Back to Accra and Back to Blogging

Sorry for the interlude of radio silence.

I'd say I've been busy, and for some of the time I have been, but honestly, mostly I've just been lazy. We left off last time with me talking about my mock mini placements, and having secured the spot for my actual placement. Since then, I completed my real mini placement, with considerably more adventures than the mock.

My mini placement went really well. We planned it out very effectively and we gathered a lot of really good information. Unfortunately, I didn't get to participate much with the really cool hands-on community part because I was at the Bongo District Hospital. Now, before you worry too much, I was actually not that sick. I mean, I was pretty miserable at the time, but the main reason I went to the hospital was because here in Ghana any time you have a fever and any kind of stomach issues it's a good idea to go and get a malaria test, because malaria is much less unpleasant if caught and treated quickly. As it turned out, I didn't have malaria, so the doctors wildly over-prescribed a whole range of anti-nausea and anti-stomach-pain drugs and instructed me to go home and rest and come back if it didn't go away in a few days. It did, and I actually never took any of the drugs. I wasn't concerned about the legitimacy of the drugs. They were all in their original packaging when the pharmacist gave them to me, and I even got the little rolled-up paper pamphlet of drug information that they always come with in Canada. Still, I felt they were all a little bit heavy-duty for my symptoms, so I just took gravol and slept for a few days.

I had been concerned that going to the hospital here would be a traumatizing experience, because it certainly was for another girl on our trip who stayed for a few nights at the hospital in Accra. The difference, I guess, was that she had very serious problems (she couldn't eat or drink anything because of the pain in her throat and stomach) they didn't know what was wrong with her, and she was in Accra. The big bills piled up mostly because she was at the targeted-to-foreigners hospital in the capitol, and she had to stay in the hospital, unlike me.

My hospital experience was actually not that bad, but I will be eternally grateful to Sarah for going through it with me. It was terrifying at first, because I didn't know what was wrong with me, or how long it was going to take, and the waiting room was basically a couple of benches under a tin roofed pavilion with chickens poking around, like there always seem to be in Ghana, and the multitude of flies made me very concerned about how sanitary the equipment would be. As it turned out, one of the administrative assistance (appropriately named Mercy) noticed the two Obrunis who clearly didn't know what to do, and walked us through the procedure of getting a folder and getting in the right lines for a consultation and a malaria test. When my name was called for my malaria test, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the room where they performed the tests was closed off and clean looking. It was a tiny room, only big enough for the nurse, myself, and Sarah standing against the door behind my chair, holding my hand. We watched him put on new clean gloves and break open a new needle and properly clean the area he was going to stab, which was very comforting. The malaria test itself was rather unpleasant, though not a big deal. I knew they were going to take blood, but I thought they'd take an ounce or so from the elbow like when you get blood tests at home. Instead they pricked my finger like they do when they test your iron before you give blood, and it hurt a lot more. There are a lot more nerve endings in your finger than in your elbow. But all in all the experience wasn't too bad. The whole procedure in and out of the hospital only took about four hours, which is honestly faster than it's ever been when I went to the ER in Peterborough, and the whole thing, consultation, test, and drugs, only cost me GHC 12, which is about $6.70 Canadian.

After we got back from the Bongo District and did our presentations, and wrote our analytical essays about our field work, Christmas vacation officially began. We held a little Christmas party at our 13 person house, where we exchanged Secret Santa gifts and Sarah and I provided hot chocolate (actually milo, but it was close enough) for everyone, while other girls provided chocolate and cookies. After that Katie and Nora and Holly and Christie and I took a three day vacation to Mole National Park. We got up at and left the house at 3:00 AM so that we could be sure to catch one of the early buses. The thing about buses in Ghana is that they never ever leave when they are scheduled to, so the best strategy is usually to show up really early and expect to wait. We only ended up having to wait about an hour once we found the appropriate bus, so it wasn't too bad. We stayed at the Mole Motel, which is the only place to stay in the park, but even with this monopoly it wasn't that expensive. The rooms were clean and spacious, and the shape of the building kept them cool. There were air conditioned options, but as students, we opted for the ceiling-fan option that was much more in our budget. There was a little pool that was mostly clean, and a nice little restaurant and a terrace that looked out over the park. The food at the restaurant was delicious, and fairly reasonably priced for the western options, though the Ghanaian dishes were wildly inflated. There was also a slightly less known staff canteen around the side, whose sign said it was open to guests. There I had one meal of yam chips, that were still five times the price I'd get at a chop bar in Tamale, but two cidies less than they were at the restaurant.

The walking safari was pretty cool. We didn't see that much in terms of wildlife. We saw a whole mess of antelope, a few gazelles, and a few waterbuck and warthogs. We didn't see any elephants, to the great dismay of the other girls, but it was cool to walk along and see the animals instead of seeing them from a truck. The guide was nice, but less knowledgeable than the guide I'd had in East Africa, and his English was not the best. It was a fabulous experience for the price though. It only cost us three cidies each per hour, and we went on a two hour trek. It was a very pleasant hike, even though I'm not much into hiking. There were herbs growing in the park that I recognized the smell of, but couldn't quite name. I think there was thyme, or something like it, but I couldn't swear to it. Anyway, the whole hike smelled like tea and the spices that my mom often cooks chicken or turkey in. We went on a driving safari the second day, and we didn't see any new animals, but we got a different view of the same ones from the day before. They had a set of three benches fixed to the top of an SUV with metal supports around so we couldn't fall out. I was a little hesitant about this at first, but the roads that we drove on were not too bumpy, and the speed limit in the park was 10km/hr, so I was able to relax. This was also a very inexpensive expedition, as it was the regular safari fee of three cidies per person per hour, plust 50 cidies per hour for the vehicle. Divided among the eight of us who went, it was quite reasonable. Our bus back to Tamale actually left on time, at 4:00 AM, which was an unprecedented occurrence that pleased us greatly. The number of people that they packed on to this bus was quite astonishing, though. The bus was set up like a greyhound, but with slightly narrower seats, and handles like the ones on city buses in Canada had been fixed to the ceiling so that people could stand,. And they did. For hours. It was about a five hour bus ride, though it only filled up such that people were standing about one or two hours in. Still, I was glad I had my seat, as cramped as it was.

Getting back to Accra from Tamale was rather disastrous. We had planned on coming back to our house for about an hour to gather our things before setting out for Kumasi that day. We ended up doing that, but the STC (state transport company) buses to Kumasi were sold out for days. We hadn't considered that throngs of people would be traveling in the days immediately before the elections, such that they could return to their home electoral areas to vote. After hours of waiting and changing our minds and visiting two of the three private bus stations in Tamale, and even considering flying, we finally got on a trotro to Kumasi and got to our guesthouse at about 10:00PM. It was a long day, and we were all a little big cranky. From there, those who had their passports with them decided to fly the rest of the way back to Accra. Sarah and Holly and Christie and I did not have that option, so we got up at around 6:00 and braved the Kumasi bus station. This time was much easier though, and it only took us about half an hour to get on a nice air conditioned VIP bus to Accra. Sarah and I came to stay with Carmencita, which felt like utter paradise after our unfortunate travel experience. We took a day to just sit around and relax before we started going about the city again. Then we visited our respective host families, which was lovely. I had missed them a lot, and as usual, they wouldn't let me leave without feeding me, and the food was delicious. Since then we've gone to the arts center to look for souvenirs and Christmas presents, spent a day downloading movies at the internet cafe, and otherwise enjoyed our vacation.

Then, a couple of days ago, Katie and Nora and I went for another little adventure to Togo. Sarah had to stay behind because her mom was flying in before we were planning to get back. This trip was fantastic. We had another up-at-3:00AM-to-travel day, but managed to make it to the border, change some money, and get our visas without much trouble. Neither Nora nor Katie speak any French, so I was the official translator for the trip; a job for which I was rewarded with one free dinner. It wasn't necessary, but it was nice that they wanted to do that. We ate delicious french food. Apparently whatever the reason for the lack of milk and dairy products in Ghana, it isn't because of the heat, because these things were readily available in Togo, and we enjoyed them thoroughly. We mostly just hung out by the beach, reading our books and relaxing and enjoying the French-ness of it all. We went to one tourist attraction: the largest fetish (as in fetish priests, kind of like voodoo) market in West Africa. It wasn't as big as I expected it to be. There were a couple dozen stalls around a courtyard/parking lot of sand, and we paid more than we should have to have a guide tell us about the items and their uses. Most of them were dead animals, or their heads. There weren't too many other odd body parts lying around, but there were also the usual stones and seeds and carved statuettes and voodoo dolls. We were blessed by the priest there, and Katie and I got little overpriced souvenirs that supposedly have magical properties and were blessed by the priest for us.

The trip home was uneventful, and overall it was just a very good vacation. Now I'm back at Carmencita's, and you're pretty much all caught up. Sarah and her mom, with whom I went for lunch and a trip to Madina Market yesterday, are on their way to Cape Coast. I would be going with them, but I promised my host family a visit today or tomorrow before Sarah invited me. Also, I'll be going to Cape Coast again with my family when they come on the 27th, so I'm not missing out too much. I have a couple of days to myself now, to relax in the air conditioning (which seems unfathomably opulent and luxurious to me now) and get ready for Christmas. Hopefully I'll be better at keeping at this blog in the days and adventures to come. I'll keep you posted!

Starting to "Do" Development

I have good news of recoveries from my last post!

First of all, I have secured a place at Tawodep! They are planning on performing a large-scale evaluation of their projects in the new year, so there will be lots of work for two interns to perform, and since the director of the organization has assured me of this, Marika, the other girl interested, seems very happy to work with me! I'm very relieved about this, and I'm really looking forward to starting work. The only small problem is that they're not government funded, and rely largely on individuals or civil society groups for charitable donations in terms of funding. While they still perform their training functions whether they have funding or not, most of the action at Tawodep is reliant on donations, so I just have to hope that they will have funding when I am there so that I can see how everything is done, and hopefully help out.

Also, on one of my sharetaxi rides across Tamale recently, I noticed a sign for a Habitat for Humanity build. My paternal grandparents, and most of my dad's side of the family, has been actively involved in Habitat for Humanity in Canada, so the sign caught my eye. In fact, when my grandfather died about eight years ago, the family sort of adopted one of the builds in my dad's hometown of Brighton in his honour. I remember visiting the build site, and I'm pretty sure there were matching tee-shirts involved. I'd like to say that I helped, but I don't think I was very useful as I was about 12 and pretty much didn't know anything and was afraid to get in the way, do something wrong, or get my hands dirty. Still, Habitat for Humanity has a special place in my heart. I would like to go and check out the build at some point while I'm here, and just see what's happening with it, see if someone will talk to me and tell me how it's organized here. I'm interested to see how it differs from the builds in Canada, but I can't for the life of me remember where I saw the sign. I guess I'll just have to keep my eyes peeled as I go about my life here over the next three weeks.

It's hard to believe that in three weeks this course will be over, and I'll have a whole month to travel and explore and do my own thing before my placement starts in January. It's going by so quickly. I'm really enjoying the course we're taking here in Tamale. Today we did a mock mini-placement, which is about as convoluted as it sounds. In January we start our placements, but next week we have mini-placements, in which we will be shipped out to communities near Bolgatanga for three days to interact with students and teachers and parents and administrators to try to evaluate the effectiveness of the Capitation Grant system. Other groups investigated other aspects of education, healthcare, and livelihood empowerment programs, but all were pro-poor government policies in the Upper East Region of Ghana. 

In Ghana, free compulsory basic education is provided by the Government up to the Junior High School level, and every school is given a Capitation Grant to help pay for cultural activities, sports programs, and minor maintenance and repairs. This grant, we learned, is equal to 1.5 Cidies per student per term. We were also meant to evaluate programs of providing free uniforms and exercise books to underprivileged students, though we found that there was much less information to be had about the logistics of these programs, as they are government programs, but not mandated by acts of parliament, so the allocation of funds to these programs are liable to serious fluctuation.  

In order to do these assessments, we will be using a toolkit referred to as Participatory Learning Approaches (sometimes called Participatory Rural Appraisal). The theory is that by involving community members and stakeholders in the information generating and planning processes of development work, not only will they be more empowered to hold service providers accountable for fulfilling their rights to education, health, and so on, but that they will also have a sense of ownership over programs and initiatives and be more willing to work on them, monitor them, and maintain them as needed. For the purposes of these assessments, we hope that by interacting with community members on both the supply side of the service (administration and teachers) and the demand side, we will be able to get a more holistic understanding of the challenges that face it, as well as helping the community to understand why there are problems, what they are entitled to, and what can be done to address issues both on the supply and demand side of the service. 

The toolkit includes semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and task groups, resource maps, rating and prioritizing strategies, and community scorecards. All of these tools are very simple in theory, but can be challenging to implement when one walks into a tiny village in West Africa where no one speaks English, and few understand why we are here (we're not Peace Corp, we're not missionaries, and we're not representing an NGO, so we're kind of a confusing group).

In order to prepare us for this ordeal and its associated challenges, we did a mock mini-placement today. It was just for the one day, and we're not actually being marked on our report for this one, so it was a great learning opportunity. We got to know our facilitator, Elizabeth, a little bit, and tried our hands at dealing with some of the most common problems in this line of work.

The first one was waiting. 

We meant to speak with the District Education Officer, but he was not there, so after greeting a lot of people, and a lot of waiting, we eventually spoke to the District Accountant, who ended up being very kind and very informative. Still, it put us about an hour or so behind schedule.

The second one was also waiting.

When we got to the village, we had to meet with the chief in order to officially "enter" the village and to have permission to perform our work. That too, involved a lot of waiting, as the chief could not be found. We ended up greeting a sub-chief instead of whatever level of chief we had planned on greeting. Regardless, we met him, and it was nice, and we got our permissions to proceed.

The third problem was structuring our session.

The question period was very informative and rewarding, but we found it challenging to transition into some of the more abstract parts of the session, namely compiling the scorecard. We identified components and indicators of problems with the services from the question period, and wanted rated in terms of severity, which is fairly simple in theory, and for the most part the community seemed to understand. The problem was that the names we gave them, like "Time Frame" and "Inclusion in Decision Making Processes" proved to be very difficult to translate into Dagbani, and it was difficult making a "thing" out of the problems (such as the waiting period after the start of the term before students receive their subsidized uniforms) that were discussed in the question period. Still, a huge smile and a small effort to speak the language goes a long way. When we identified our categories to be rated, I asked for the translations for "waiting time" and the like, and said them loudly with a huge stupid smile whilst holding up an item to the group. Time was represented by a bowl, quantity of uniforms by an empty water sachet, inclusion in decision making by a pen, etc. As a group, we had them recognize and repeat what each item represented, and from there asked them to rate how happy they were with the pen, or the water sachet, by placing stones in a grid that we drew with a stick in the dirt, with boxes representing very poor, poor, fair, good, and very good for each item. It seemed to work fairly well in the end.

The last, and biggest problem, was inclusion.

It was hard to get the women to talk. There were about as many women present as men, but they didn't sit together, and the women didn't talk unless we explicitly asked them  question. Also, when it came time for voting, and the women were given stones, the community talked at them very loudly and seemed to influence their votes, although without understanding Dagbani I really can't be sure. There were some children present, but most were too young to try to include in the process, and those that were old enough didn't stay for long.  Even within the men and women groups, as always, there were some who dominated the discussion and some whose voices were not heard. If we'd had more time to split into focus groups, or better yet, to do short individual interviews, perhaps this could have been better mitigated. Even if we shared a common language, we could have mediated the discussion a little better to gear it towards those who were less vocal, but as we were speaking through an interpreter, this was difficult to do. We managed to get some opinions from the women, and a few of the less talkative men, but in general this was something we struggled with.

It was a really good learning experience though. I mean, we are always taught that we have to try to get all members to participate, and we always want to do that, but we saw today why it can be so hard to enact that in practice. Hopefully this experience will help us to come up with some strategies to address this issue in our real mini-placement. We have to do our mock reports tomorrow, and then our professor (who's kind of a rockstar; everyone in development or government in the area seems to know him, and he's so engaging and informative) and the rest of the class will give us suggestions for next time.

There's not much else to report from this end, other than life continues to be life in Africa. There were ants in my sugar cubes, so I must either find ziploc bags (which I have not seen anywhere here, amazingly) or start keeping my sugar in the fridge. I found that nothing is more wonderful than a fanchoco on the walk home from the sharetaxi stop on a sunny afternoon when it's 40 degrees. A fanchoco is one of a line of fan-something products that are all frozen and delicious. Fanchoco tastes kind of like a fudgesicle in a little bag (kind of like the ones that Yoplait used to make tubes of yogurt in) about the size of Canadian paper money. Other flavours include fanice, which kind of tastes like coolwhip, fanyogo which apparently tastes like strawberry frozen yogurt, and fandango which I have not yet tried, but very much want to because of its name. This one is sort of mango flavoured. 

I thought we were done with essay writing when we left Accra, but apparently I was wrong.  I have an analytical essay on the Participatory Learning Approach due on Friday, and then my mini placement report at the end of the course. More Northern adventures to come! I'll keep you posted.

Toughing it Out

Today was rough.

The power has been out in our house since last night at about 8:00. It was so hard to sleep last night, because of the heat and lack of fan, so that probably contributed pretty significantly to my difficulties dealing with the morning’s challenges. The power was still out, and our water stopped flowing. This was not too concerning, because we have two polytanks (big black plastic reservoirs for water) and a concrete underground reservoir. Unfortunately, these appeared to be empty when we tried to use them this morning, so I washed my face with a drinking water sachet and got dressed.

Then there was a cockroach.

It wasn’t as huge and terrifying as some that I have seen. Actually, I’ve only ever seen one other, and it was in a train station in Malaysia when I was nine. It was about as big as my foot, which I know because it ran towards me and almost under my foot as I went to step. I’m pretty sure I screamed when I saw that one. I handled this one a little better; I just stood there and cursed at it. Soon after that, I realized that it was already dead, which was nice. Probably this was a result of the liberal application of raid that we’ve been practicing around all the baseboards in our house. Holly demonstrated her unflappability and resolve as she swept it up and threw it outside for me. She was my hero for the morning.

Shortly after that was taken care of, I dropped a still sealed water sachet and it exploded all over my room, which was fun. It got my clothes that I’d just brought in off the line (and had to shake a host of moths and ants off of) all nice and wet again, so that made me really happy. But I think the most personally upsetting part of my morning happened when we stopped to get egg sandwiches on the way to school. I was sitting there eating, minding my own business, and I saw that one of the girls next to me had a mosquito bite on her leg that she had scratched open a bit so it was bleeding. It was not a very large cut, nor very deep, so it should not have been a big deal.

What was upsetting about it was that there were flies in it.

Apparently flies here really really like open wounds, so there were a few of them, that she didn’t seem to notice, packed together and not really moving in a little triangle of horror on top of the cut. At first I actually thought they were biting her, but when she brushed them away, it was clear that they were just hanging out on top of a cut that already existed. I helped her chase them off (they were quite stubborn) and gave her some polysporin because flies carry all kinds of nastiness here. Luckily, the flies didn’t seem to like the polysporin very much, so they kept away after that. Still, it wasn’t too upsetting.

What was upsetting was realizing that I had the same thing on three different mosquito bites an hour later, and not knowing how long they had been there. When I discovered this I freaked out a little bit and liberally applied polysporin to every mosquito bite and cut I could locate.

School at least was good today. It was very engaging and I enjoyed it. I haven’t done much this afternoon, but to put a great end to that wonderful morning I had jollof at a chop bar that had questionable crunchy bits in it, and I found out that the other girl who was interested in TAWODEP, the NGO I wanted to do my placement with, has already contacted them and arranged her placement, and although we’re technically allowed to have up to two students at an NGO, they’re a small organization and I don’t think it’s likely that they’ll have enough work for the both of us. So it looks like I’m going to have to keep looking, which is not awesome because the deadline to choose an NGO is coming up quickly. Hopefully things will turn around tomorrow. Today just hasn’t been a good one.

I know that sometimes it’s the hardest parts of adventures like this that will end up being the most rewarding, and that will teach me the most when this is all over. I try to remind myself of this, because right now it just feels hard. I’m so aware of how uncomfortable or unsafe or inconvenient just about everything is here, and it’s hard to feel like it’s worth it when I’m afraid I’ll end up at a placement that I don’t enjoy or care about. Still, I’m sure there are other NGOs that I’ll find interesting, and I’m sure I’ll have better days.

To quote an excellent animated film (that I recently found out features the creative genius of Joss Whedon and the voice talents of Leonard Nimoy), “When you’ve hit rock bottom, the only place left to go is up.” While I know I’m still not really at rock bottom, I still have a lot to be appreciative of, it’s nice to think that things will probably turn up soon.

I’ll just have to grit my teeth and tough it out until then. I’ll keep you posted!

Way Up North

The last several days have been very busy as we made our way up North.

It was about a seven hour bus ride from Accra to Kumasi. Leaving my host family was pretty sad, and my host mother even cried as I left. I’m happy I’ll be coming back to visit them in December.

Kumasi was fun. We were supposed to tour a cacao farm on our way there, but there was a miscommunication with the tour guide, so that didn’t end up happening.

We did, however, see the museum at the Chief’s Palace. It was a nice museum, and the palace was quite opulent because this chief is the ruler of the whole Asante kingdom, which is the largest in all of Ghana.

I had to miss out on going to the Kente village and a lake that was apparently gorgeous because I was sick.

We found a restaurant with really good Indian food and delicious ice cream. I had fresh lime soda like I haven’t had since I was in Sri Lanka. It was nice. Sarah and Rockson and I also braved the largest open air market in West Africa in order to find costumes for our Halloween party. It was so huge and crowded and crazy, but I held my own. I was very impressed with myself, actually. I bargained the price of the dress I bought down to almost half the original price, and when Rockson was wandering off, I got his attention (in typical Ghanaian fashion) by hissing, which was oddly fun. I felt like I was starting to fit in. I even bargained in Twi!

And then we hopped on our bus and drove for another seven hours north to Tamale. There we got all dressed up to celebrate Halloween in a country where most people have never even heard of such a thing. I dressed up as a pink panther. The dress was ugly, but it was only about five dollars, and it was perfect for the costume.

One of the first things we did when we got here, actually, was to go to the regional Chief’s palace. It’s customary to greet the Chief and explain your reasons for coming to a community when you arrive, and to thank him when you leave. It was a very interesting experience, and it was very awkward and scary for a lot of it, but I’m really glad we went. We were given water, which looked extremely questionable, but we couldn’t refuse without causing grave offense, so we all just took the bowl and touched it to our lips before passing it on. We were also given kola nuts to chew. They were a pleasant texture, and I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to swallow them or not, but I didn’t see anyone else spitting, so I did. They were very bitter. They tasted almost exactly like the bitter aftertaste that tea gets when you let it steep for too long. The chief seemed nice, though we only spoke to him through Rockson’s interpreting. He got dressed in his Regalia and invited us to take lots of pictures, so we did. It was nice.

The guesthouse we stayed at in Tamale was not so nice. The fan prevented me from putting up my mosquito net, and the door didn’t even pretend to seal, so I got about a trillion mosquito bites, despite spraying myself and my sheets with deet before bed every night. Furthermore, the ceiling was almost uniformly polka-dotted with white circles of mold, and I think I was allergic to the spores. The accommodation was arranged and paid for by the Trent in Ghana program, so we didn’t have a choice in the matter. But the beds were comfy, at least, and the bathroom was clean, except for the moldy ceiling.

We went on a daytrip to Bolgatanga, which is the capital of the Upper East region. It’s pretty close to both Burkina Faso and Togo, so there was a lot of French. It was a really nice city, and we had an NGO fair that I really enjoyed. Katie and Sarah and I all found NGOs that we were interested in. I found one called TAWODEP, the Talensi Women’s Development Program. It’s a really cool organization that puts women in the community who engage in income generating activities (like shea butter production or batik fabric dying) into groups to help maximize efficiency and to help them negotiate loans with the banks. It also serves as a not for profit middle man for larger orders that any one producer in the community would not be able to meet. It provides capacity building workshops and vocational training for the women too. It’s especially cool because (unlike a lot of NGOs and charity projects) it doesn’t introduce or try to teach activities that aren’t already practiced in the communities, it just facilitates the cooperation of smaller producers and helps them engage with markets on a larger scale. The woman who runs the program seems really nice, and she said that she could help me find accommodation either in the community of Talensi or in nearby Bolgatanga, and that I could bike between the two. I think this would be a really good place for me.

The only thing I’m concerned about is that there was another girl from the program who also had her eye on this place, so I just have to make sure I keep on top of things to make sure I get it first. There was another NGO that did similar work, but specifically with widows in Bolgatanga that I could fall back on, but its main mandate was advocacy instead of economic empowerment, so it’s not quite my cup of tea. Still, I’m sure I would enjoy it. We’ll see how it all turns out.

The next day we had The Great Race: Tamale, a series of activities organized by our non-academic coordinator to get us familiar with the city. It was a lot of fun, and very helpful. We learned the sharetaxi routes (they run regular routes like buses, but they’re taxi cabs, and you pay between 20 and 80 peshwas depending on how far you’re going) to get around. Our tasks included going to the new hospital and finding the cost of a Malaria test, the cost of the most recommended malaria medications, finding Kooseh (deep fried bean-patties sold on the street) and asking about headache remedies at the Herbal Garden. In performing the last task we actually got invited into Madame Tamaiko’s living room. She runs the herbal garden, and is pretty much the authority on traditional medicine. She sat us down and talked to us for a good thirty minutes (contributing to our defeat in the Race) about the value of traditional medicine and how important it is that traditional healers and western doctors learn to work together to provide safe, adequate, and affordable healthcare for Ghana. It was really interesting, and well worth losing the race for.

Now we’ve finally moved into our more permanent residence here. Thirteen of us girls are sharing a house. It’s pretty big, and I share a room with Sarah. We share a bathroom down the hall with the two other two-person rooms. On top of that, there’s a room of four and one of three (each with bunk beds) that each have en suite bathrooms. We all share a kitchen, but it’s relatively spacious, and the living room is quite large. There’s a porch and a large yard with a bunch of trees, one of which produces mangos, so we’re very excited. We’ve been told we’ll have hammocks for the trees too, but I’ll believe that when I see it. We still haven’t gotten the bicycles that we signed up to rent, but that’s because Rachel and Rockson (her assistant here in Tamale, not to be confused with Rockson our classmate) have had their hands full with last-minute repairs to the carpentry and plumbing and the like. Patience, as always, is the name of the game here.

I’m interested to see how our field course (titled Local Dynamics of Change) will go here in Tamale. It’s also going to be an adventure cooking and cleaning and taking care of myself again, especially here where shopping is such an adventure on its own. I’m sure it will be fun and awkward and hilarious. I’ll keep you posted!

Sunday Brunch

Sunday brunch was overall a pretty surreal experience.

It was pretty easy taking a trotro to the Movenpick. There was no traffic, because it was a Sunday morning and everyone in Accra was at church, so Sarah and I were about 45 minutes early. We walked around downtown a little bit, and then hung out in the lobby of the Movenpick, enjoying the artwork and the air conditioning.

I was very acutely aware of the white privilege that we were experiencing. We weren’t staying in the hotel, and neither Sarah nor I could really afford to do so, but we were two white girls who looked reasonably nice and put together, so we were able to walk past all the guards and other staff and sit down in the comfy chairs and loiter without anyone stopping us or asking us if we had an appointment. Thinking about that was a little bit uncomfortable. Luckily, as I expected, Carmencita was early. Unsurprisingly, Alberta (running on Ghanaian Standard Time) was late.

It was extremely luxurious. They handed us each a glass of champagne as soon as we walked in the door, and a coconut to drink (like the ones on the street, only this one was cold). There was a band playing a lot of familiar songs (mostly oldies that I grew up with, like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay) except in High Life style, with Ghanaian instruments. I really liked it. The food was absolutely delicious. I had a wonderful salad and sushi and smoked salmon with capers and chocolate croissants and really good cheese with dried apricots and crème brulée and a cream puff and some sort of berry pie. It was heavenly. We had real coffee afterward, and it was overall a great time.

The conversation was interesting, and we covered a whole range of topics. There was a little uncomfortable part where Alberta was talking about how she supported Romney in the upcoming U.S. elections because of his Christian values. I thought I was being pretty diplomatic when I said that Christian values are wonderful, but the U.S. is supposed to have separation of church and state, and I kind of put my head down and concentrated on my sushi when she retorted with, “The currency says, ‘In God We Trust.’” Other than that, though, it was all lots of fun. We talked about food and school and work, and all sorts of stuff.

What struck me as extremely surreal in our conversation was when Carmencita (Grand-High Mucky-muck at the World Bank here in Ghana) brought up the Gagnam Style video. Now, I know some of you reading this are not up to date on internet culture, so despite my thorough disapproval of the whole institution of it, you can see the video in question here, or just take my word for how painfully ridiculous it is. Basically it’s a pop song, that in and of itself is not that bad, but the music video is just completely absurd, and the dance that is performed is uncomfortably ridiculous.

Carmencita had apparently seen the video in some sort of piece on the BBC, and she was trying to explain it to Alberta, as well as asking Sarah’s and my opinion on the matter. I was honestly too shocked and amused to really provide much of an answer, as Carmencita made it sound kind of like an aerobic exercise, as opposed to the awkward pop craze that it is. It was so surreal to me, that I just had to laugh. What finally had me in pretty much hysterical laughter was Alberta (worker in the IMF liaison office) suggesting that Carmencita (Resident Advisor of the World Bank to the Central Bank of Ghana) demonstrate the dance in the grand hall of the Movenpick in Accra, Ghana. It was just too weird.

When Sarah and I recovered from our giggles and we finished our lunch, we went back to Carmencita’s house for a few hours to hang out in the air conditioning and study for a while, without the constant noises of Madina around us. Sarah was a lot better at staying on task than I was (as she usually is) but we were both fairly productive.

Exams on Monday and today went really well, though as usual I was writing until the last second. I’m just really glad to be done! Now I have a couple of days to pack and get ready to go to Tamale! I’ll have to talk to either Carmencita or my host family, and see if I can leave some of my stuff here. I won’t need everything for my month in Tamale, and when I travel afterward, I don’t want to have to lug all my belongings around. Hopefully that will work out.

I look forward to my adventures in Kumasi (for a couple of days on the way North) and Tamale to come! I’ll keep you posted!

A Whirlwind Tour of Kwahu

This weekend was a complete whirlwind.

Katie and I got up on Friday morning and packed our bags to go to the area of Kwahu in the Eastern Region with my host mother. She brought Nana (our two year old host brother) along with her, probably because he’s such a mama’s boy, he would have cried the whole two days while she was away if she hadn't.

We caught a trotro from Zongo Junction, which is not too far from our house, and is right by Madina Market. The tro ride was about four and a half hours, and it was bumpy and crowded and the traffic was bad. I know, I’m making it sound like so much fun, but it wasn't actually too bad. I was kind of half-asleep most of the way. From the station in Akoko, at the base of the mountains in the Eastern Region we took a cab to a place to have lunch, and it was really good. I had jollof with chicken: a pretty standard Ghanaian dish.

I also had my first experience with the fabled Ghanaian “female urinal.” I’m not a fan. It’s fairly similar to the non-western style toilets of East Africa and Asia, which can be very clean and nice, but are essentially holes in the floor. Still, they were much easier to use than the Ghanaian versions. It’s basically a room with a drain… so it was pretty awkward. It kind of felt like peeing in a shower. Still, it was clean, and could have been a lot worse.

The weather was pleasantly cool, because of the mountains, and as it turns out, we escaped a little heat wave back in Accra that kept Sarah and Holly up all night. The power was out pretty much all weekend in Accra, so their fan was ineffective. I felt bad for them, but I enjoyed the break.

Anyway, after lunch my host mother’s older brother, Daniel who still lives in her home town came and picked us up. He teaches phys. Ed. at a boys’ senior high school in the area, as well as being the Honourable District Assembly member for the area.

Ghanaian politics are kind of complicated. There is a parliament made up of MPs kind of like in Canada, but the President is independently elected, kind of like in the U.S. In addition to this, the chieftaincy structure still exists, and is recognized by the constitution, and there are chiefs on the village, district, and paramount levels, as well as the House of Chiefs, kind of like a House of Lords or Senate in the central government itself. The chieftaincy structure is monarchical, and varies a bit from the North to the South of Ghana, but does not follow the law of primogeniture. Instead, a chief is selected either by the chief’s council (in the South) or by the Paramount Chief (in the North) from the eligible candidates at the time of a vacancy. Furthermore, there are government bodies called District Assemblies (as each of the ten regions is divided into a number of districts) with elected representatives from various areas within the districts, that have a certain level of autonomy.

In our classes, we’ve been learning a bit about how these structures work, and how the political system is kind of neo-patrimonial, and that elected officials retain their power by maintaining patron-client relationships with their voters: for example by paying school fees or hospital bills, or by making donations to community centers or NGOs. In a lot of ways, this is problematic, because it makes politics here even less about the issues, but at the same time, with all the blue-collar corruption (ex. Policeman catches a speeder, the fine is GHC 400, but instead of writing him up, accepts a bribe of GHC 200, and both the policeman and the speeder are happy) it’s a good way of ensuring that some of the “lost” money returns to the people. It’s a tricky issue.

But we definitely saw a lot of those patron-client relationships when we were there. Most of our time being shown the area involved us being introduced to MPs and assembly members as well as teachers, nurses, the leaders of health clinics, and other important community members as the Honourable Mr. Daniel went around meeting them. I definitely felt like I was on the campaign tour. I wasn't sure if we obrunis were some kind of political statement, or if we just happened to be going along with him as he made his campaign, but either way it was a strange mix of fun and uncomfortable.

We met a lot of very interesting people. I had some fun conversations with teachers about politics and development, as well as about earrings with a group of girls that looked to be around 17. I got proposed to in French, and for the first time, I had a married man ask me to be his second wife. This man, in fact, brought his wife over to talk to me, to make sure she approved. It was nine shades of awkward, and my host family did not come to my rescue this time. I told them I was married, and that I had to go find my mother. The latter part of that sentence was true, as everyone seemed to have disappeared in that moment, but they were actually just around the corner.

We ate dinner at Mr. Daniel’s house, where there was a big bag of clothes and toys in the living room. I didn't ask about it, but he must have noticed me looking, because he explained that people from Korea sent these things to him, and he gives them to widows and orphans. This was actually after he showed us three different newspaper articles documenting his charitable donations to widows groups and orphanages in the area. It seemed a little underhanded to me to be using charity proceeds from abroad and taking political credit for the donations, but it wasn't really any of my business. I didn't ask how he got the stuff from the Koreans, and he didn't say. I just kind of smiled and nodded at that point. I had assumed we’d be staying with the family, but in fact he got us a room at a guest house that I assume is affiliated with the school (as it’s practically on campus) that was very nice. He also got a room for my host mother and Nana so that they could stay close to us in case we needed anything, even though I'm certain that they typically stay at the family's house. The room wasn't elaborate by Western standards, but it had two single beds, and it was clean, and there was a TV and a fan and a bathroom with running water and a real shower. The water pressure was pretty weak, but it worked, though I had been anticipating a bucket shower or none at all, so I didn't bring shampoo and conditioner to be able to take full advantage of it. Still, it’s amazing how running water feels like a luxury these days.

Saturday was very busy. We got up at six and went for breakfast at Mr. Dan’s house, following which we drove to a field somewhere and took a quick hike through the field, then through some rainforest until we got to an amazingly beautiful and picturesque waterfall. 

 The waterfall.

Me, My host mother (with Nana in that cloth on her back) our guide, and Mr. Daniel

From there we drove to a little fishing village, though we didn't stay long. It was the hometown of some of our extended family, and they wanted us to see the river, but we didn't really do much there except take pictures. We went to a funeral, but only for a moment, before we went to a wedding, but nothing was happening yet, and the music was too loud, so we went home to eat. Then we went and visited the medical center in the area, and went back to the wedding, where stuff was actually starting to happen. I'm not sure entirely what was going on, because it was all in Twi, but there was a lot of praying and a lot of yelling and a lot of music. There was one point where a character that I can only describe as the MC was talking (very fast) over the music that was playing, and the groom was standing in the middle of the courtyard (it was set up a lot like the funeral from a few weeks ago) and people kept leaving their seats to come up to the groom and stick money to his forehead. I'm pretty sure it stayed on because he was sweaty, which was kind of gross, but they would stick it to him, or rub it on his face and neck. Then either it would stick/fall and be collected by a young woman with a bowl, or else people would deposit their money in the bowl themselves after rubbing it on the groom. I'm not sure exactly what the significance of this was, though I assume it was a way of contributing to the cost of the wedding. Regardless, it was fun to watch. 

After that, we met some more nurses because Katie had to use the restroom, so we stopped into the house of one of Daniel's friends (which is totally casual here) to chat for a while and use the facilities before he drove us back to the trotro station.

Though I think I neglected to mention the most enjoyable part of the weekend, which was Nana crying the entire time. Nana is two, so like all two year olds, he cries. But he was really being a brat, and crying at absolutely everything. Now, to some extent, this is understandable, because it was a long journey and a long day, with lots of moving and people, and that's tiring. Still, along with us for our whole journey was Mr. Daniel's son Joshua who was the same age, and so much better behaved, despite not having his mother with him, and Mr. Daniel not really paying him too much attention. There was one instance where Joshua was sleeping, but had been woken up, because we got back to the house, and as Katie and I got settled on the couch, he walked into the living room making noises like he was about to cry. It was so cute and so sad, I just automatically held my arms out to him, and he walked into them for me to pick him up. He looked at me for about four seconds, and I thought he was going to cry, but then he just closed his eyes, put his head on my chest, and promptly fell asleep. It was so precious. He stayed there for about half an hour, waking up occasionally to look around, before sleeping again, and when he got up to go play with Nana at the end of the half hour, he was fresh and happy and just like new. Conversely, there was another instance in the car, where my host mother handed Nana to me so that she could climb in, and the minute he left his mothers arms, he just screamed and pitched a fit like you wouldn't believe. I think the difference here was probably because Nana is the youngest of his siblings, by quite a wide margin (Felix, then next youngest, is 11), whereas Joshua, who's about two, has a younger brother who's about one, so he's had to learn to share toys and play nice sometimes, and generally be a little bit less of a brat. But really, who knows? It could also be that Nana just happened to be having a bad day when Joshua was having a good one. 

The trotro ride home was pretty uneventful, just long. There were people around me arguing. One of them asked me if I was a Christian (I never know how to respond to that here. They don't understand the concept of being "nominally" or "a little bit" Christian), and I said "Kind of," which I guess he assumed meant yes, because he asked me what church I went to. His friend piped up that they were having an argument about Christianity, so I promptly put on my huge pink headphones and stared out the window. The last thing I wanted to do was get in the middle of a religious debate on a trotro at 8:00 at night in Ghana. Apparently Katie sidestepped the whole discussion by telling them she was a Buddhist. They took that a lot better than when we've tried to tell people we're atheists, so I think I might use that one next time. 

Next up will be the exciting story of Sunday Brunch at the Movenpick with Carmencita and Alberta! Stay tuned, and I'll keep you posted.

Staying Home Sick

Monday was pretty rough.

This wasn't my first time not feeling well in Africa, but this is the first time that it didn't go away in half an hour. Part of moving to a new place is that the food and the climate and even the air quality is all different, and sometimes that can make you sick for no reason. This is especially true if you’re moving to a place where you can’t drink the water, and there are always places to get infected by it. Making the transition from bottled water to sachet water also has the potential to make your stomach kind of upset. And then there’s always the heat and the sun. Sunstroke and heat exhaustion are very common among foreigners in Ghana, and on one of the first days when the air conditioner in the classroom was not yet working, the first victim of it in our group was yours truly.

But this time I was actually sick. I kept on top of my fever, terrified that I would be second (that’s right, one of us has already fallen) to get malaria on the trip. But it never went above 103, and ibuprofen did a pretty satisfactory job of keeping it down. I didn't really need to take anything to lower the fever, except that having a fever when it’s 40 degrees out is pretty miserable. The usual hot/cold flashes that come with fever were just multiplied by the heat and the cold water that I had to wash off the sweat. Normally cold showers don’t bother me here, because it’s really hot out all the time, so the cold water feels nice. But the cold flashes were really good at timing themselves for halfway through a bucket shower.

The day seemed to stretch on forever, but I watched Toy Story 3 for the first time, which was fun, and I hung out with my host mother for a while when my fever was down. All in all, it could have been a lot worse. I don’t know if my host mother really understood I was sick at first. Luckily, by the time lunch rolled around, my stomach was settled, because what she served me was not exactly mild. She fried some yams in palm oil. Now, these were not what I think of as yams, like orange sweet potatoes, but were instead these huge tubours about the size of a loaf of bread that taste a lot like regular potatoes. Anyway, she fried those and served them with a kind of salsa of crushed tomatoes, onions, and the hot peppers that go into just about everything here, as well as Kobe fish. Now, Kobe is considered a delicacy in Ghana, and I had never actually tried it before Monday. It’s a fish (that my host sister told me they “make tilapia” out of… which confused me a little) that has been left in the sun to dry, and then allowed to rot a little bit and then salted. It has a very strong flavor, that was actually really good with the tomatoes and onions, but it was definitely not what I would have thought of as “sick” food. But I ate it, and amazingly it didn't upset my stomach at all, so maybe there was method to the madness.

When she made rice balls with groundnut soup for dinner, though, I couldn't finish it. The spicy and oily groundnut soup just did not make my stomach very happy. I think that was when she realized I was actually sick, because a little while after dinner, she called me out of my room to talk to me. “Amma, do you need to go to hospital?” she asked, “You didn’t eat the food!” I found this kind of entertaining. Eating is a very big deal here.

But by the end of the day, I was feeling better, and I was able to go to school on Tuesday, which was good, because it was our last week of class, and I don’t want to miss it. After we go to our host mother’s hometown this weekend, I’m going to be meeting Carmencita (a friend of my dad’s who works for the World Bank here) for Sunday brunch. I’m excited. She definitely said something about sushi, which would be amazing. I’ll let you know how the weekend turns out! As always, I’ll keep you posted.

Green Turtle Lodge

Last weekend was spectacular.

We went to an eco-lodge called Green Turtle in the Western Region near a town called Busua (pronounced boo-syou-wa). It was a really beautiful place, but getting there was quite an adventure.

Katie had to go to Cape Coast, which is on the way there, on Thursday night to meet with an NGO that she might want to do her placement with, so she met us at the resort on Friday. Sarah and I left home at 7:30 in the morning, and caught a taxi to campus, where we met our friend Nora to start the trek. From campus we caught a trotro to take us to Circle station, which took about an hour. We then transferred to a trotro going to Kaneshi station, which took another hour. From there we found a trotro going to Takoradi, which took us a few minutes to find, and then a few more to fill up. Trotros don’t leave the stations until they’re full, so it can be hard to plan travel time exactly. Anyways, we rode that trotro for a few hours before it started to rain. The rain was pretty miserable in the trotro, because we were in the back row, and the vehicle was kind of a refurbished 15-seater van (now seating 21) and the double doors on the back didn’t close properly. As a result, a few of us had water dripping down the backs of our seats, but that didn’t last for too long.

We got to Takoradi station in one piece, and we called a cab driver (Mr. George) who works with Green Turtle and gave us a better price than any other taxi driver would to get us there. The Green Turtle lodge is actually about an hour and a half away from Takoradi, about an hour past Agona and forty minutes past Busua. The roads past Busua are pretty horrendous, and I was very impressed with our driver’s ability to navigate them in his little taxicab, and have never been more thankful that I don’t get carsick. It’s about half an hour away from any kind of internet or cellphone service, though they had payphones available to those who thought to bring credit cards to activate them.

By the time we actually got to the lodge, we had been nine hours in transit. We were pretty exhausted, but thrilled to find that Sarah and I each got double beds in our room, which we were not expecting. Furthermore, our rooms were literally right on the beach, as was the bar where we ordered some travel antidotes (mine was a Green Turtle Iced Tea) and our dinner. The food was absolutely delicious. I had barracuda for the first time, and it was phenomenal. To my extreme delight, there were also dessert options, which is a big deal, because sweets are hard to come by around here.

We hung out on the beach a bunch, playing in the water a little bit. It was a really beautiful place. We met a German couple, who seemed very nice. The woman was named Anna, and the man was named something that sounded like Bold-hans, but I’m not exactly sure. They asked us a lot of questions about our lives in Accra. They were some of the first tourists we’ve met (most of the foreigners here are either volunteers or students) and they were very interested in things like how much water we drink, and what we do with our free time.

Our second day was our great beach day. Sarah and I walked all the way up the beach past a few little villages to a nice little point. We had a nice long DMC (deep meaningful conversation) and enjoyed the beauty of the ocean and the beach. We went swimming, though not very far out, because the current was almost frighteningly strong. I got a wonderful tan, and Sarah and Katie got horrific sunburns. We had amazingly delicious French toast for breakfast, served with fried bananas and local honey, and I had a tomato and brie Panini for lunch. It was so amazing. After coming out of the ocean, I had the first real shower I’ve had in weeks, and it felt amazingly luxurious. Sarah and I took some fun photographs (to come) in the gorgeous light of the sunset, and we pretty much just basked in the fact that we didn’t have any more essays due. It was a great relaxing weekend.

The trip home was a lot less traumatic than the way there. We actually caught a privately owned tour bus (a very pink one) that was comfy and air conditioned from Takoradi to Kaneshi. Then we caught the usual trotros home. We were pretty tired by the time we got home, but it was so very worth it.

Next weekend Katie and I will be going back to the Eastern Region, to our host mother’s hometown. It should be lots and lots of fun. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanksgiving and Funerals

I have so much to tell you about this time. I wrote this post last Thursday, actually, but I haven't had reliable internet to post it since then. Another update of this past weekend will be coming soon :)

I guess I should start with last Saturday, when my friend Sarah and I went to a funeral with my host family in the Eastern Region.

Now, you would think that this would be a sad thing, and a somber event, but in fact it was quite the opposite. Funerals are typically held about forty days after a person has died, and in the morning it is kind of sad. Very early in the morning, the close friends and family view the body and prayers are said, and it more or less resembles the funerals that we have at home.

After this, however, the fun begins.

We got up and got dressed in the appropriate black and red clothing and took a taxi to the main junction in our neighborhood with my host mom and dad, where we caught the first trotro that got us out of Accra, and it took about an hour and a half. We changed cars somewhere outside Accra, though I don’t exactly know where, and made our way to the town of the deceased, all in all about a three hour trip. We got to the little town where the funeral was being held, and frankly, I don’t think that people there had seen a white person in months. We were definitely the only Obrunis in the whole village, and we really stood out, especially at the funeral. It was held in a field just off the main road, and there were tents set up in a square shape, with plastic chairs underneath them in rows, with a kind of courtyard in the middle where the casket and the preacher were. He was speaking into a microphone hooked up to a speaker bank in one corner that looked comparable to what a lot of people in Canada might rent for a wedding reception or a good school dance.

There was some praying, mostly in Twi so I didn’t follow, and then various groups of people went up to see the body. The woman who had died had been a yam seller, so there was a part where her sisters and sisters in law kind of acted out a scene of buying yams (this was explained to me by my host father. I had no idea what they were doing, or why there were yams being exchanged in front of the casket).

Most of this would not be too weird to see at a funeral in Canada, except that here, so one seemed terribly sad. People were smiling and chatting (and largely not paying attention to what was going on in the courtyard, though it seemed to be the “main event”) and there were people selling peanuts and pure-water (clean drinking water in 500mL bags).

After a little while, all 500 of us or so got up and walked in the blazing noonday equatorial sun down the street to the cemetery to see where the casket would be buried. On the way I got a few marriage proposals, and a few drunk people asked me to take them to America, so pretty much par for the course. We then walked back to the main road and went to the house of some of our extended host family where we were fed, and we hung out for a while, just talking and relaxing. The family was almost embarrassingly hospitable, going out of their way to make sure that Sarah and I had food and water and juice or pop, and making sure we had somewhere to sit, and that we weren’t sitting in the sun. It would have made me uncomfortable, except that they seemed to be giving almost the same attention to our host parents (with the exception of minding whether or not they were in the sun). A young man about my age gave me a little plastic packet, a lot like a pure-water sachet, only much smaller, that was labeled “ginger-gin.” I accepted it, because it was given to me, but my host mother wouldn’t let me drink it. While I was reading it, she kept trying to explain that I shouldn’t drink it because it’s alcohol, and I would get drunk. I’m not sure she realized I knew what alcohol was. Here in Ghana, women who drink alcohol are kind of stigmatized. It’s not something that anyone would prevent me from doing (except my mom, obviously) but it carries associations of promiscuity and lavishness. So I didn’t get to try Ghanaian alcohol that day, but I didn’t push the issue. She told me not to drink it but, not as one would forbid a child from doing something wrong. It was more like she was advising me against it because she thought I didn’t know it was bad for me, or something. Like telling me not to take too much of something spicy. Anyway, I decided it was better to just follow the norms in that instance, and try exciting Ghanaian ginger-gin another time.

 We went back to the funeral site after a couple of hours, and there was a live brass band and a DJ that alternated providing musical entertainment. On the way here we met even more drunk people, and one man (who was holding what I can only describe as a baby goblet of a murky alcoholic substance) put his arms around me, and before I knew what was happening, planted a wet and very alcoholic kiss on my cheek. I kind of grimaced and tried to push him away without starting a fight, and my host parents noticed. I have never seen my host father angry before, but he came over with my host mother, and scolded him so hard I thought he might cry. My whole host family, including my Auntie Amma (who is actually my host mother’s cousin) scolded him and muttered about him, before telling me not to pay him any attention because “He drinks the alcohol, so…you don’t mind him.” I was very upset for a moment or two, though I’m not sure how much of that showed on my face. I was very embarrassed that I was put in that situation, and that my host parents felt they needed to intervene, though I’m glad they did. Still, by the time we got back to the tent area, I was feeling better. All of us danced, and it was a lot of fun. People of all ages were dancing, and it reminded me of dancing as a child. Not because people were uncoordinated and mostly just jumping, like children dancing. The styles of dancing were varied and interesting. It reminded me of childhood because people all seemed to be happy-dancing. They all seemed to be moving out of simple happiness, and the feeling of being on stage on the dancefloor/courtyard in broad daylight just didn’t exist. Some young men came over and tried to dance with Sarah and I, but mostly it was older men and women dancing. It all just had a family vibe to it, because even the young men who tried to dance with me (a little too closely for my comfort) then went to dance with my host family, and a group of ladies who were old enough to be their grandmothers. It was a really cool experience.

At the end of the funeral, it’s customary for everyone present to donate a few cidies to help support the family of the deceased, so after we did that, and the family came over to thank us for our support, we headed out. We stopped at the village market along the way, because it was a market day, and my host family bought some food items that are cheaper in the Eastern Region than they are in Accra, including “aburo-buro” or snails about the size of my fist. I’ve tried them, and I’m not a huge fan. Like the tiny snails that are popularly baked in garlic butter and cheese at home, they don’t have much of a taste on their own, they mostly just taste like whatever they’re cooked in. The two times that I’ve had them, however, they were extremely chewy, like very overdone squid, so it was not exactly a pleasant experience. Still, I’m glad I tried them.

By the time we got down to the trotro and share taxi stand on the main street, it was starting to rain. We tried to get onto the appropriate trotro, but there were too many other people trying to get on it. We ended up hiding out under the awning of this unidentified shack for a while, but then the wind started to pick up. We started getting soaked even under the awning. Now, this shack had a heap of sand spilling out from a doorway. Mostly the doorway was blocked by the sand, but the part that wasn’t was closed off by a piece of corrugated metal. As the storm got really bad, my host father pulled back the strip of metal, and we spent the duration of the rainstorm in this rather dodgy room half filled up with sand (on a diagonal, spilling out the door) with a few others hiding from the rain, including a chicken and about a million spiders. It was not the best moment of my life, but Sarah and I took some pictures to pass the time, and talked, and even sang a little bit. Of course we both had Toto’s “Africa” stuck in our heads from the moment it started precipitating, but we also had a short cheesy burst of “This Little Light of Mine” because it was the only song we could think of that our host family might also know.

Eventually we caught a tro back home, and by the time we got there we were very tired, but it was a good day. On the way home, the windows were open on the trotro once it stopped raining, and it actually started cooling off significantly once the sun went down. Sarah’s dress didn’t have sleeves, so she was getting pretty chilly. My host mother was wearing a black dress with a piece of red cloth tied around the waist (this tying of a sarong-like cloth around the waist on top of a fancy dress is pretty common practice here; I’m not sure why) and when she saw that Sarah was shivering she took off the red cloth and wrapped it around Sarah’s shoulders. It was very sweet, and adorable. It was pretty late by the time we got home, and I almost fell asleep in my dinner, but I slept very well that night.

Sunday was largely uneventful, though I was proud of myself for cleaning my room and doing my laundry almost entirely on my own. My host mother still helped me with my whites, making sure I got all the dust out of them, but I mostly did it myself.

Then on Monday we had our Thanksgiving Dinner. It was held at the Yiri Lodge: the nice guesthouse that we stayed at during our orientation week. There was live music, and it was a lot of fun. The dinner was delicious, even though it wasn’t exactly traditional Thanksgiving food. They did roast a few chickens with herbs that tasted similar to Thanksgiving turkey, and to my delight there were mashed potatoes. They may have come out of a box, I’m not sure, but they were buttery and delicious. There was also cranberry sauce for the turkey-style-chicken, which I wasn’t expecting, but was very good. There was salad, too, which was exciting, because it’s usually not safe to eat salad in places where you can’t drink the water, but because it was catered by the institute, and Rachel (our non-academic coordinator) arranged the whole thing, I was pretty sure it was safe. I didn’t get sick, and it was delicious. There was also jollof rice (fried rice that is fried again in red palm oil with spices and chicken or fish) and plain rice, and more Ghanaian-style chicken for the Ghanaian students and faculty who were there, and might not be feeling particularly adventurous.

It was a lot of fun explaining the concept of Thanksgiving to the Ghanaian students in the program, and they seemed to enjoy the dinner. Hawawu kept asking me if it “tasted just like home” which I thought was sweet of her. They all really liked the mashed potatoes, which made me happy. For dessert, sadly, but as expected, there was no pie. There was, however, delicious real vanilla ice cream with bits of tropical fruit. All in all, it was very good, and lots of fun.

This weekend, after all my essays are done, a bunch of us are celebrating by going to an eco-lodge called Green Turtle in the Western Region. Hopefully we will see baby sea turtles hatching on the beach. The lady we spoke to at the lodge said it was the season for sea turtles to hatch, but she also said that the season lasted from September until March, so I don’t know how much luck we’ll have. Still, it will be a fun beach vacation, and I’ll get to feel good about myself because the whole place is sustainable and environmentally friendly. I’ll let you know how that goes! (And, of course, I’ll keep you posted :P)

A Lot of Fun and a Little Culture Shock

Maaha!

(Good afternoon!) I am currently hanging out at the Busy Internet cafe on ring road near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, where I will soon be heading to face the throngs of people and try to buy some new shoes.

Last weekend we went on a field trip to Cape Coast and it was awesome. We started with an NGO fair, like the one in Accra, and there were a lot of cool presentations. After that we had some time to do our own thing, and Sarah and I went on an epic adventure around the city. We got thoroughly lost, and made friends with every single child in one neighbourhood, because we stopped to talk to a man outside a little resto-bar. He introduced himself as "Justice Capee" which was pretty funny, because we were walking along Capee street. He sent me an e-mail later, which said his name was Yaroo, so I think that's what he's actually called, but I'm still not sure.

 We took pictures with him and the kids. They really seemed to enjoy the cameras. We eventually found our way back to our guest house, after stopping to watch some football (soccer) on the beach, and making friends with the coach of the football team at the local Senior High School. I find it astounding the really awesome people that you can meet just walking down the street here.

Everyone talks to us when we walk around here. As obrunis, we stand out quite a bit, and mostly people are really nice. They are curious about us, and why we are here, or they want to make sure we're not lost. Part of that concern for foreigners comes from the heavy reliance on extended family groups for support here. Since they see us here alone, clearly far away from our family support groups, a lot of people feel compelled to make sure that we're okay. It's very sweet.

Sometimes standing out can be disadvantageous though. I can't count the number of times I've been proposed to just walking down the street. People ask me for money, or gifts, or food. People are always trying to sell me things. People ask me to take them to Canada if I tell them where I'm from, or America more often than not. People hiss at me all the time. Hissing and kissing noises are the usual practice for getting someone's attention, especially a woman, a customer, or a taxi. People grab my arms and put their arms around me, especially in crowded markets. It's hard sometimes to remember that it's not a big deal here, even though it sometimes feels rather aggressive. Still, I've been doing pretty well, and the easiest way to deal with it is usually just to laugh it off. Sometimes I've had to be firm with people to get them to let me go or leave me alone, but for the most part, people are just trying to get my attention.

Anyways, on Saturday we went to Kakum National Park, and it seems that the internet will be fast enough for me to upload a video or two of that. (I'll see if I can embed it, or link to it. In fact, I may go back and edit a bunch of old posts and put in some videos, if I can get them to upload. I'll let you know how that goes.) We did a canopy walk, which was awesome, and I'm very proud of myself for doing it because I'm usually terrified of heights. It was high, but I got used to it, and then it was so much fun.

We also toured the Slave Castle, which was beautiful and horrifying. The tour was really good, if a little long. There's not too much to say about it though... the building was lovely and the stories were sad.

We went out to a little bar and club on the beach. It was attached to a resort of some kind, so there were a lot of expats. The music was good, and I got to know a bunch of the other students on the trip a little better. That was pretty much our weekend; after that we just came home and did homework.

I actually got to hang out with the host family a little more this week. I went with my host mother to the "Saloon" to get her hair done, which I found absolutely hilarious. So did she, once I explained that in Canada when we say "Salon" we mean a hair place, and when we say "Saloon" we mean a bar with swinging doors and cowboys.

The lady who was doing her hair tried to teach me how to twist the little braids that she was doing, but I was incompetent at it. She also tried to teach me more Twi. She taught me some new foods, which was fun. She asked me what Canadian food was like. I always find that question difficult to answer, because there isn't a lot of really "Canadian" food that I eat on a regular basis. Mostly we eat pseudo-Italian food, and things like that. The other thing is, we don't have the kind of staple-food diet that people have here. For the most part, people rotate through banku with fish, noodles, and either rice balls or fufu with one of three or four soups. Yams or plantains with the same kinds of stews also get rotated through, but there isn't as much variety as I might see at home. They change things up by changing the kind of meat that they put in their soups and stews, but a lot of the flavours are the same. I told her the most Canadian thing I could think of was maple syrup, and she insisted that I make some for her.

I wasn't sure how to tell her that you can't just "make" maple syrup, so I just smiled and nodded.

Katie and I also made spaghetti for my host family on Friday night. We went to the Western style mall to get ingredients (and ice cream) and then came home and cooked. Our host mother helped us chop the onions, because both Katie and I are huge wusses about chopping onions, but we did the rest.

Interestingly, oregano and basil are impossible to find here. I found parsley, sage, rosemary, and black pepper, so it still mostly tasted like spaghetti at home, but no basil or oregano. I used a mix of tomato paste and tomato "puree" because I couldn't find crushed tomatoes, and it amounted to the same thing. Ground beef was easy to procure, as were the noodles themselves. Onions and garlic were a little more expensive than at home, but readily available, so that was good.

It was really funny watching the family trying to eat spaghetti. I'm pretty sure it was about as funny as it was for them watching us try to eat fufu. I taught my host mother how to twirl the noodles around a fork with a spoon, and she was very good at it, but eventually she gave up and ate it with her hands like she's used to. Despite the difficulties in eating it, the spaghetti seemed to be a big hit. It felt nice to kind of share something from home with them.

I guess the last little update I have to share is about yesterday's beach adventure. My roommate Katie, and another of our friends from the program, Nora, and I all decided that we were going to go to the beach. The beaches right near the city are typically pretty dirty, and you really can't swim at them, so we decided we'd try to go to a little resort called Bojo Beach. The entrance cost was only ten cidies, so it really wasn't too bad. The adventure was getting across the city to where the beach was.

We walked to campus, which took the usual 30 minutes, and picked a tro tro at the main gate. Tro tros are kind of like buses here. They're privately owned vans that run regular routes across the city. A trip usually costs between 50 peshwas and 1 cidi, so from about 27-53 cents give or take. We took one from campus to Circle, and then another to Kaneshi, and we were going to take another to Aplaku, the little town where Bojo Beach is, but it started to rain. It was actually quite a thing to witness. We were walking down Kaneshi, the biggest market in Accra, on a market day, and the sky started to look pretty grey. Within the span of four minutes, the street literally emptied. People were puttering all around us, rushing to get things inside or covered. After five minutes, it started to smell like rain, and a woman who was almost running past us said, "The rain is coming!" In the most dramatic voice you can imagine. Literally thirty seconds later, we saw a sheet of rain coming towards us, and we promptly picked a taxi.

Unfortunately, because of the rain, we had to ignore the rule that says "Don't get into a taxi before you've negotiated the price." So when we finally got to the beach, we got royally ripped off. I was pretty annoyed about it, but there was not much we could do, and in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that much money. He charged us forty cidies for what should have been about fifteen, but it was still only about twenty dollars Canadian. It was still better than being soaking wet and muddy.

The worst thing about rain here is definitely the mud. It's so  dusty when it's dry, and it's so muddy when it's wet. It's slippery and dangerous and red. I can see how disease and things can be exacerbated by the rainy season. The open gutters that run along all the roads get full and sometimes overflow, and puddles form on every street and sidewalk, because they're not very well drained. The puddles are still around today, despite the heat, especially in bushier areas, and they're breeding grounds for bacteria and mosquitoes. I'm really glad that we're mostly here for the dry season.

That's pretty much all I've got to report for now. Stay tuned for videos as I'm able to upload them. It may take a while, because the internet is really slow, and I need to set aside like three hours for some of them. More adventures to come. I'll keep you posted.

Tales of Terror

This week went pretty smoothly –really.

Classes have continued to be fun and interesting, even though there are stacks and stacks of readings, and the due dates for our assignments are starting to loom dangerously near overhead. The week itself was fairly uneventful.

This weekend we had our first NGO (that’s Non-Government Organization) fair, where representatives from the various organizations told us about their work and the placements available for us should we choose to work with them. One that caught my eye was called Hope for Future Generations (HFFG), but I’m trying not to make up my mind about anything until we see a few more options. There was also one called Trashy Bags, whose work you can look at and read about here, that I thought was really interesting, but I have no skill in design and/or visual art, so I wouldn’t qualify for the internship that they’re offering.

After the fair, I went with my friend Sarah to get coffee with a political sciences and archaeology (interesting combination, I know) student that I met on campus. He was really interesting to talk to. We mostly talked about politics and the upcoming election, but we also talked about the distinct lack of funding for arts at the University of Ghana. I think he may have designs on Sarah, but he might have just been fascinated by her red hair. All in all, it was a very pleasant afternoon.

We then went to the central Bank of Ghana, where we met a friend of my dad’s named Carmencita. Her driver, John, who was very friendly, picked us up from campus and showed us to the Ghana Stock Exchange, as well as the Library at the central bank. We had a nice chat with the librarian, and everyone there was very impressed with our limited knowledge of Twi.

From there we went right across the street to the Mövenpick to get some cake to have for dessert. It was completely surreal. The lobby was massive and everything was polished and beautiful. We looked around a little while Carmencita dealt with the baker. There were at least two swimming pools with beautiful terraces all around, and a poolside bar with a big screen TV, and corridors with boutiques branching off the lobby selling everything from toothbrushes to diamond necklaces. The opulence of everything came in very stark contrast to the Ghana that we’d been experiencing for the last few weeks. It was here, Carmencita told us, that she likes to have Sunday brunch, because they have very nice sushi. It was a mind-blowing experience.

After this little adventure, we went to Carmencita’s home, which was also quite extravagant. It was provided for her by her employer because of the huge difficulties associated with finding accommodation in Accra. It’s not uncommon here for landlords to demand a two or more year lease, with rent paid up front in full. Though she lives alone, with her dog Hope, she has a five bedroom home that is very tastefully furnished. She has a backup generator, and has invited Sarah and me to camp out at her place if we ever need some peace and quiet, or if our power goes out. She offered this multiple times, presumably to convince us that she was being sincere and not just being polite. She is such a wonderfully kind woman, I am so happy to have her as a contact here in Accra. We had dinner with her and one of her friends, Alberta, who works at the Bank of Ghana’s IMF (International Monetary Fund) liaison desk. She was so friendly; it was really a great time having dinner with them. We were talking and laughing and eating for hours.

 And the cake was absolutely heavenly. It was a chocolate mousse cake. Sweets can be very hard to find in Ghana, as most Ghanaians don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and dairy products are rare and expensive, due to problems with refrigeration given the frequent power outages. Mostly people have little cans of condensed milk that they put in tea, coffee (of the instant variety that is almost exclusively available), porridge, and milo. Milo is a kind of chocolate-type beverage, very similar to ovaltine, which can be had hot or cold. I quite like it. Anyway, the whole evening felt like a little vacation from real life.

So, of course, when we came back, real life had to make up for lost time.

On Saturday morning, I was gently woken by the gospel music playing from somewhere outside my window at the leisurely hour of 4:00AM at a soothing billion and a half decibels. This was perfectly acceptable, of course, because anyone who wasn’t already in a Mosque at that time was both awake and devoutly Christian anyways, except for Katie and I. I lay in bed and experienced a little bit of what they call “obruni rage” for a few hours.

“Obruni” is a Twi word that literally translates to “stranger,” but can be used to address any white (or Asian, or otherwise non-Ghanaian-looking) person. I’m not exactly sure what the social tone of this word is. I know it’s perfectly acceptable for children to call me this, and I am sometimes addressed as Obruni by the elderly as well, but as far as I can tell, it’s not really okay for my peers to call me this unless they are my friends and are clearly joking around.

“Obruni rage” is used to reference symptoms of culture shock that everyone experiences when they more to a new place, specifically the frustration and irrational anger that’s sometimes felt when things feel very foreign. Certainly, the noise etiquette of this neighbourhood was extremely frustrating and foreign at 4:00 that morning. Finally, with the combination of earplugs that I saved from the flight over and my huge pink Skullcrusher headphones I was able to block out the music enough to fall back asleep, though even then it was still audible.

When we got up, we had breakfast and did laundry, which seems to be the routine for Saturday mornings. While we were doing our laundry, my youngest host-brother, Nana, was playing in the little yard around us. I use “yard” to refer to the concrete courtyard that connects the three houses in our family compound, all enclosed by the main gate. Somehow in his playing, Nana took a bit of a tumble. I didn’t see it, I just heard the thunk as he fell. He seemed to be okay, though there was some confusion for a while. He managed to tear open a pretty serious gash on his big toe, but otherwise appeared to be fine. Automatically, I went to get my first aid kit, and after Auntie had cleaned the cut with some kind of chemical that I didn’t recognize, I offered some Polysporin and one of the fun fingertip band-aids that I brought with me.

Now, I’m not too squeamish when it comes to blood and gore. Looking at the gash didn’t bother me. Having to touch the wound as I applied the polysporin didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that Nana, as two year olds do, was screaming and struggling the whole time that I was trying to help. It was heartbreaking for me, as I am so seldom around small children, but with the way he was twitching I was really scared that I was going to accidentally push the torn skin back as I dabbed on the polysporin. It was fairly traumatizing. Luckily, Auntie (as my host-mother likes to be called) was holding Nana’s foot while I put on the band-aid.

Needless to say, that was a rather stressful situation for me.

My next tale of terror actually happened this morning while I was having my shower. The worst things always happen in the shower. I had just started washing my hair, and was generally minding my own business, when I felt something on my leg. At first, I thought it was a hair that just felt like it was moving because of the water flow. Unfortunately, when that is the case, it’s a downward movement, not an upward movement. In the span of about half a second I came to this conclusion, looked down, squealed, and brushed a centipede/millipede kind of bug that was about four inches long, off of my calf.

Luckily, at this point most of the family had gone to church, so it was only Katie who heard my little scream of horror and subsequent jibblies. Now, I’m not really fond of insect life, especially when it’s inside, but I’m usually pretty good at keeping my voice down when I see a bug, and I can generally deal with them myself, if I have to, with minimal flipping-out. For example, a few days ago at dinner, there was a spider on the wall, whom I have named Polyp. This is because the spider was (including legs) about the size of a tennis ball, and looked almost exactly like the nasty exploding squid monster things called Polyps from Gears of War 3. I didn’t even start when I saw this spider, and continued to eat my dinner in peace, watching it as it moved back and forth on the wall, each of us just minding our own business.  

This Polyp is just a baby. It was only about the size of my thumb.

There is one distinct exception to this rule, however, and that is when I’m in the shower. I don’t know why, exactly, but it always seems so much more horrific when there is a bug in the shower. Consequently, if I do find a bug in my house, it always seems to be when I’m in the shower. They always seem to come after me when I’m naked and vulnerable. It’s like they stake the place out just to pounce on me.

Anyway, after jumping out of the shower (and my skin), I managed to use my shoe to squash it and the cup that we shower with to wash the thing down the drain. After some commiseration and sympathy from Katie, I resumed my shower, cursing vehemently.

This right here is a monster just like the millipede that attacked me in the shower. This was actually taken in the classroom at the Institute of African Studies, but it's roughly the same size and shape. 

Again, luckily, I was so freaked out by this course of events that I had my eye on the drain, because the nasty thing crawled up out of the drain again. Apparently, although it was squashed, it was not dead. So, of course, I freaked out once again, and pounded it into mush with my shoe. When it was no longer recognizable as anything resembling a living organism, I once again washed the wretched mush down the drain.

This occurred at about seven this morning, and I am still freaking out a little bit.

Hopefully I’ll get over this, and I’ll be able to feel safe in my shower again. For now though, I’ve got my head on a swivel the whole time. 

I've finally given in and made my way to the biggest internet cafe in Accra: Busy Internet. It is air conditioned, and nice, and it costs roughly a dollar for an hour of reliable internet. It's not the fastest internet in the world, but it's consistent, which is a godsend after fighting with my little expresso internet stick day in and day out. It works on campus fairly well, but almost never connects to the internet for more than half a second when I'm in my room. It's extremely frustrating. 

Anyway, I have two papers due every week for the next three weeks that desperately need my attention. I'll try to get a good chunk of them due today so that I can get back to my adventures. As always, I'll keep you posted!