I'm still in Ghana, and trying to finish my story about the weekend before I come home!
One of the places I really wanted to go was a small town called Sirigu, even closer up to the border with Burkina Faso. In Sirigu, they have a special style of painting their houses to make them beautiful (in Sirigu, the women do the painting).
For a while, people were stopping painting them because the paints are made from natural things like special rocks, and they don't last very long. I was told that they need to be repainted every three years, and that's a lot of work - especially since things up near the desert (remember I said that up there is getting close to the Sahara) things are getting drier and it's more and more work just to grow food to eat. So, a little while ago a woman from Sirigu - who I am told was the first one from the village to go to college, and who went on to be a teacher - decided to put together an organization called SWOPA. SWOPA helps people keep doing the traditional house painting (and other crafts of the village, like making pottery) by teaching them how to do it, helping them get a good price for crafts, and then paying some people to maintain the traditional house painting by running tours and sharing the money they get from the tours with them.
So, I went. I had a very nice guide named Albert, who talked a lot with me about the village, and how the paints are made, and the traditional religion there. For instance, he told me that when people die in Sirigu, they have a special way of making a place to bury them. First, they dig a round hole only big enough for your shoulders (well, not your shoulders, your shoulders are tiny). Then someone goes underground and hollows out a bigger room for the person who died, but still with only the little hole to get in, and when they have buried the person, they cover the hole with a clay disk so they know where it is.
But you probably want to see pictures of the painting! First, Mr. Albert took me around the SWOPA building.
Kofi Annan, who's one of my heroes, and is famous in Ghana (and around the world! He was in charge of the United Nations for a while), came to visit, and they made a statue of him!
Inside the workshop, they have some things made by people in the village. You can buy them (don't worry, I got something for you and Mommy), but it was also interesting to get a tour and some explanations of the kinds of things they make and how they make them. For instance, he showed me the special rocks and dirt and sticks that the women use to make the red, white, and black paint they use on the houses (they don't just buy it in a store!):
People use them to keep dried food in, because in Sirigu (like lots of places in Africa), it's very important to always be hospitable, which means ready to welcome guests. So, just in case someone comes and you don't have enough fresh food to serve them a nice meal, you will always have dried fruit and vegetables, and some millet (people were surprised to learn that I knew what millet was, and that you liked to eat it for breakfast!) to serve them.
Then we went out to see the model homes that people keep nice so people like me can come and look at them.
The houses in Sirigu aren't quite like our houses. They're made of dried mud, and they only have one floor, and they're mostly outside! Each person has his or her own small circular room, and then there's a courtyard (sort of like the ama in Ebele's Favorite Game) where people get together, sort of like a living room, but outdoors. And then there's a section for the animals and storing grain, and everything's connected with outside walls. Here, let me show you:
This is what one of the houses (actually the third one I went to) looks like from a little ways away. The building on the left is one built out of concrete in a more modern style that was added to it later. Albert told me that people like building out of concrete sometimes because it lasts longer than the mud, but the mud makes homes cool when it's hot and warm when it's cold, in a way that concrete doesn't (if our house was made of mud, we probably wouldn't need the air conditioners in the summer!). So he said that they are experimenting with making blocks out of a combination of mud and concrete to see if they can make something that is strong like concrete but cool like mud. But you want to see more of the houses!
This is the oldest house in the village that's still standing, what it looks like as you just come through its outer wall.
Outside the house, there's a little shrine, dedicated to the first man who was the father of the man who lives in the house now. His father is buried somewhere else, but this is a place where they come to ask him to help them out. People in Sirigu, like lots of people in Ghana (and Africa, and lots of places in the world) believe that after you die, you go to another world with other people who died (sort of like a ghost) but you can still help out people in your family who are still alive, and they can still talk to you using magic. [Adults: I don't know how to explain religion in a way that will make a lot of sense to Ruth and be respectful and make clear that Melissa and I don't believe the same things. So feel free to skip most of this. Also, maybe skip the fact that you have to kill a chicken on that stone in order to talk to the ancestors. Animal sacrifice is, unfortunately, going to be kind of a theme.]
Then we went inside. The first part of the house is where they keep small animals, like chickens and goats and sometimes pigs. People in Sirigu mostly grow millet for food. I was there in the dry season, when there's no rain, so the millet had all died, and most of what you see in my pictures are the old dried out millet stalks that people can't eat.
But chickens can!
They have a pretty neat system. After they harvest the millet, they bring the dried stalks into the animal part of the house, where chickens and goats and pigs eat it. Then they poop! And the people collect the poop and make it into compost that helps grow more millet.
Also, remember there aren't a lot of grocery stores where people can just go buy food. Most of the farmers have to live pretty much on what they can grow. So, what do they eat in the dry season when the millet can't grow? Most farmers in Sirigu have granaries as part of their house, in the animal part. These are big hollow towers made of mud and sticks that they fill up with dry millet that they can eat during the dry season.
Then we went through into the part where the people live (the blocks you can see are some of the mud/concrete blocks).
The part with the little round door at the bottom and the stairs going up is the main room of the house. It's where the Mommy usually lives, and also the kitchen [Adults: Yeah, Sirigu isn't quite a stronghold of feminism.]
Albert explained that the triangle pattern on the main building represents a net that holds calabash pots, and the straight lines represent a broken calabash, because both are so useful - even broken calabashes are used as tools to help make pottery, kind of like how you used part of the coconut shell as a scoop when we were at Madina Market.
The stairs go up to the flat roof. This is what the area around the house looks like from the roof:
And this is what the whole house looks like from up there. The big stick is so you can climb up to the top of the granary and take the top off to get the millet.
There are two reasons why there are stairs up to the roof. First, when it's really hot, sometimes people go up there and sleep instead of inside the house (most people in Sirigu don't have any electricity in their houses, so not only no air conditioning, not even any fans, and most of the buildings don't have windows you can open).
The other reason is that there used to be a lot of fighting in Sirigu [Adults: especially slave raids for sale in the south], a long time ago when this kind of house was first made. So someone could go up on the roof and see really far (like in the picture above) and see if anyone was coming to do fighting. Then he could yell to warn other people in the village.
When we came down off the roof, we went into the main room through its special door.
If it looks hard to get into, it is! The opening is so low I had to crawl! And then there's a low wall right inside, that you have to climb over.
They made the opening this way on purpose. Not only was there once a lot of fighting near Sirigu, people used to have to worry about wild animals (like lions!) that would sometimes attack people. They built their doors this way so that, if someone on the roof warned them that people were coming to fight, or there were dangerous wild animals, everyone could go hide in the main room. Then, if someone tried to come in, they would have to crawl, and while they were crawling someone inside could push them back out with a spear or hit them on the head with a club, and the people inside would be safe.
Inside, we looked around. There was a big oven to cook in, and they kept their pots on top.
On the left you can see the special pots for dried food (but no elder woman lives in this house, so they don't have the special top pot!). I also got to see the special spot where they grind millet and things to cook with.
Then we went to see another one of the houses. It was pretty similar, but had some neat differences.
Albert told me a story about the pattern way at the top, that looks like diamonds. It symbolizes "leadership," and he said it's always the first pattern you paint on a house.
The story he told me was: A long time ago, one of the farmers in the village was having trouble with his cows getting away, and getting eaten by wild animals. So he trained one cow to be as smart as a person, and he fed her until she was huge and had gigantic horns. That cow would then take care of the other cows. When wild animals came, she would fight them with her giant horns. And when it was time for the herd to move, the super cow would just moo once and all the other cows would follow her. So, he said, the big red diamond in the middle represents the leader cow, and the lines all the other animals following her around.
The bird in the middle of the design is supposed to be a guinea fowl, which are delicious and give eggs so are a sign of being rich. And then the crescent above it is for the moon. The people who live in this house believe that the moon is a spirit, sort of like a person, who is very powerful and you can ask to help you.
On top of their house, along with the places to sleep, they have a special place to go to make wishes to the moon:
And then I just thought this quote that someone painted on the house was pretty funny.
While we were talking about what people in the village believe about how when you die you can stay as a sort of ghost to help your family out, Albert also told me about how they do funerals there. If you are older, when you die there is a big celebration, and the older you are, the bigger it is! There's usually dancing and drumming and people tell stories about your life.
One neat thing they do is that during the celebration a few people, at night, will go way out into the fields and hide. Then people will stand by the door of your house and shout out, "if when you were alive, you were a bad person, come back!" And the people will stay hidden. Then people will shout again, "if when you were alive, you were very evil, and fought, and hurt people, and didn't take care of your family, come back now!" and the people will stay hidden. Then they will shout a third time, but this time say, "if you when you were alive you were a very good person, and nice, and did good things, and everyone liked you, come back!" and then the people hiding in the field will pretend to be the spirit of the person who died and come running back and everyone will celebrate the good things you did in your life.
If you are very old, people will do a war dance for you. There's not much fighting in Sirigu now, but people still keep special clothes like the ones they used to wear for war, including a special helmet made out of a calabash and covered in cowrie shells, and the men do a big dance to show you were a great elder and leader in the village. I asked Albert if there were any examples of the special clothes I could see, and he brought me to see a man in the village who agreed to put on all his special war dance clothes for me. His children laughed and laughed - I think they thought he looked silly, but I thought it was neat.
Here you can see his special helmet.
Cowrie shells are considered very valuable in northern Ghana - they used to use them as money. So it's like having a helmet covered in jewels or gold coins would be for us. Some of the hunters in Sirigu, they believe, have magic that lets them sit on their helmets and make them fly, so they can be high above the animals when they're hunting.
And here you can see him without his quiver of arrows, but with his special animal skin.
People in Sirigu believe that some of the hunters and warriors can also do magic with these skins to make themselves invisible so they can sneak up on animals or people they are fighting.
Seeing all the houses and getting all the stories took a long time but was very interesting! I thanked Albert, and he showed me the way to take a path from SWOPA into the main part of Sirigu so that I could get a tro-tro back to Bolga.
I couldn't get enough of the huge baobab trees! I've never seen a tree that big before! And you can eat the seeds - but they weren't quite ready yet. Albert and the man with the war dance clothes picked a pod and let me try one of the seeds, but it didn't taste like much. As they dry during the dry season, they say they get sweet and delicious.
Yup, that little thing in the corner is a house.
On the way back to Sirigu town, I saw some guinea fowl pecking, which reminded me they are delicious and I wanted to try some of the spicy stew they make near Bolga.
I had to wait a long time for the tro-tro, but it was OK, I just sort of watched Sirigu go by. It's small - about the size of the little town I grew up in! But much more isolated, which makes it feel smaller.
Then I went back to Bolga, and had some delicious and super super super spicy guinea fowl stew at a restaurant called Mama Rakiya's, and then went to sleep.
I better hurry up and finish this story! As I write this, it's only two days until I leave to come back to see you and stay with you and Mommy for good!
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