Kakum Park Guides such as Emmanuel Peasah (left) serve as community liaison with community leaders, such as Adam Mohammed of Homaho (right) to help ensure that park management serves both the interests of conservation and community.

Women spend many hours per day in food preparation such as, shown here the rinsing of ground cassava to make a staple, gari, which is used, much like rice balls or fufu, as the carbohydrate base on which savoury soups or stews are served. (To complement this gari photo see a Ghanain recipe for gari foto at bottom.)

Like everywhere else, rural Ghanaians enjoy sunning themselves outside their houses to converse with passersby. Note the large cooking pot at right that would be used for cooking over an open fire.

Small family farmlands are usually at some distance from centralized community dwelling complexes-- where they are not always under the vigilance of growers-- and thus are more easily targetted by snack-seeking elephants.

Bananas are a familiar food favourite around the world. Less familiar, in North America, at least, is the cooking banana or plantain which, when green, like those shown at right, is sliced and fried for making tasty chips or pounded and boiled in some types of fufu (a starchy, doughy staple common across Africa). Unfortuneately, these crops are also favourites of elephants and this plantain plantation was targetted by elephants the previous year.

(Carrying heavy loads, balanced on the head as shown, is a skill that most rural Ghanains learn as children and utilize throughout their lives.)

Cocoyam, or taro root, is another starchy tuber, like cassava and yam, that is a staple of Ghanaian cuisine.

These cocoyams were damaged, like nearby plantins, by elephants in the previous year.  

Cacao trees are the source of cocoa beans, from which chocolate is derived. The beans are inside the pods-- which are unusual, amongst seed-bearing fruits, in growing from the trunk of the tree, rather than from branches. Cocoa is the major cash crop in the area so when the ripe pods are damaged by raiding elephants, who prize the sweet pulp surrounding the beans, this can represent a major financial loss to the grower.

Pepper-greased cloth-lines offer some limited protection to the plantings of these farmers from the Aroso and Nsabaa communities. Elephants tempted into cultivated areas by the succulent crops quickly learn to avoid contact with the chili-soaked rope fences and pepper-infused cloths hung from them.