Shea!

I have been living in a village called Dalun, nearby Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana, for the past week, working in a shea butter cooperative. This means that most days of the week I and my four counterparts, who are all staying at a center known as the Ghanaian Dutch Community Programme in Dalun, work with local women as they process shea nuts into shea butter, some of which is exported across the world. So far we have been directly involved in almost every aspect of shea butter processing, from harvesting the nuts to boiling them to removing their soft outer coating to washing them to grinding them to roasting them over a fire to milling them into a paste to mixing that paste with water until it releases a fatty substance similar to shea butter to boiling the resultant shea compound until it is refined. The entire process takes about a week.

On the 22nd we will leave Dalun and make an excursion to Mole National Park, where we will hope to see some of the animals that have always bounded into my imagination when I think of African wildlife, before beginning our journey back through Tamale and Kumasi and finally Accra, where we will spend just under a week before (hopefully, depending on the consequences of the British Airways strike) departing on the evening of May 30 for America. Scarcely can I imagine that in hardly more than 2 weeks I will be back in my original home (original because in some, though not all, ways Ghana has become a home for me)!

For those of you in the La Crosse area, note that I plan to have a small presentation of pictures on the evening of Friday, June 4, but I will get more details out soon.

Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in mine, friends; by God's grace we shall meet again soon.