Thursday, June 9, 2011



After much preparation, and many trips to Accra, the Animal Rearing/Cage Building IST held at my site in the Volta Region was a huge success… or at least I thought it was.

Chris and I persevered through all the obstacles that lay in our way in order to put on a successful, and first ever, volunteer led In Service Training.

Day 1: Snail Cage

Last minute the dates were changed, the budget was never approved until 5 days before the training was suppose to start, the Easter holiday that happens to last for about 5 days in Ghana, caused us to not be able to buy many of our materials, and we booked our hotel too late causing us to have to change the location where everyone was suppose to stay… all lessened learned for the next IST that we give.

Day 2: Rabbit Cage

But in the course of 3 days, 12 Peace Corps Volunteers (including Chris and myself), 10 Counterparts, and 13 participants from my village all took part in building 7 animal cages/hutches in hopes of turning the trend to caging animals vs. living with the animals. We got MOFA, The Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana, on board and they gave a very encouraging presentation on the benefits of caging animals… the trends are starting to change.

Day 3: Looking through the Chicken Coup

The first day, 3 snail cages were built, two above the ground and one in ground to mimic their natural habitat. The second day 2 rabbit hutches and 1 grasscutter cage were built. And on the last day we built an amazing chicken coup (I might be predigest because it was built so I could raise chickens with my Ghanaian Family, but I must say it’s a bomb chicken coup!) and finished what wasn’t finished on the first day.


It was great to see everyone in the training get involved, from the village participants to all the PCV’s everyone worked well and efficient together. This was the first time for many PCV’s that we were able to get our hands dirty during a training. We were all tired of observing during our technical training instead of partaking in the technical aspect of our training.


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