highway to the ocean side and walked a little on the beach. Like most beaches in West Africa, it's covered with broken up rubbish; people treat the beach like it's a dump--and a bathroom, so watch out! The sand slopes steeply out, so the waves break in close to shore. Rip tides are very prevalent.

The first roof-rack was too large, so they took off in another taxi and came back 30 minutes later with an antique that fit. The claws that grasp the roof edges were so rusty that parts had eroded away, making their grasp of the roof tenuous. I had serious doubts that this would work, but Mark, the logical engineer in our group, stated that the machetes, as heavy as they were, would hold the rack down. Sure enough, after 7 days of driving, that rack never did depart from the roof. The downside of putting boxes of machetes on the roof, though, was the signal to the ever-present police, who saw money in those boxes and therefore demanded larger "cadeaux" every time they stopped us. Later, once we got to Depa, only a suitcase stayed on the roof, and the size and frequency of the "cadeaux" diminished significantly.

We left Port Bouet at around 2 PM. We drove about 20 minutes--past Deux Plateaux area of Abidjan to the first police barricade, the place where, four years earlier, I had fostered my first international incident by peeing under the Défense d’Uriner sign and had to pay a penalty of $10. This time, I didn’t need to pee, but we were stuck in gridlock of trucks. Our séjour lasted better part of an hour, thanks to the myriad trucks blocking our way, a reflection of the end of the war and the surging of economic ties to the northern half of Côte d’Ivoire. As we sat there, our diesel chugging away, we discovered a new problem (other than not starting)--the fact that it would overheat. Water vapor was gushing out from under the hood, so the driver got out, raised the hood. Lo and behold--no cap on the radiator! Mark explained the benefit of leaving the cap off: if you put it on and there’s a radiator leak, every time you twisted off the cap, you risked painful steam burns. This way, while vapor came out from under the hood (and also entered the passenger cabin through the “air conditioner”), you could readily replenish it as it evaporated away. Besides pouring more water into the radiator from a jug kept firmly ensconced between the driver’s legs, he also poured water all over the engine.

At one point, he even bought plastic bags of ice water. I took this picture while we sat and the driver was squirting ice water from plastic bags you purchase from passing street vendors.

Because of the evaporation problems associated with sitting still, the driver turned the car off. When trucks began to move, the car refused to start, so the driver hired a couple guys to push him and the engine roared to life.

This was the only long stop that day, and we drove north toward Yamassoukro, reaching the city around 8 PM. We checked into a hotel. Mark and Kate were too tired to eat dinner, so Stan and I went downstairs and regaled ourselves on Goat Kedjenou (a stew flavored with chilis and tomatoes.)

Sunday, August 19

2007-09-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

We got up around 7 AM, ate breakfast, and then visited three major tourist attractions: the basilica, the presidential palace, and the beautiful lotus-covered lake located right in the middle of the nation’s capital. Yamoussoukra used to be a village of 2,000 right on the shores of the lake. When Houphouët-Boigny became president in 1960, he built a grand city that now numbers 175,000 and has large boulevards lined by electric lights that work!

This is the basilica, the largest church in all Christendom. St. Peter's in Rome used to be. Pope Paul II asked Houphouët-Boigny, the Ivoirian president, to not build this replica as large as the original. Houphouët-Boigny, a good Catholic, obliged by building it 1 meter short. He then put the gold cupola on top to make it higher. The pope inaugurated the church. We were not allowed to enter because we were obviously tourists and tourist hours began at 2 PM.

The lake covers acres of land and about 1/5 of it is lilies with the most beautiful flowers.

A crocodile on the lake outside the presidential palace. It is said that Houphouët-Boigny on more than one occasion had opponents thrown into the lake in order to dispose of them. He preferred the single-party system until shortly before his death in 1993.

At about 1 PM, we started driving toward Daloa. Our reasoning was that there was no point in driving south to Issia only to retrace our steps several times. It took about 2 hours to get to Daloa, where we checked into a very attractive, comfortable small hotel called St. Martin, Pecheur (St. Martin, the Fisherman). The hotel has beautiful rooms, whimsical stairs and balconies, and costs only $30 per night!

After taking showers and moving all the machetes and t-shirts to my room, we set out to Galebre to visit Kavokiva. There, we met Georges, whom I knew, as well as some other staff. We had a little question-and-answer session and I re-expressed my idea of eventually doing a Kavokiva bar. Kavokiva means "let's stay together." It has approximately 6,000 members. I do not know the percentage of cocoa that is actually sold Fair Trade.

I asked Georges if we could go visit Eugénie, which we did. We drove about 8 km into the forest, passing an old teak plantation with its accompanying workers' homes. Georges took off on his motorbike to her land and brought her back. She was very moved that Sweet Earth bags of cocoa have her picture. We gave her some chocolate bars and a t-shirt.

We then continued to Batteguedea, where we had a little gift ceremony and donated 40 machetes and 12 t-shirts, a wind-up flashlight, and 4 chocolate bars.

The fellow with the slingshot demonstrates how rice farmers chase away birds.

Boy of Batteguedea

After 45 minutes, we drove to Broguhe, where we spent more time. The chief of this village is a very likeable fellow with an outgoing personality. His wife has built an impressive little sewing studio, and she wants to electrify it. We toured the town and Kate spent much time with the children. We also met the schoolmaster again and the chief showed me how the water pump is now broken, the pipes having corroded into non-usability.

Donating the machetes to Broguhe. We drank lots of palm wine to increase the feeling of celebration.

Evariste and the chief stand next to the pump that is now useless.

We returned to Daloa after the sun had set and we had dinner at the Moroccan restaurant. This is Chawarma: bits of barbecued meat with vegetables and a yogurt sauce.

Monday, August 20

2007-09-06T14:07:00.000-07:00

Today, we drove south from Daloa to Issia. On the way, just south of Daloa, we stopped at the monkey village. The story goes that the village chief, fearing that he and his family would be enslaved by the French, concocted a potion to turn his own family into monkeys. Unfortunately, the reversing potion failed to work once the slavers were gone. To this day, villagers are forbidden to harm the monkeys, as they are after all humans. Of course, economic harm would also result. We paid $30 for the privilege of taking photographs.

It took about 2 hours to drive to Issia. On the way, I noticed for the first time a rock formation similar to Ayers Rock in Australia and Enchanted Rock of Texas--upwellings of magma exposed after surrounding sedimentary rock had been worn away. Issia has a simlar rock.

We arrived in Issia at about 4 PM and drove to the business of Evariste’s cousin, Annika. She runs a hair salon and with the earnings, she houses and feeds dozens of young women who lost their parents during the war and who otherwise would work in the cocoa farms or as prostitutes in the cities. Her partner, Christianne, wants to build a clothing factory where she can employ otherwise homeless young women.

We sat in the courtyard for 45 minutes while Evariste and the driver went to pick up bottled water and toilet paper. We then proceeded to Depa. Here we were welcomed with great shouts and the chief himself came down to greet us. We proceeded to the chief's house, where we enjoyed some glasses of delicious palm wine.

We walked up toward the chief’s house, where he received us with palm wine, Koutoukou, and some other hard beverages. We sat for a while as the sun went down, and then we walked back down the hill to our respective quarters.

I asked if I could use the new bathroom. About 40 people accompanied me, and when I was finished, they all applauded as I emerged. It’s a solidly built structure, and the floor is quite attractive with its inlaid fragments of tile.

Stan and I each took African showers (ala bucket) in the new “bathroom”. As usual, it felt really good to clean one’s skin after a hot, sweaty day. We then ate dinner with Evariste. Mark and Kate chose to go without.

Afterward, Evariste, Stan and I enjoyed a nice dinner. Mark and Kate retired early and actually slept on a bed! They were also able to use the bathroom in the room next door, although they have to tiptoe past a few people sleeping on the floor--presumably because they had given up their bed.

After dinner, Stan and I retired to another bedroom that was graciously lent to us. I covered myself with mosquito repellant, but the buggers got me in my Achilles heel, of all places. Good thing I was taking my anti-malarial medication!

Tuesday, August 21

2007-09-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

Today, we spent the first half in Depa. We had a gift-giving ceremony followed by the fantastic mask dance.

The "bamboo", used in construction and whose pithy center is very useful for model building, has been used to construct this model car. The doors, hood, and trunk open.

The chief of the village is holding a trophy made from the bamboo pith.

A fetching young woman who's doing some fetching.

Annika and Christiane. They came to attend the Mask Dance. Want to help combat child slavery in Côte d'Ivoire? We are soliciting funds to aid Annika and Christiane, who are building a hair salon and clothing workshop and will employ young women who have lost their parents in the last war and who would probably end up as prostitutes or working on the cocoa farms.

Young girls of Depa

Old man of Depa

Young mother

Three young women

Young lad going out to the rice fields. The slingshot is used to scare away birds.

The chief's wife.

The village waits in the gathering place and the chief arrives dressed in his regalia and flanked by two ministers. He is a "Chef des chefs", meaning that Depa is the chef-lieu for 152 other villages, and he is the main chief. This means that 152 other villages know what PH&F has done for Depa!

The Mask Dance starts.

After the Mask Dance, we presented the machetes (40) and t-shirts (10).

After the ceremony was over, we walked down to the toilet/shower, which had been constructed in April from funds contributed by Stan, Kate, and Mark.

Meanwhile, Mark was demonstrating his prowess with the stilts.

Preparing the evening foutou.

In mid-afternoon, we visited Zereguhe, which is only a couple kilometers from Depa. We have always tried to treat both villages equally--in order to minimize jealousy. This year, we built a WC in each village. Last year, we donated an equivalent number of boots. The year before, we gave each village a cocoa-weighing scale.

Like other villages, Zereguhe started with the music and dance entertainment.

The chief of Zereguhe.

And in the late afternoon, we had a ceremony in Pezoan, our last village. The chief of Pezoan pointedly asked that next year we spend the night in his village and that we consider building a bathroom there. The music and dance in both Zereguhe and Pezoan were exceptional. The chief of Pezoan paid me the ultimate compliment: by passing a live rooster around my body!

Passing the rooster around the body...

Wednesday, August 22

2007-09-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

We spent the morning in Depa, eating a leisurely breakfast and chatting with the chief. Kate was presented by the women with a truly Ivoirian dress: complete with oil wells and a picture of Gbagbo. We left in late morning and drove south toward Galebre.

After breakfast, the chief came over and sat on our porch. We exchanged pleasantries and he then presented us with a goat as a symbol of the village's appreciation. It accompanied us to our next stop, Galebre.

On the way, we stopped at a rubber plantation. We met a man and his wife working in the forest. They were gathering nuts from the rubber trees. They explained that seedlings are grown from the nuts, they transplant these, then graft a high-yielding variety onto the wild rootstock.

The wife shows us some of the nuts of the rubber tree.
Many cocoa farmers are tearing out their cocoa trees and planting rubber. Because the American and European chocolate industry pays so little for the product (cocoa is cheaper today than it was in the early 80s), the cocoa farmer often gives up in disgust. This is why Project Hope and Fairness is working so hard to let consumers know how much the Ghanaian and Ivoirian cocoa farmers are suffering.

Anyway--back to the rubber story. When a tree is mature, its cambium is slashed to cause bleeding of the latex. It drips into a cast-iron cup which, when full, is emptied of its contents.

The contents set quickly. They are piled on the forest floor and eventually carried out to the road, where they are piled on wooden platforms. The balls of latex smell absolutely disgusting. It is no fun to live downwind of a rubber plant!

The trip to Galebre took only about 90 minutes. We had to stop and ask directions several times, because the road-signs installed by the French decades ago had lost all their printing. We arrived for a late lunch and dined with Dr. Brou, the president of Kedesch, an organization devoted to the education of the children of cocoa farmers and to raising the standard of living of cocoa-farming villages in the Galebre region.

Joanne and I donated $2500 to Kedesch for electrification of a classroom. After lunch, we walked through Galebre and visited the weaving site. Off to the right was a new building under construction. Turns out that Dr. Brou decided to use the money on the building rather than electrification of a classroom. His reasoning was that the electrification of a classroom was inefficient when said classroom was being rented.

Young man weaving a cloth. Children who are too old to go to primary school--between the ages of 15 and 17--participate in the weaving, shoe-making, or sewing programs.

We walked to Dr. Brou’s family land, which includes a small lake, the site of an old quarry formerly used to construct asphalt highways in the region. A very attractive site for the hotel that Dr. Brou is planning.

We enjoyed interviewing women in his compound. Kate was especially taken by old-style pottery which has been replaced by plastic, metal, and enamelware. Imagine how heavy this is even without the water!

We all enjoyed learning about how rice is dried, stored on the stalk in the hot, smoky kitchen, pounded to loosen the hull and bran, and then tossed in the air to winnow the grain. In this picture, the rice is drying.

Once dried, the rice is stacked at the back of the kitchen, the walls of which are black with smoke. Note the cute little stove. In many villages, the stove consists only of three stones, kept outdoors.

Before each meal, the rice is pounded in the mortar to loosen the hulls and the bran. This is very time-consuming, and most of the villages we visited in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire requested a rice hulling machine.

Pounding the grain does a lot of damage--as you can see from the half pieces. Also, note that pounding hulls and polishes: the result is white rice. They call this "Uncle Ben variety" although it is far superior in texture and flavor to the brand by that name.

Below are other images depicting life in Dr. Brou's compound.

This picture shows women processing oil palm fruits. They are first cooked to loosen the outside fruity portion from the inside hard kernel which is saved to make palm kernel oil for frying. European chocolates use up to 5% palm kernel oil, which has a melting point close to that of cocoa butter. Note the pile of fruit pulp. This is boiled with smoked dry fish to produce a sauce typically served with chicken or grasscutter (agouti).

Here's engineering at work! In Tokyo, city law requires all 5-story-plus buildings to cover a certain percentage of their roofs with vegetation. Obviously, this has been done in West Africa for many years. Perhaps we in the United States could learn from the wisdom of the ages.

Plantains. They are roasted and wrapped in newspaper, making an excellent snack when driving. Or, they are boiled and pounded to make Foutou. Or, they are sliced and fried in palm oil to make Aloto. Combined with cowpeas (black-eyed peas) you have the very excellent Ghanaian dish, Red-Red.

Pineapple. In Abidjan, one sees pineapple juice venders on the street. They typically carry a pile of fruit in a wheelbarrow, cut long strands of "skin" off and drape them decoratively on the handles of the barrow. Then they squeeze the interior inside a plastic bag, massaging it into juice and pouring through a funnel into an old water bottle. The result is heart-stoppingly good.

We spent the night at the Hotel de l'Amitié. Our very excellent and quietly efficient driver maneuvered the ancient and decrepit Peugeot over heart-stoppingly deep ruts through the gate and into the courtyard.

The courtyard of the hotel. It's made of dirt, and like any village, it is swept early every day. The rooms are concrete block with concrete floors, there's a single 10 watt light bulb (compact fluorescent) inside, a mattress with sheets but no blanket, a fan, and one wall socket. During the night, the mosquitoes visit, so either cover yourself with the sheet or if it's too hot, cover yourself with repellant.

The hotel toilet, which is flanked by the two "showers". As in a village, you wet yourself with well water from a bucket, you suds yourself up with soap, and then you pour the cold well water over yourself. Don't mind the spiders and moths crawling up the walls of the toilet or the shower. If you're an entomologist, you're in hog's heaven.

Thursday, August 23

2007-09-05T17:47:00.000-07:00

This morning, we spent in a village about 8 Km from the road. It’s called “Dawayo Chantier.” Dawayo is right on the road: it’s Dr. Brou’s birthplace. Dawayo Chantier is so-named because years ago, the French built a saw-mill here as well as a lot of buildings. (Chantier means “workplace” in French.) Most of these have been consumed by termites, but one or two of the old community buildings with their characteristic clapboard siding still remain. Dr. Brou brought us here because he wants us to pay for a new roof for the school.

To get there, we had to drive 10 Km down a dirt road. Our driver, feeling that one tire seemed low, paid to have it filled with air. This picture shows a typical tire store: old, used tires stacked under a couple trees, a lawnmower engine gerry-rigged to a compressor, and a rubber hose.

We walked through the village to the school grounds, which were quite large and quite different from any other I’ve seen. They had constructed two large fences, designed to hold palm fronds which would keep soccer balls from bouncing outside the grounds. In the inner grounds, there were two schools--one made of wood and at the opposite end, one made of mud brick.

The wood building was actually made of “bamboo”, the tough plant that clearly is not bamboo but which seems very useful for construction purposes. One member of the group following us around told me that they had built the entire structure just this year! And he pointed out where termites had already set about devouring it. Obviously, building public buildings out of cellulose-based materials in an area that used to be jungle is problematic: the bugs destroy it.

Across the soccer field is a mud-brick school that lacks a roof. This community is quite ambitious and seems to have a high respect for education.

Dr. Brou is a very ambitious man. He has many projects and many plans. Although I do not share his ecclesiastical ambitions, I respect him for his concerns about village poverty. In that sense, our missions cross.

Before we left Dawayo-Chantier, we sat together with the oldest men of the village and waited for the chief. It is not good protocol to come and go without announcing your presence to the village chief at the beginning, trading "news" which means telling him your intentions, and then when you plan to leave, ask his permission and exchange gifts. In this case, we didn't bring gift. This is the picture of an old man in the village.

Dr. Brou has obviously built the townspeople up for the event. Several years ago, he promised them a school and, not being able to deliver, I suspect that he has created the expectation that we will. I arrive at this conclusion because everyone followed us and because afterwards--at the leaving ceremony--they gave us a goat. People don’t give goats lightly.

We ate lunch at the doctor’s house. A typical meal in this part of Côte d'Ivoire consists of rice, always rice, two meats and another starch. With this meal, we had rice, monkey in a delicious sauce, chicken, and foutou, which is boiled plantain pounded into a paste.

After eating and saying our good-byes, we departed.

The drive to San Pedro took about 3 hours. At around 4 PM we were in Soubre. I asked Evariste if he thought we could do the Soubre river walk and he responded, “No time.” I’m glad he said that, because when we arrived in San Pedro, there was still time to stop at Saf-Cacao.

Saf-Cacao is the fourth largest cocoa buyer in Côte d'Ivoire--after Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Barry Callebaut. It was started in the early 60s by a Lebanese Shiite family, the Lakiss family. There are 40,000 Lebanese Shiites in Côte d'Ivoire, and they pretty much control the cocoa business. This is a picture of the outside of a warehouse.

Ali Lakiss, the owner, spent about 30 minutes with us. Lakiss, as he is known to his employees, is the third generation of his family to have this business. It started in the early 60s with his grandparents. Saf-Cacao is the fourth largest cocoa buyer in Côte d’Ivoire--after Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Barry-Callebaut.

Although it is best to dry cocoa beans under the sun, this can be difficult. Cocoa beans are harvested, fermented, and dried during the wet season, and sometimes adequate drying is not possible. The beans have to be shipped to the middleman (the traitant) who conditions them--using a low-fired oven to drive off the moisture so they can be stored without developing a moldy flavor. This is the drying oven. Generally, beans of similar moisture content are dried in a single batch.

Beans are shipped free-form, pumped directly into the holds of ships. Or, they are bagged (64 Kg per jute bag) and put in a container. Or, they are "big-bagged", which is being demonstrated in this picture.

We also set up an appointment for Friday morning to have a tour of a neighboring plant that is still accepting cocoa. At the time, Saf-Cacao was shut down for receiving because it had no more space.

Friday, August 24

2007-09-04T22:18:00.000-07:00

This morning, we had breakfast at 7 AM in the local Lebanese restaurant. A group of Lebanese Shiite businessmen (from Southern Lebanon) were eating breakfast at one table. I asked for a menu and was told: “bread with cheese.” Supposedly they also served omelets and coffee, but we were served bread with cheese and tea. It was delicious--excellent cheese on excellent flat bread. Toward the end of breakfast, some of the businessmen drove away in their Mercedes. The rest stayed to play cards. One of them, whom we had met at Ali’s, paid for our breakfast.

We took a taxi to Saf-Cacao and they drove us to a neighboring business, run by an Ivoirian. They were still receiving trucks of product. In fact, 25 trucks were lined up.

When a truck pulls in, the man with the moisture meter goes to work, categorizing bags by their moisture contents. They separate the bags of beans into different piles. For example, 9% moisture beans should not be mixed with 12% moisture beans because drying both together would result in the 9% beans scorching.

The man with the sampling tube then goes to work, pulling samples from each bag and dropping it into a plastic bucket, which corresponds to each pile of bags.

The bucket is run to the lab and the beans are tested for flintiness, purple color, evidence of mold, and insects. Flintiness is an indication of bean immaturity. Purple color shows inadequate fermentation. Mold manifests in two ways: internally, which happens during the drying process or externally, which occurs after the beans have been purchased. The latter is not serious because the mold is on the papery shell and therefore removed during the winnowing process. To analyze a bucket of beans, 300 beans are randomly sampled and split in half, then arranged on a special board. Good quality means less than 4% mold, less than 8% flintiness/purple color.

A lab assistant cuts each bean in half and lays it on a board designed to help categorize and count the beans. A total of 300 beans are analyzed per bucket.

This is a moisture meter. Although the beans are categorized at the truck, this machine permits a more accurate read-out, usually confirming the quick results.

After the beans in a bucket have been analyzed, a sample is set aside in case the owner of the truck (a Shiite Lebanese traitant more than likely) disputes the laboratory’s findings. Money rides on the analysis, as do feelings, so the buyer protects himself by keeping the sample until the deal is closed.

At around 10 AM, we drove in the direction of Abidjan. The road was much worse than last year. We arrived around 4 PM and dropped Kate, Mark, and Stan off at the Restaurant Le Baron in Port Bouet. Evariste and I continued to his village and returned by 6 PM. We sat around and ate and drank and talked until 10 PM, then drove to the airport. We sat on our luggage until midnight, at which point we were allowed to check in for the 3 AM flight. The journey home was not too hard, although on the flight from Casablanca to NYC, a smell of smoke filled the cabin. After 15 minutes of stewards and stewardesses opening bathrooms and overhead compartments keeping a decidedly brave face, the captain came on and announced that the source of the smell had been located in an “electrical machine.” Interestingly, our breakfast was served cold. We parted in Kennedy and Stan and I flew to LAX, rented a car at midnight and drove to San Luis Obispo, where we arrived at about 5 AM--at home after a 17 day romp across the world.

Stan Thompson did not get bored waiting for Evariste and me. This is because he was enjoying his Flag, an Ivoirian beer manufactured by Solibra, a large beer-making company in Côte d'Ivoire.

*********A GREAT SADNESS AND A GREAT JOY***********
One month after our return, Stan Thompson had a massive heart attack while running. His death was virtually instant. Hundreds of people in this community mourned his passing; his spirit touched so many. Really, Stan showed that humans CAN evolve. He showed that we are after all, a world community and that we can treat each other with respect and dignity. Although I only spent two weeks with Stan, I shall always remember his positive energy and I shall emulate him.

As president of Project Hope and Fairness, I have tried to build on this tragedy. As a result of Stan's marvelous impact on our county, we were able to raise over $4,000 in Stan's memory. With that money, a roof was put on the school of Dawayo-Chantier, described later in this blog.

Google and Chocolate

2007-08-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

Just wanted all of you Sweet Earth Chocolates lovers to know that we are an official supplier of chocolate to Google employees. We participated in a contest and Google employees voted us one of the best and now we're supplying 20,000 chocolate discs a week to them. Guess all of the Googler's have a huge sweet tooth!!

Welcome to Sweet Earth Chocolates!

2007-08-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

We are so excited to start a conversation with you, our friends and customers. We created this blog with exactly that in mind. We plan to send out information and news about our activities in the world of chocolate - from new products to our support of Project Hope & Fairness, a non-profit 501(3c) founded by Tom that supports West African cocoa farmers. We hope that you will visit us often, subscribe to our RSS feed and, of course, comment on any of the postings. We look forward to hearing from you.