Chelsea Anderson - Ghana Spring 2013

Akwaaba!  We send our greetings from here in Abomosu. This week has been a very great week for our classes and this upcoming week should be just as good. In the three classes that we are teaching first time students,  we will be wrapping up teaching phase two this week. Which is exciting news because now we get to start working on the loan application process with these students. Throughout this week we will be working to finish up each individual's business plans. Last week we taught our students how to project their expenses and how to find their own variable and fixed costs. Now this week we will be focusing on projecting their businesses revenue. It is so interesting to work with all our students individually. Sometimes it can be hard to rely so much on a translator, but by now the language barrier is not as daunting. Our translators translate for free and on their own time, so we are very appreciative of the work they do for us. 

Karson and I have been working this semester on doing second time loans in Asunafo, which has been a new experience. Being second time students we don't require them to go through the whole course again, so for three weeks we taught phase three, and then over the past two weeks we have been meeting individually with the ten students. Out of the ten students, seven are cocoa farmers. Through our research and meetings with them, we have discovered it cost around 300 cedis (150 dollars) to harvest one acre of cocoa. This includes the fertilizer, weedicide, pesticide, and labor. When we first met with the farmers, we were so shocked at the amount of money they were requesting for their farms. On average each farmer was asking for 1500 to 2000 cedis (750 to 1000 dollars). After further discussing their costs, we discovered the reason for them asking for so much. They explained that there are agriculture banks here that loan to the cocoa farmers, not in terms of money, but in terms of the products they need for the farming. Then at the end of their harvest, they pay back their "loan" in cedis. However, these banks charge outrageous interest on their loans. For example, one of our students received about 800 cedis worth of materials, and at the end of his harvest eight months later he paid back 1800 cedis. It is discouraging to see how hard these cocoa farmers work, and then they can't even make a decent profit. Our seven cocoa farmers were hoping that they could borrow all from us this year instead of using  both SEED and these agriculture banks, and that was why they were asking for big loans. We have worked hard with them over the past two weeks to work out a reasonable loan that works best for them and for the SEED program; furthermore, we are excited to be able to fund them this Friday on March 1st. All of our students have paid back their first time loans very well and we have high expectations for them this time around. 

I also have some exciting news! This past weekend we all took a trip down to Cape Coast to stay with some students and friends at the University of Cape Coast. Cape Coast is so beautiful, and the university is right on the beach. I can't imagine going to school there, the beach would be so distracting. While down in Cape Coast a group of ten of us ventured to Kakum National Park. Kakum is very beautiful, it is a natural forest/jungle where you can do a canopy walk 100 feet above the forest. There are a total of seven platforms and then you walk across rope bridges to each platform. This is the exciting part; while we were cautiously walking on the tiny bridges, Karson got down on one knee and proposed to me! It was a complete surprise and I was so worried he would drop the ring as he put it on my finger. It was a wonderful trip, and needless to say, Kakum will always be a special place for us.