More Random Musings

I write this as I sit on our porch its 6:30 ish and this is what I see and hear.

  The sun rises slowly and starts its track across the sky. It’s cool and foggy, the sounds of a village waking up to start their day echo across the land. Smokey fires are fanned and children head for school. Close by the neighbor is chopping something with a cutlass, most likely firewood for the day. The news broadcast is playing down by the market. The sun has risen higher and is starting to burn off the fog. Mottos fire up and cruise off, dropping off children at school and then heading out to farm. Friendly conversation can be heard drifting through the cool, damp air as friends meet and or are walking together. A motto king bounces and rattles past on the dirt road. As soon as he hits pavement, he gives it all the throttle it has and heads into town.

   Its rainy season here and the rains have started to come more. Its been cloudy and cool the majority of the time with a few days of blue sky. Reminds me of the big blue sky of western Kansas. The sun beats down with intensity here that I am not used too but it doesn’t seem to burn like the sun the over the pond in the states. A chain saw has now fired up and sounds like it could use a tune up. He really needs to run that thing down to Rolling Hills Small Engine Service and get that thing back in shape.  The rains have made the garden eggs to produce more so the price has dropped and it paining the farmers.

  Its election year here so the politicians have been campaigning. We have very little campaigning here in our village but on the main roads and bigger towns we have seen them set up. Occasionally a vehicle will come by with speakers blaring try to woo the people into supporting them. There has been some violence up north but that’s more between two tribes bickering. Look up Bawku conflict if you want more info I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it and am not going to attempt to explain. The Ashanti people here around us are peaceful and a very hospitable tribe which would go for the vast majority of Ghana I suppose there would be some that wouldn’t really appreciate the white man but they would be very few and far between.

   The courage is well here, hopefully you are finding courage in everyday life. The weeks are beginning to move by rapidly. We had Hoz’s and Miss Erica along with her folks here and now at the end of the week there is a Ghana leaders meeting and a workers meeting planned. I am really looking forward to that. There are a couple of CSI type projects in the works. Not sure how those are going to turn out. There is a high probability that not a lot will happen if anything but still one must try, I guess. There are some converts waiting for doctrine one couple is working on getting their marriage license figured out or something to that affect. He did mention something about needing some dowry yet. He was hoping that with this corn harvest he could get it wrapped up. That is enthusing to have that on the horizon. There is a older brother that lives about 15 drive from here and he is crippled to the point where he can hardly walk much less crawl into a car to drive back to church. So he said we could stop picking him up and maybe come and visit him small.

Now several months later I sit at our kitchen counter and it’s a Saturday night. There is a party goin on behind our house aways. They got the speakers cranked up and half the town can hear what they got going on. Thanksgiving has come and gone. We spent close to a week in the north with Hoz and company after the thanksgiving bash at their place with all the trimmings. The day after thanksgiving found us at a rock formation that seemed to jut out of terrain randomly. Later from up higher it appeared as if there was some type of seam that ran for a number of miles with rock protruding here and there. After lunch back at Hoz’s it became apparent that Maddie had left her bike at the rocks, so another small journey was made back out to the rocks to retrieve said bike. Since we had time to kill Hoz and I went on a little drive down to a rock quarry. I was quite surprised at the very new and modern crushers, screens, and other random things that make a rock quarry operate smoothly. It looked to me that they made any size of rock for crusher fines to maybe 1” crush.

        They blasting slabs of rock off one of those previously mentioned rocks that were protruding, then break it down further with a jackhammer on a track hoe, then haul it to the crushers. By all appearances they had been working for quite some time on the rock by the size of the hole they had blasted out.

         When we were pulling up to the quarry there was an explosives truck leaving the quarry. So, after talking to some of the workers we found that they were planning to blast that afternoon. They seemed ok with us watching them blast. With both Hoz and I quite interested things that go boom we thought we should take them up on it. We had to run home and grab some provisions for an afternoon working in a rock quarry. Thomas, Liv, and Max came along with us back to the quarry. On the way there we stopped and bought some cold drinks for the guys to maybe help them be okay with the white guys hanging around there for a couple hrs. When we got back to the quarry they had started to load the holes with explosives. Which turned out to be diesel and fertilizer. They had 99, 3.5-to-4-inch holes,10 meters deep drilled into this solid chunk of granite looking rock. The blast area was maybe 50x100.

        After some time, the boss showed up, he seemed quite okay with us there. We started to pick his brain a bit. They let high explosive booster charge hooked toe their det cord, down first then loaded the hole with about 9 meters of explosive. Then topped it off with 1 meter of fine crushed rock to keep everything in the hole. It took a couple of hours to get the holes filled. Then the det cord was laid and connected. Meanwhile there was a couple chaps working at getting a track hoe covered that was broken down close to the face of the rock they were fixing to blast. There were 3 different lengths of delays built into the det cords. There was a 25, 17 and 6 millisecond delay. The boss had it all timed so all the det cord was done burning on the top before the first hole lite.

      When everything was squared away there we drove off 500 meters to watch the festivities. As we were leaving I saw they building a fire. That turned out to be the way they light the fuse. They had two minutes of fuse before the det cord started its burn. So we could see them drop the fuse in the fire and run for the pickup and cruise off to a safe spot. When that thing blew it was quite spectacle. Rocks the size of exercise balls were blasted up maybe 60 ft and a wack of small stuff to with a impressive plum of dust and smoke.  A person could see all the det cord go in short order like maybe 50 milliseconds then it sounded like one big explosion even though it had small delays between each hole. At 500 meters away a person could definitely feel the shock wave. Nothing crazy but it still was noticeable.              

       And power of that all was impressive. Massive chunks of rock the size of a average car clear down to the fist size rocks were all in a massive heap. So now it was time for the track hoe with a jack hammer to bust this all down to a size of a basketball then it would be hauled over to the crushers. It will definitely will be high light of that trip.

The north is quite different form here in the south. Some parts could be straight out of the Texas hill country others have the New Mexico feel. But it definitely is semiarid with only one rainy season versus the south were we get two rainy seasons. They are good farmers. So over dry season some of them will come to the south to farm or work other jobs. There is also lots of cattle up there and they seem to do well with the grass they have.