Typical Workday Schedule

 

The majority of the trip was spent in the rural village of Fiankoma, in the Ashanti region. Fiankoma is home to about 2000 people, most of whom are subsistence farmers, and has no plumbing or electricity. Weekdays we worked with local homeowners and craftsmen on four Habitat for Humanity houses. Though it was not uncommon for a morning or afternoon to be partly taken up by a cultural experience or trip to part of the village, a typical workday schedule is shown below. 

Time

Activity

Between 5:30 and 6 Get up: We would get up just after sunrise, hopefully woken up by the dawn and not the roosters, who start crowing more than an hour before sunrise.
7:00 Breakfast: Typically bread, beans, eggs, and little hot dog things with tea, coffee, and juice.
7:30 Circle meeting: We form a circle with the masons, carpenters, home owners, etc. A reading, like a story or an inspirational passage, is read (then translated by Frimpong) and then everyone holds hands for a moment of silence (during which time you could pray or simply think about the day ahead).
7:45 to ~11:30 Work: Physical labor. We did brick laying, stuccoing, pick axing the ground to make fill dirt, moving of fill dirt, planing wood, nailing frames together, or helping put down concrete floors. 
12:00 Lunch: Usually saucy dishes served with rice and fried chicken or fried plantains. Foods made from yams, bananas, or cassava would sometimes be served. 
1:00 to ~4:00pm Work: What time we quit work in the afternoon usually depended on how brutally hot and sunny it was. Temperatures ranged from low 90's to a little over 100, Fahrenheit, with high humidity. On hot sunny day we often physically couldn't handle more than a couple hours of work in the afternoon.
6:00 Dinner: Generally same kinds of foods as served at lunch: saucy dishes with rice. Dessert, if we had it, was oranges or pineapples villagers had given to us (probably the best pineapple I've ever had).
7:00 Team meeting or free time:  Team meetings would be a time to discuss experiences, concerns, or learn about the team members or Ghana. Free time was often spent relaxing, playing cards, or going to bed early.
8:30pm
Go to sleep: The sun set at about 7:30 because Ghana is so close to the equator and by 8:30 we were usually passing out.