A Day at the Dam: Tono

Trust you’re having a good day. Today, let’s go see some water. I moved away from home a few years back because I had to school in another part of the country. Everything was new to me for the start but with time, I started to feel at home with everything and everyone there.

For my first few years in school, it was always from my residence to the lecture hall and back and sometimes I would go see my friends and that was all. My friends didn’t know how to have fun and so it was normal for them to influence me into staying at home all the time. Being a homebody, I really didn’t care if I was indoors all week but my parents would always call and ask me to go out.

I’m not a dull person but one bad habit of mine was that I could stay indoors all week and not mind. To prevent this from happening, I started taking part in extra curricular activities which got me to be on the move all the time. With time, I was in charge of so many activities on campus and so i had so much on my plate.

On one of these numerous activities I had to manage, I had to go with my team to the Tono dam in the Upper east region of Ghana for some shots on a research we were conducting. I had been there before and so I knew my way there but the others on the team didn’t even know where there were going. It was about an hour drive from campus and the sun was out on the particular day. There were no buses or tricycles going that way so we had to hire one for ourselves and off we were. The road to the dam was packed with trees and we made sure to enjoy the view and the fresh breeze.

The Tono irrigation dam is a man made dam which was dug to serve as a source of irrigation for farmers. Up here, majority of the indigenes are mainly into rice farming all year round. The whole area around the dam was packed with acres of rice farms with farmers working tirelessly to feed us.
I had never seen rice farms this huge before and I got experience the harvesting process also. The dam was connected to the farms in a way but I didn’t really know how it worked. What mattered was that farmers had water to grow their crops.

We made our way to the dam which was surrounded by huge rocks and we had to make our way down these rocks to get to the water. Once again, I had those wild thoughts of mine? I started to ask myself what I was going to do if one of these rocks should come running down on me.😂

I was so eager to get into the water so I took my shots as quickly as I could and made my way to the others who were already sitting in the canoes just at the bank of the water. The water was really cold as I walked right into it. The view was magnificent and I could see some water snails or whatever they’re called floating on top of the water.

I thought I loved water but you should see how excited the others were to get to see a dam for their first time. Weird right? That was also my reaction the first time I came here. As I was responsible for everyone, I allowed them have some more fun and then we made our way back to campus. Anytime you’re in the upper East region of Ghana, you should go check out the Tono Dam.

all images belong to me.