Ebekawopa:

This village is reached after a two-mile drive up and down a rutted dirt road. Its most defining feature is the church, which is a solidly built cement block structure.




We enjoyed the music and especially the dance by young teenage girls, pictured above. They have painted themselves with kaolin clay, the main ingredient in Kaopectate. It is handy for painting the skin and to settle digestive problems. People also eat it, especially women, and Western nutritionists often imply that there is something wrong with geophagy, even though we Americans eat kaolin ourselves--just suspended in water, flavored, and poured into plastic bottles.



Pictures of village life--above. Left: a chicken cage. People like to make fun cages for their animals. The chickens that live in this cage climb the ladder. Middle: this man is distilling palm wine to make palm brandy, called "Schnapps" in Ghana and "Coutoucou" in Ivory Coast.





Pictures of cocoa growing. Left: a cocoa tree. Middle: this man is showing the difference in pods between the usual Forastero type and the new, larger hybrid. Right: cocoa drying on a bamboo rack.



Pictures of cooking and eating. Left, the fattest woman I've ever seen in West Africa. She is suffering from a goiter. She is frying delicious cassava fritters; Middle: typical pantry, a box surrounded in chicken wire used to keep cooking ingredients; Right: fufu being pounded.



Pictures of sisters. Left, sisters posing together. Right, sisters sharing their breakfast of red-red or cowpeas cooked with palm oil.



Dancing. Left, woman feeling the rhythm. Right, the rhythm section consisting of lengths of bamboo pounded on rocks.



Tom donates boots, machetes, chocolate bars, and flashlights to the Lutheran pastor, who represents the village.