My name is Madam Comfort and I live in Wa, the capital city of the Upper West Region of Ghana, with my husband and our children.
My husband and I farm crops such as beans, groundnuts, yam, sorghum and maize to get food and money to survive.
I also process shea butter during the off-farm season, which I sell in Wa market, and my husband has also learnt to make aluminium pots [locally called danse´ma] for some extra money. Neither of us has been to school and so we depend on what nature can give us to make our income.
When I think about the environment and remember what it was like during my childhood days, I can see that a lot has changed. Then, the soils were fine and it rained well. Food shortage was hardly a problem and everyone in this area was able to make a good harvest. Overall, the environment was very good and the poor farmer household did okay.
But now things are different, and strange things are happening. We have to spray chemicals on our bean crops. Without spraying, they will be attacked by all sorts of pests. I remember when our crops didn’t need spraying but now we have to do this every year, otherwise we get nothing for our hard work.
Today most of the trees are gone because we harvest them to cook, or to burn as charcoal to use and sell, and also to build our houses. Before the vegetation was so thick you could hardly see beyond it, but now the whole area is open and you can far into the distance, especially during the dry season.
The rains have also changed. Now, either the rainfall is so heavy that it ruins our crops, or so weak that the crops fail and we feel hapless. It’s the same for everyone.
I must say that this year so far has been an exception. The rain pattern has been quite consistent and moderate for the cropping season. It is already October and the rains are still falling – a situation we haven’t experienced for many years. But I know this isn’t the case in other areas. Take a look at my bean fields and you will get an idea of what we go through during bad years, which is what it's like normally.
We are living with very extreme weather. Conditions are very cold or very hot, too dry that the land is parched or too wet that there is flooding. These changing and erratic circumstances pose a lot of health challenges for me and my family. We frequently fall ill and have to seek treatment which is not easy, even with the national health insurance policy now in place.
There are simply too many uncertainties to deal with. It is difficult to know why these strange are happening but I believe it is partly the work of God and also the way we recklessly handle our environment.
The shea trees I depend on for extra money do not fruit as heavily as they did when I was growing up, and there are less of them. The quantity of nuts I pick every year is getting smaller and whenever my stock is low, I try to reinvest the little profit I make from the sale of the butter by buying nuts from the market so that I can keep earning something. Together, my husband and I try to manage our family the best way we can from our off-farm sources. Life can be very difficult but we must cope.
I’ve talked to other people in the community and I’ve come to realise that education is very important. If I or my husband had been to school we perhaps would have depended less on the environment for our livelihood. So now we are making sacrifices to send our children to school. If they succeed in their education they can earn a salary to support us, now that we are getting old and weak, and also to secure their own lives.
As long as these troubles continue, we will have to keep on making sacrifices. I only hope there is a remedy.
This interview was conducted and translated from Dagaare by Augustine Yelfaanibe
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