Wednesday, April 15, 2009
pics
http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=336746021/a=158961882_158961882/fromupload=true/imagecount=55/videocount=0/t_=158961882
April 15th
So it's only been a week this time!
This last weekend was a long Easter weekend for us because we got both Friday and Monday off. Our professor for cultural values had surgery recently, and her class is the only one I have on Mondays. So actually, I wont be having class Fridays (as usual) or Mondays the rest of the time I'm here. Anyways, we decided to visit the Stilt Village in Western Ghana over the long break. Ashley, Rachel, Stephanie and Shannah (Rachel's soccer teamates from school who are doing the CIEE Legon program) and left Friday morning. We took a 4 hour STC bus (air-conditioned!) to Takoradi which is the third largest urban area in Ghana. It is a twin city with Sekondi. From there we decided to take a tro-tro to Axim, a town about halfway between Takoradi and Beyin (the town outside Nzulezo, the stilt village). We didn't have any reservations because all the hotels with listed phone numbers in the guide book were booked for the weekend. We were nervous about making it all the way to Beyin and not having a place to stay, so we stayed in Axim for the night and decided to wake up early to go to the village.
Our hotel in Axim left a little to be desired. The water was not working when we got there so we had to request buckets of water. The TV that we were paying extra for was not working. The matresses were so thin and squishy that it felt as if we were actually just sleeping on the bedframe. Besides all this, we had a working fan (always necessary) and electricity (to charge various items). We relaxed for a bit in the hotel before taking a walk through town. There was a fort there and an Easter celebration going on. We watched the sun set from underneath a gorgeous typical Africa-looking tree (tall thick trunk, with a canopy type branch and leaves). The children in the town followed us to the beach and stood around behind us while we watched the sun-set. Typical.
The next morning we woke up early and got a rip off of a taxi ride to Beyin. We payed 4 cedi's each (20 cedis for him, for a 2 hour drive). Once in Beyin we had to pay the tourist office for our visit to the stilt village. We drove out to the water where we walked a little ways through some very squishy and questionably parasitic mud. After getting in our canoes, we helped the two men (Pont, our tour guide, and the taxi driver came with us) paddle to the stilt village. The lake the village was on was beautiful still water with trees and grass surrounding it (see pictures). Once we reached the stilt village we got out of the boats and walked up the central 'street'. The village is exactly what it sounds like, a village on stilts. When we were there we could see a small soccer field. They only have this for the 3 driest months of the year. During the rest of it, it is also under water. Steph and I had to pee really bad so he showed us where we could go. It sort of looked outhouse-like, except that there was no door, or hole. You just had to try to aim through the boards and not get it on your own feet. We were mildly successful. For the most part Ghanaians have no qualms about going to the bathroom anywhere anytime. One time, Shannah was telling me that her taxi driver pulled over on the side of the street during a ride, and proceeded to diarrhea on the side of the road. It is not uncommon to walk by men peeing into the gutters. Even women will pop a squat if the urge is such that they cannot wait.
Some of the children in the village were playing a game that looked similar to a jump-roping game kids in the US call Double-Dutch. The 'jump-rope' was made of tied together plastic bags. After getting a snack and a drink at the 'bar' we got back in the canoes and travelled back to Beyin. Our same taxi driver drove us back to Axim where he said he needed to change his break rubber. We had negotiated that he take us all the way to Prince's Town for the same price, since he had already overcharged us. We waited for about 30 minutes while they were working on the car. We found a woman and man who were making fried balls of maize and sugar that were quite delicious. We tried to play Ampe (the rock-paper-scissors-like game I described earlier) with the children who gathered to stare at us. I tried to teach a couple of them how to do a handstand before their mother yelled at them for not doing their work. After fixing the car, our taxi driver tried to charge us extra to take us to Prince's town. We were so fed up with getting ripped off that we got out of the car and signalled a tro-tro. After a while, we got off the tro-tro in Takoradi. Oops. We had missed the junction for Prince's town. We ended up just hanging out in Takoradi for a little to get some lunch since by this point we were all starving. We then got a tro-tro to Princes town.
When we got to princes town we first went to the German fort there to see if they had room available. They had one room available that would only just barely fit 5 people, for 6 cedis each a night. The bathrooms were shared, but the view was gorgeous and there was a woman pounding fufu for dinner. We decided to look elsewhere since we were planning to stay a couple nights and would rather have more space. We found a nice guesthouse where noone was staying, and were able to get two rooms for 2 nights for a total of 60 cedis, 6 cedis each a night! For the same price we were able to get our own bathrooms with running water and fans. The guesthouse even had a lounge and eating area. The food we got there was a bit expensive, but the deal we got on the rooms evened it out.
The following day, our plan was to hike to Cape Three Points through the forest reserve where there was supposed to be some cool plants and wildlife. Rachel's knee had been a bit sore (she tore her ACL and had surgery in the fall). So we decided to do a shorter hike through a bamboo forest. We got to see rubber trees, pineapple plants, gardenegg plants, palm-nut plants (not palm trees), banana trees, pawpaw trees (papaya) and lots of other cool things before we even got to the bamboo forest. The bamboo forest was incredible. All these huge trees with bamboo stalks growing up and arching over were pretty much the only trees there. When we reached a small river we saw some smoke in the distance and our tour guide Alex said it was a traditional palm wine distillery. For one cedi we were able to go and see how they tap the trees, light a fire in a hole to scare out/kill all the bugs, and collect the palm wine. We tried some very fresh palm wine which was even sweeter than the wine we'd tasted in Cape Coast. He also gave us a taste of the twice distilled liquor that was much harder. It tasted a lot like vodka but with a distinctly palm-winey after-taste. The distillery was a big can full of the palm wine. They lit a fire under it that was fuelled by bamboo stalks. The evaporated alcohol (that evaporates faster than water) enters a tube that cools it in the lake. It then comes back up another tube into a bucket. This process is done twice to get the hard palm alcohol.
Just a ways up the hill were two men working on making a dugout canoe. They had a large tree that had falled and were hacking at either end to make the curved ends of the boat. After that they light fires in the center to kill the bugs and make the process easier. They said it takes about two weeks to make a canoe. After the hike, we spent the day on the prince's town beach near a german-owned hotel. Alex said that hotel would have cost 50 cedis a night! The beach was practically empty except for a couple other people and we had a great view of Cape Three Points. It was also very clean!
The following morning we decided to do a lagoon trip before we left. We split up between two dugout canoes and toured the Ehunu Lagoon (salt water) near Princes Town. We saw a bunch of black and white colobus monkeys in the mangroves. We also saw a very small aligator climbing out of the water (the picture of the aligator isn't very good). We saw some tucan-looking birds as well. The pictures will do this tour better justice than a description. On our way out of the boats, we saw a fisherman who had caught a stingray in the lagoon and cut it up in the bottom of his boat. My camera had died at this point but I'll get pictures from Shannah later on. After the tour we packed up our stuff and headed back to Takoradi where we got a bus to Accra. Dedei had some fufu and hot soup waiting for us when we got back! It was probably the best trip we've done so far because we got to do so many cool things that we weren't even expecting. Things worked out better than we had hoped without even having reservations. All the places we stayed were really beautiful and clean. The Western region was really appealing. If I ever moved to Ghana I think that is the area I would try to live. It seemed like things were cleaner and better organized there while still having the Ghanaian relaxed sense of time.
The computer I'm on now isn't accepting my pen drive, so I will try to post the pictures tomorrow. Today is the 4 week mark. Only a month left! Yikes. We're trying to do all the travelling we wanted to before we leave. This weekend we're planning to go to Tema to visit with Dedei's mother and family so that should be fun.
This last weekend was a long Easter weekend for us because we got both Friday and Monday off. Our professor for cultural values had surgery recently, and her class is the only one I have on Mondays. So actually, I wont be having class Fridays (as usual) or Mondays the rest of the time I'm here. Anyways, we decided to visit the Stilt Village in Western Ghana over the long break. Ashley, Rachel, Stephanie and Shannah (Rachel's soccer teamates from school who are doing the CIEE Legon program) and left Friday morning. We took a 4 hour STC bus (air-conditioned!) to Takoradi which is the third largest urban area in Ghana. It is a twin city with Sekondi. From there we decided to take a tro-tro to Axim, a town about halfway between Takoradi and Beyin (the town outside Nzulezo, the stilt village). We didn't have any reservations because all the hotels with listed phone numbers in the guide book were booked for the weekend. We were nervous about making it all the way to Beyin and not having a place to stay, so we stayed in Axim for the night and decided to wake up early to go to the village.
Our hotel in Axim left a little to be desired. The water was not working when we got there so we had to request buckets of water. The TV that we were paying extra for was not working. The matresses were so thin and squishy that it felt as if we were actually just sleeping on the bedframe. Besides all this, we had a working fan (always necessary) and electricity (to charge various items). We relaxed for a bit in the hotel before taking a walk through town. There was a fort there and an Easter celebration going on. We watched the sun set from underneath a gorgeous typical Africa-looking tree (tall thick trunk, with a canopy type branch and leaves). The children in the town followed us to the beach and stood around behind us while we watched the sun-set. Typical.
The next morning we woke up early and got a rip off of a taxi ride to Beyin. We payed 4 cedi's each (20 cedis for him, for a 2 hour drive). Once in Beyin we had to pay the tourist office for our visit to the stilt village. We drove out to the water where we walked a little ways through some very squishy and questionably parasitic mud. After getting in our canoes, we helped the two men (Pont, our tour guide, and the taxi driver came with us) paddle to the stilt village. The lake the village was on was beautiful still water with trees and grass surrounding it (see pictures). Once we reached the stilt village we got out of the boats and walked up the central 'street'. The village is exactly what it sounds like, a village on stilts. When we were there we could see a small soccer field. They only have this for the 3 driest months of the year. During the rest of it, it is also under water. Steph and I had to pee really bad so he showed us where we could go. It sort of looked outhouse-like, except that there was no door, or hole. You just had to try to aim through the boards and not get it on your own feet. We were mildly successful. For the most part Ghanaians have no qualms about going to the bathroom anywhere anytime. One time, Shannah was telling me that her taxi driver pulled over on the side of the street during a ride, and proceeded to diarrhea on the side of the road. It is not uncommon to walk by men peeing into the gutters. Even women will pop a squat if the urge is such that they cannot wait.
Some of the children in the village were playing a game that looked similar to a jump-roping game kids in the US call Double-Dutch. The 'jump-rope' was made of tied together plastic bags. After getting a snack and a drink at the 'bar' we got back in the canoes and travelled back to Beyin. Our same taxi driver drove us back to Axim where he said he needed to change his break rubber. We had negotiated that he take us all the way to Prince's Town for the same price, since he had already overcharged us. We waited for about 30 minutes while they were working on the car. We found a woman and man who were making fried balls of maize and sugar that were quite delicious. We tried to play Ampe (the rock-paper-scissors-like game I described earlier) with the children who gathered to stare at us. I tried to teach a couple of them how to do a handstand before their mother yelled at them for not doing their work. After fixing the car, our taxi driver tried to charge us extra to take us to Prince's town. We were so fed up with getting ripped off that we got out of the car and signalled a tro-tro. After a while, we got off the tro-tro in Takoradi. Oops. We had missed the junction for Prince's town. We ended up just hanging out in Takoradi for a little to get some lunch since by this point we were all starving. We then got a tro-tro to Princes town.
When we got to princes town we first went to the German fort there to see if they had room available. They had one room available that would only just barely fit 5 people, for 6 cedis each a night. The bathrooms were shared, but the view was gorgeous and there was a woman pounding fufu for dinner. We decided to look elsewhere since we were planning to stay a couple nights and would rather have more space. We found a nice guesthouse where noone was staying, and were able to get two rooms for 2 nights for a total of 60 cedis, 6 cedis each a night! For the same price we were able to get our own bathrooms with running water and fans. The guesthouse even had a lounge and eating area. The food we got there was a bit expensive, but the deal we got on the rooms evened it out.
The following day, our plan was to hike to Cape Three Points through the forest reserve where there was supposed to be some cool plants and wildlife. Rachel's knee had been a bit sore (she tore her ACL and had surgery in the fall). So we decided to do a shorter hike through a bamboo forest. We got to see rubber trees, pineapple plants, gardenegg plants, palm-nut plants (not palm trees), banana trees, pawpaw trees (papaya) and lots of other cool things before we even got to the bamboo forest. The bamboo forest was incredible. All these huge trees with bamboo stalks growing up and arching over were pretty much the only trees there. When we reached a small river we saw some smoke in the distance and our tour guide Alex said it was a traditional palm wine distillery. For one cedi we were able to go and see how they tap the trees, light a fire in a hole to scare out/kill all the bugs, and collect the palm wine. We tried some very fresh palm wine which was even sweeter than the wine we'd tasted in Cape Coast. He also gave us a taste of the twice distilled liquor that was much harder. It tasted a lot like vodka but with a distinctly palm-winey after-taste. The distillery was a big can full of the palm wine. They lit a fire under it that was fuelled by bamboo stalks. The evaporated alcohol (that evaporates faster than water) enters a tube that cools it in the lake. It then comes back up another tube into a bucket. This process is done twice to get the hard palm alcohol.
Just a ways up the hill were two men working on making a dugout canoe. They had a large tree that had falled and were hacking at either end to make the curved ends of the boat. After that they light fires in the center to kill the bugs and make the process easier. They said it takes about two weeks to make a canoe. After the hike, we spent the day on the prince's town beach near a german-owned hotel. Alex said that hotel would have cost 50 cedis a night! The beach was practically empty except for a couple other people and we had a great view of Cape Three Points. It was also very clean!
The following morning we decided to do a lagoon trip before we left. We split up between two dugout canoes and toured the Ehunu Lagoon (salt water) near Princes Town. We saw a bunch of black and white colobus monkeys in the mangroves. We also saw a very small aligator climbing out of the water (the picture of the aligator isn't very good). We saw some tucan-looking birds as well. The pictures will do this tour better justice than a description. On our way out of the boats, we saw a fisherman who had caught a stingray in the lagoon and cut it up in the bottom of his boat. My camera had died at this point but I'll get pictures from Shannah later on. After the tour we packed up our stuff and headed back to Takoradi where we got a bus to Accra. Dedei had some fufu and hot soup waiting for us when we got back! It was probably the best trip we've done so far because we got to do so many cool things that we weren't even expecting. Things worked out better than we had hoped without even having reservations. All the places we stayed were really beautiful and clean. The Western region was really appealing. If I ever moved to Ghana I think that is the area I would try to live. It seemed like things were cleaner and better organized there while still having the Ghanaian relaxed sense of time.
The computer I'm on now isn't accepting my pen drive, so I will try to post the pictures tomorrow. Today is the 4 week mark. Only a month left! Yikes. We're trying to do all the travelling we wanted to before we leave. This weekend we're planning to go to Tema to visit with Dedei's mother and family so that should be fun.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
April 6th
The Friday after my last post, Rachel and I went to Dedei’s school (as we do most Fridays) to teach. However, after showing Dedei some of our new moves from our Music and Dance class, she decided that we would have a music and dance section of class that day. Needless to say, Rachel and I were a bit nervous. The songs we sing are in Ga, which is most of the children’s first language, so we knew that our American accents could be a bit embarrassing. We also inevitably move in a very Western way, and so the African style moves look a little funny when we do them. When we sang our song, the children just stared at us for a while. Dedei said another student walked by outside and exclaimed “the white women are singing our song!”. After they got over the shock of us singing their song, they got up and showed us the song they sing for the Kponlogo dance (the song we had been singing, and a dance we learned in class). Their version was slightly different but we could deffinitly see the similarties. It was really cool to watch the children do their song and dance because every kid there knew the song and was really into it. The ones who weren’t dancing were clapping and singing, some were drumming on desks and chalk tins, others were improvising their own moves on top of the desks. Rachel and I were kind of jealous that we didn’t have that kind of experience as a kid. It shows again how dancing and music are a huge part of Ghanaian culture.
The next day Lily, Rachel, Ashley and I left Accra to go to Kumasi for the Black Starts football game. We didn’t have tickets and had been told varying things about what availability would be like when we got there. We decided to believe someone who told us we would be able to get tickets as long as we got to the stadium Sunday morning (the day of the game) at 4:30. After making reservations at a hotel near the bus station, we arrived to find that they had ‘no rooms available’. We finally found out that there was one room available, and if we were really leaving early we could all stay in that room. Apparently there was a guy coming the next day who wouldn’t be happy about having four people in one room. Anyways, we ended up paying 11 cedis each (because there was AC and a television) and stayed in that room for the night. The next morning we went to the stadium at 5:00. There were people there who told us that they don’t start selling tickets until 7:00. By this time of course we had already checked out of our room, so we ended up just waiting in line in hopes that maybe our tickets would be somehow better because we had waited so long. Along comes 7:30 and the whole line behind us runs around the corner. Not really knowing what to do, we followed them and ended up at the back of a line at another ticket booth. Now people were saying that tickets wouldn’t be on sale until 10:00. We had quite a bit of time, and I was very hungry so I bought some hard boiled eggs, groundnuts, and bananas for breakfast.
The same kinds of people who sell food in traffic often sell food anywhere else there are groups of people. Women who sell hard boiled eggs will peel the eggs for you and ask if you want ‘pepper’, which is a spicy/salty sauce with cut up onion in it. They cut the egg open and scoop some sauce in and hand you the egg. Usually they are 20 or 25 pesewa each. Groudnuts come in little baggies that are 10 pesewa each. Bananas are usually about 20 pesewa for two, but the price goes down per banana if you buy more. Other people sell plantain chips, ‘pure water’ (which is questionable. The water here is much cheaper if you buy it in a ‘sashe’ which is a 500 ml baggie of water, but some desperate people will just fill them up from a tap. This is how my cultural values professor got typhoid), grilled plantains, ‘biscuits’ (crackers of various types, a lot of them are either milk crackers, cream crackers, butter crackers, some of them actually have a chocolate mousse stuff in them), coconuts (the man will cut it open for you with his machete so you can drink the milk, then he cuts it in half so you can eat the insides), etc.
After eating, I had been talking to a man in front of us a bit, just making conversation. Some people had been going up to the gate, and he explained to me that there was a man inside who was bringing some tickets. He told me that if I gave him our money, he could get tickets for us. The tickets were 5 cedi for general seating, and 10, 15 or 20 for VIP seating. People had recommended to us that we get VIP seating because just a month ago a few people had been trampled and killed at the Kumasi stadium. In Accra a few years ago, people had gotten so rowdy that about 160 people were killed. We opted for the cheapest VIP seats and I gave the money to the man and watched him talk to the man at the gate for our tickets. I was a bit worried about giving my money to some random guy I had just met, but I had already seen his tickets and watched him give the money to the man at the gate. He came back about 10 minutes later with 4 10 cedi vip tickets. I gave him a dash (tip) for his efforts and each of us ended up paying 11 cedis for our VIP tickets. We went back to the hotel we had stayed at the night before and had some breakfast/lunch while we waited for our reservation to open up (that we made the night before so we would be sure to have a room for Sunday night). We put our stuff in the room and took a nap before getting some more food and heading to the game around 3:00. When we got there, of course the road was blocked off so we had to walk up the street with all the other fans and we got to see all the fan regalia being sold outside the stadium. There are some pictures of the kind of stuff that was being sold. I had bought an Appiah jersey in Accra to wear to the game (he is their captain). At the game I bought a Ghanaian flag to wave. When we found our seats we were excited to notice that we actually had a great view (even though we got the least expensive VIP tickets available). We were sitting so that our view of the field was just above the plexi-glass barrier by one of the goals. Ghana scored within the first minute of the game, and then didn’t score again. Benin had no goals. Ghana’s win! They had a few good shots on goal toward the end of the game but could not put the ball in the net. The game was very exciting anyways.Rachel and Lily left that night on a bus back to Accra. Lily had a project due the next day so she wanted to be sure she would be back in time. Ashley and I stayed the night in our reserved room and headed back on the 4:30 bus on Monday morning.
Wednesday morning the next week Rachel and I went with Dedei to her sister-in-law’s grandchild’s naming ceremony. Dedei’s sister in law, Georgina, is the woman who owns the international school that Rachel and I have taught at a couple times. Naming ceremonies are a traditional Ghanaian ceremony that takes place about a week after the child is born. Until then, they only go by their day name. We went to a more westernized version that was held in a church. Dedei has explained to us that in more traditional ones (which they carried out at the reception that we couldn’t attend because of class), the child is held up to the sky to offer it to God, and then it is put on the ground to show that it is now a human of the Earth.
Rachel and I had gone to Georgina’s school a couple weeks ago. We brought some plain paper and colored pencils to do an activity with them. In the US we call them fortunetellers and kids use them to ‘tell each others’ fortunes’ during recess etc. They are folded in such a way that the players can pick colors and numbers, and then behind each number is a question. We adapted this activity so that each question was a quiz question related to the things the students were learning in class. So we showed them all how to fold, color, and number the fortunetellers. They had a bit of trouble thinking of good quiz questions. Some of them had questions like “what is your name”. Others picked up on it much more quickly and thought of some really good questions. This week Rachel and I went to teach at Dedei’s school, but she had us go to the third grade class because she felt she was being selfish with our help. We did the same activity with the kids at the public school. We also played twenty questions with the object being Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and the man who led them to independence in 1957. After being exposed to the craziness of Dedei’s class one, class three was really interesting. Dedei says that by this time ‘the cane has done it’s work’, and indeed the children are very well behaved. They were also very bright, and thought of many good questions for the fortunetellers (such as, How many religions are there in Ghana? Etc.) It was sad to realize that many of these children will not get an education past highschool because they cannot afford the fee’s. Many of the children at the international school will attend college, but may not be as smart or as intelligent as some of the public school children.
Last week Dedei made us ‘pepper’ which is kind of like the stews she has made us before. You take it in much smaller amounts than the stew though because it is so hot. We had it with banku, which I think is typical. It was quite good, and very spicy. She told us we could add some ketchup to make it a bit more mild. We have also had a few talks about how Americans are very picky about what they eat. For example, fish head is a delicacy here and people love it. People also apparently eat bones. I don’t mean like chew off all the last bits of meat until the bones are clean, but they actually bite and chew and swallow the bones. Dedei showed me a drumstick bone that I could try it on since those bones are very soft. It was surprisingly soft, and didn’t taste especially good. I guess it is an acquired taste. The doggy that we usually feed our bones to is probably happy that I didn’t like them. She has become a lot more friendly and will greet us when we come to the gate now and even get so excited she’ll jump up on us sometimes. Mostly the dogs here are wild, and no one ever gives them any attention. She has probably never had so much attention in her life. If you walk by a stray dog on the street, it wont even look up at you the way dogs in the US do. They have never had an experience that would suggest to them that a human would be somewhere to look for shelter, food, or attention. Usually people just treat them as pests, so they really are wild dogs. Speaking of animals, the kitty that we also feed our scraps to, had her kittens a few weeks ago. She only had two of them and Rachel and I named them Pongo (from 101 Dalmations, because she is spotted) and Raja (from Aladdin, because he is striped like a tiger). We’ve gotten to hold them and play with them a couple times. They are so tiny that when they make noise it doesn’t even sound like a cat. When they walk it looks like their drunk because their legs move in weird jerky motions like their muscles aren’t working properly yet. We’re glad she had them while we were here because we feed the kitty so many scraps that she is able to take care of them now. She had a little once before and ended up eating them because she was so hungry.
This weekend we went to a place about 40 minutes up the coast called Kokrobite. It is a pretty touristy beach, though it doesn’t cost any to just lay on the beach. It was by far the nicest beach I’ve been to in Ghana. There was only a very small amount of trash, and the waves were great. When we got there some people were having a drumming session too so that was nice to enjoy. When we were having lunch we ran into Adam, the British guy we met on the ferry to the northern region.
We seem to be running quite low on weekends now. We only have 5 left. The first weekend in May we have planned to go back to Winneba. There is a big antelope hunting festival that weekend where two groups try to see who can catch the antelope with their bare hands first. It is then killed as a sacrifice. One of our friends, Rose, from school is from Winneba so we are going to stay at her uncles’ hotel while we are there that weekend. We also have a weekend trip with the program still. That trip will be to the Volta region to go to a Monkey Sanctuary and also to Wli falls. This coming weekend is Easter weekend so we get Friday and Monday off. Hopefully we will be able to plan a fun trip. There is a stilt village a ways West of here almost to la Cote D’Ivoire that we might try to see. That only leaves 2 weekends open! Yikes.
The Friday after my last post, Rachel and I went to Dedei’s school (as we do most Fridays) to teach. However, after showing Dedei some of our new moves from our Music and Dance class, she decided that we would have a music and dance section of class that day. Needless to say, Rachel and I were a bit nervous. The songs we sing are in Ga, which is most of the children’s first language, so we knew that our American accents could be a bit embarrassing. We also inevitably move in a very Western way, and so the African style moves look a little funny when we do them. When we sang our song, the children just stared at us for a while. Dedei said another student walked by outside and exclaimed “the white women are singing our song!”. After they got over the shock of us singing their song, they got up and showed us the song they sing for the Kponlogo dance (the song we had been singing, and a dance we learned in class). Their version was slightly different but we could deffinitly see the similarties. It was really cool to watch the children do their song and dance because every kid there knew the song and was really into it. The ones who weren’t dancing were clapping and singing, some were drumming on desks and chalk tins, others were improvising their own moves on top of the desks. Rachel and I were kind of jealous that we didn’t have that kind of experience as a kid. It shows again how dancing and music are a huge part of Ghanaian culture.
The next day Lily, Rachel, Ashley and I left Accra to go to Kumasi for the Black Starts football game. We didn’t have tickets and had been told varying things about what availability would be like when we got there. We decided to believe someone who told us we would be able to get tickets as long as we got to the stadium Sunday morning (the day of the game) at 4:30. After making reservations at a hotel near the bus station, we arrived to find that they had ‘no rooms available’. We finally found out that there was one room available, and if we were really leaving early we could all stay in that room. Apparently there was a guy coming the next day who wouldn’t be happy about having four people in one room. Anyways, we ended up paying 11 cedis each (because there was AC and a television) and stayed in that room for the night. The next morning we went to the stadium at 5:00. There were people there who told us that they don’t start selling tickets until 7:00. By this time of course we had already checked out of our room, so we ended up just waiting in line in hopes that maybe our tickets would be somehow better because we had waited so long. Along comes 7:30 and the whole line behind us runs around the corner. Not really knowing what to do, we followed them and ended up at the back of a line at another ticket booth. Now people were saying that tickets wouldn’t be on sale until 10:00. We had quite a bit of time, and I was very hungry so I bought some hard boiled eggs, groundnuts, and bananas for breakfast.
The same kinds of people who sell food in traffic often sell food anywhere else there are groups of people. Women who sell hard boiled eggs will peel the eggs for you and ask if you want ‘pepper’, which is a spicy/salty sauce with cut up onion in it. They cut the egg open and scoop some sauce in and hand you the egg. Usually they are 20 or 25 pesewa each. Groudnuts come in little baggies that are 10 pesewa each. Bananas are usually about 20 pesewa for two, but the price goes down per banana if you buy more. Other people sell plantain chips, ‘pure water’ (which is questionable. The water here is much cheaper if you buy it in a ‘sashe’ which is a 500 ml baggie of water, but some desperate people will just fill them up from a tap. This is how my cultural values professor got typhoid), grilled plantains, ‘biscuits’ (crackers of various types, a lot of them are either milk crackers, cream crackers, butter crackers, some of them actually have a chocolate mousse stuff in them), coconuts (the man will cut it open for you with his machete so you can drink the milk, then he cuts it in half so you can eat the insides), etc.
After eating, I had been talking to a man in front of us a bit, just making conversation. Some people had been going up to the gate, and he explained to me that there was a man inside who was bringing some tickets. He told me that if I gave him our money, he could get tickets for us. The tickets were 5 cedi for general seating, and 10, 15 or 20 for VIP seating. People had recommended to us that we get VIP seating because just a month ago a few people had been trampled and killed at the Kumasi stadium. In Accra a few years ago, people had gotten so rowdy that about 160 people were killed. We opted for the cheapest VIP seats and I gave the money to the man and watched him talk to the man at the gate for our tickets. I was a bit worried about giving my money to some random guy I had just met, but I had already seen his tickets and watched him give the money to the man at the gate. He came back about 10 minutes later with 4 10 cedi vip tickets. I gave him a dash (tip) for his efforts and each of us ended up paying 11 cedis for our VIP tickets. We went back to the hotel we had stayed at the night before and had some breakfast/lunch while we waited for our reservation to open up (that we made the night before so we would be sure to have a room for Sunday night). We put our stuff in the room and took a nap before getting some more food and heading to the game around 3:00. When we got there, of course the road was blocked off so we had to walk up the street with all the other fans and we got to see all the fan regalia being sold outside the stadium. There are some pictures of the kind of stuff that was being sold. I had bought an Appiah jersey in Accra to wear to the game (he is their captain). At the game I bought a Ghanaian flag to wave. When we found our seats we were excited to notice that we actually had a great view (even though we got the least expensive VIP tickets available). We were sitting so that our view of the field was just above the plexi-glass barrier by one of the goals. Ghana scored within the first minute of the game, and then didn’t score again. Benin had no goals. Ghana’s win! They had a few good shots on goal toward the end of the game but could not put the ball in the net. The game was very exciting anyways.Rachel and Lily left that night on a bus back to Accra. Lily had a project due the next day so she wanted to be sure she would be back in time. Ashley and I stayed the night in our reserved room and headed back on the 4:30 bus on Monday morning.
Wednesday morning the next week Rachel and I went with Dedei to her sister-in-law’s grandchild’s naming ceremony. Dedei’s sister in law, Georgina, is the woman who owns the international school that Rachel and I have taught at a couple times. Naming ceremonies are a traditional Ghanaian ceremony that takes place about a week after the child is born. Until then, they only go by their day name. We went to a more westernized version that was held in a church. Dedei has explained to us that in more traditional ones (which they carried out at the reception that we couldn’t attend because of class), the child is held up to the sky to offer it to God, and then it is put on the ground to show that it is now a human of the Earth.
Rachel and I had gone to Georgina’s school a couple weeks ago. We brought some plain paper and colored pencils to do an activity with them. In the US we call them fortunetellers and kids use them to ‘tell each others’ fortunes’ during recess etc. They are folded in such a way that the players can pick colors and numbers, and then behind each number is a question. We adapted this activity so that each question was a quiz question related to the things the students were learning in class. So we showed them all how to fold, color, and number the fortunetellers. They had a bit of trouble thinking of good quiz questions. Some of them had questions like “what is your name”. Others picked up on it much more quickly and thought of some really good questions. This week Rachel and I went to teach at Dedei’s school, but she had us go to the third grade class because she felt she was being selfish with our help. We did the same activity with the kids at the public school. We also played twenty questions with the object being Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and the man who led them to independence in 1957. After being exposed to the craziness of Dedei’s class one, class three was really interesting. Dedei says that by this time ‘the cane has done it’s work’, and indeed the children are very well behaved. They were also very bright, and thought of many good questions for the fortunetellers (such as, How many religions are there in Ghana? Etc.) It was sad to realize that many of these children will not get an education past highschool because they cannot afford the fee’s. Many of the children at the international school will attend college, but may not be as smart or as intelligent as some of the public school children.
Last week Dedei made us ‘pepper’ which is kind of like the stews she has made us before. You take it in much smaller amounts than the stew though because it is so hot. We had it with banku, which I think is typical. It was quite good, and very spicy. She told us we could add some ketchup to make it a bit more mild. We have also had a few talks about how Americans are very picky about what they eat. For example, fish head is a delicacy here and people love it. People also apparently eat bones. I don’t mean like chew off all the last bits of meat until the bones are clean, but they actually bite and chew and swallow the bones. Dedei showed me a drumstick bone that I could try it on since those bones are very soft. It was surprisingly soft, and didn’t taste especially good. I guess it is an acquired taste. The doggy that we usually feed our bones to is probably happy that I didn’t like them. She has become a lot more friendly and will greet us when we come to the gate now and even get so excited she’ll jump up on us sometimes. Mostly the dogs here are wild, and no one ever gives them any attention. She has probably never had so much attention in her life. If you walk by a stray dog on the street, it wont even look up at you the way dogs in the US do. They have never had an experience that would suggest to them that a human would be somewhere to look for shelter, food, or attention. Usually people just treat them as pests, so they really are wild dogs. Speaking of animals, the kitty that we also feed our scraps to, had her kittens a few weeks ago. She only had two of them and Rachel and I named them Pongo (from 101 Dalmations, because she is spotted) and Raja (from Aladdin, because he is striped like a tiger). We’ve gotten to hold them and play with them a couple times. They are so tiny that when they make noise it doesn’t even sound like a cat. When they walk it looks like their drunk because their legs move in weird jerky motions like their muscles aren’t working properly yet. We’re glad she had them while we were here because we feed the kitty so many scraps that she is able to take care of them now. She had a little once before and ended up eating them because she was so hungry.
This weekend we went to a place about 40 minutes up the coast called Kokrobite. It is a pretty touristy beach, though it doesn’t cost any to just lay on the beach. It was by far the nicest beach I’ve been to in Ghana. There was only a very small amount of trash, and the waves were great. When we got there some people were having a drumming session too so that was nice to enjoy. When we were having lunch we ran into Adam, the British guy we met on the ferry to the northern region.
We seem to be running quite low on weekends now. We only have 5 left. The first weekend in May we have planned to go back to Winneba. There is a big antelope hunting festival that weekend where two groups try to see who can catch the antelope with their bare hands first. It is then killed as a sacrifice. One of our friends, Rose, from school is from Winneba so we are going to stay at her uncles’ hotel while we are there that weekend. We also have a weekend trip with the program still. That trip will be to the Volta region to go to a Monkey Sanctuary and also to Wli falls. This coming weekend is Easter weekend so we get Friday and Monday off. Hopefully we will be able to plan a fun trip. There is a stilt village a ways West of here almost to la Cote D’Ivoire that we might try to see. That only leaves 2 weekends open! Yikes.
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