Good
evening!
Once again,
I have a lot to report. I’ve been having trouble motivating myself to keep at
my blog, but once my placement starts, I’ll have to keep a daily journal, so
hopefully that will help me to keep on top of things.
I had
Christmas at Green Turtle eco lodge with Sarah and her dad and Holly and her
mom. It was loads of fun, but not much to report. After that my whole family
came to visit me in Ghana. In typical Andrews fashion, we travelled around as a
horde of five foreigners that everyone thought they should sell things to,
showed up to places early, and worried about things we couldn’t control. Still,
for us, it was remarkably chill, and we had a good time. We visited Cape Coast
and Elmina, as well as Accra and Akosombo, in the Volta. My younger sister was
not very impressed with all the touring we did, and my older sister’s eyes were
not very impressed by the pollen and dust, but on the whole I think they
enjoyed the trip.
I think the
highlight of the visit for me (aside from staying in the near-unfathomably
luxurious Villa Boutique hotel and riding around in an air-conditioned van) was
when my Canadian family and my Ghanaian family got to meet. We brought gifts
for my host mother and father, and they cooked us a veritable feast, complete
with juice served in fancy champagne flutes. There was entirely too much food,
and we were all uncomfortably full by the time we left, but it was delicious,
and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The conversation was not easy, because
of the language barrier, but it was a lot of fun, and very rewarding. I found
my cheeks were sore from smiling by the time we headed back to the hotel.
As a
result, I only moved my stuff up north to Bolga on Saturday, and I still
haven’t started my placement. I caught the 7:15AM Starbow flight from Accra to
Tamale, which was quite nice. For GHC 195 (Roughly $105 Canadian) I took an
hour flight instead of a 12 hour bus ride, and was given a juice box, a pack of
cookies, a water bottle, and the world’s tiniest cup of tea. Perhaps the most
surprisingly enjoyable part of the flight, however, was the check-in procedure.
Since I was flying economy (and yes, there is a tiny 8-seat business class
section on this regional jet) I was only allowed to check 20kg of stuff, but my
bags weighed 32kg. I was afraid that this was going to cost me a fortune, or
else that I simply wouldn’t be allowed to check my bags. To my delight,
however, the overweight charge was only 2 cidies per kg, so I was able to check
an extra 12kg of baggage for about $15.
In Tamale I
met up with Marika, who’s going to be working with me at Tawodep. She had
bussed the day before and stayed at a very nice place called the Gariba Lodge.
So I met her there and used her very nice shower after we had a quiet breakfast
at the hotel restaurant. From there we chartered a taxi (Marika was friends
with the driver) to take us to Bolga. If we hadn’t had all of our stuff, I
expect we would have just taken a trotro, but they would have charged us extra
for the bags, if they even would have had room for them, and it would have been
a pain to carry them around the trotro station. I had my signature bright pink
backpack on my back, my purse slung across my shoulders underneath, my black
day-pack on my front, and then a blue duffle bag in my hand. It was not exactly
easy travelling. Similarly, Marika had two backpacks and a bag in her hand that
out-sized and out-weighed my duffle quite impressively. I was actually quite
impressed that she could carry it all herself, although she said the same thing
about my luggage.
So we got
to Bolga, and we ate lunch at the one western restaurant: Swap. From there,
Sarah and Raymond picked us up. Raymond is the volunteer director at Afrikids,
so he is the liason person for Katie’s placement. Additionally, he runs a
not-for-profit school in his community and has recently founded an NGO called
Zodec that deals with education in the area, and Sarah is doing her placement
with them. Furthermore, Katie and Sarah are both staying in a little apartment
in Raymond’s compound, so they’re getting very close with him and his wife
Edna, and son Junior. They picked us up and took us to the annual Afrikids
staff party for a little while, where we socialized and danced before returning
to their home completely exhausted.
Marika will
be living in one of the villages in Talensi, very close to Tawodep
headquarters, and I will be living in Bolga with Doris, the woman who runs
Tawodep and organized our places to stay. The reason that we haven’t started
work yet is that Doris told us that she would only be back in Talensi on the
20th, and that she would need some time to get our rooms ready for us. So, we
left most of our stuff at Sarah and Katie’s place this morning and walked to
the Bolga bus station and found a share-taxi to the border with Burkina Faso.
It took about an hour or so, and only cost a few cidies. From there we shuffled
through immigration, and bought our visas (that we’d been told would only cost
us 10,000 CFAs, so about $20) for 47,000 CFAs. Walking across the border took
about five minutes, because there was a weird stretch of shopping-and-police
no-man’s-land between what we could definitively identify as Ghana and Burkina
Faso.
Immediately
on the Burkina side, a man asked us if we were going to the capitol, which we
were, and ushered us to a small bus station. We saw beautiful shiny new pink
and purple buses that would be spacious and air-conditioned and were very
excited. Sadly, he led us past those buses to a sad broken-down looking red bus
whose every inch was caked in dust. Unfortunately, this appeared to be the only
bus to the capitol. It ended up being a more or less pleasant ride, though,
excluding the frequent stoppages at which numerous military personnel inspected
the cargo. This was probably a result of the massive pile of garbage bags
containing “uniquely oranges,” according to the driver. These “oranges” (which
some of them certainly were) took up most of the back of the bus, floor to
ceiling. There were at least two or three more rows behind where we were
sitting, with our backs to the mountain. Interspersed through the “oranges”
were some suitcases and plastic stools, a stack of which threatened to impale
us once or twice before they were moved into the aisle.
The name of
the capital of Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou. No joke. That’s the name. It’s
pronounced “Waga-doo-goo” but is frequently shortened to just “Waga.”
Additionally, half the stores in Ouaga have names that follow a simple formula:
(consonant) + ou + (consonant) + ou. It’s a fun city to be in.
So we found
our way to a nice little place called the Pavillon Vert, which is not, in fact,
green. The cabs here are, however. All the taxis are a striking colour of
Kermit-the-Frog green, which makes them very easy to identify. The place we
stayed has mosquito nets and running water and pillows and towels and sheets,
which makes it a cut above most of the places in our price range. The water
wasn’t hot, but there’s good pressure, and the room is very clean. We were
quite happy with it.
More to
come about our exciting trip to Bobo-Dioulasso and the surrounding areas! I’ll
keep you posted!
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