May 14th
Currently, I am sitting in Lounge 3 of the Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport. I’m finally on my way home after 4 ½ months in Ghana. In the last days of my stay here, I did a lot of present buying for various family members and friends. I also had a few papers to finish and hand in. Besides that, Rachel and I spent some time at our favorite beach (Tawala) and got Chicken and rice there (the best in Accra as far as I’m concerned). On the Sunday before we left (Mother’s day), Dedei’s brother Eddie came to pick us up early and take us to Tema. After visiting Dedei’s mother and niece Ayelei in East Legon a little over a week ago, we wanted to meet the rest of her family before we left. Eddie is Catholic (unlike Dedei, who is Born Again), so we went with him to a Catholic church in Tema. It was quite large, and there was even one other Obruni there! We wore the dresses Dedei’s sister KK (nickname for Korkor, the same name Dedei calls Rachel- means second born girl) made for us. We got a lot of comments on how beautiful they are. The church service talked about mothers and love. The chorus was really great, and they had traditional accompaniment with drums and everything. There are also separate groups within the church that are from different regions. For example, there were the Akan group (from the Ashanti region), the Ewe group (from the Volta Region), the group from the North (propably Hausa and a mix of other ethnicities) etc. The Ewe and Akan groups performed a couple of their own songs as well which were nice. *As a side note, the ethnicity called Ewe is actually pronounced ‘Ev-ay’. Their language was first written down by the Germans, which explains the trade of a ‘w’ sound for the ‘v’ sound.
After church we stayed with Eddie for a youth group meeting (he is one of the people who runs the group). The question posed to everyone there was ‘What is a citizen?’ and ‘What is a citizen’s responsibilities?’, as well as ‘What specific things could Ghanaians do to be better citizens?’. It was nice to see that these things are being discussed outside of Ashesi, because it seems that Ghana has a problem with personal responsibility. They have been brought up to be dependent, and see their role in politics and government as merely participating in elections. Many Ghanaians feel that once they have elected a president, their role is finished until the next time. Not many people had anything to say in response to the questions, showing another cultural manifestation.
After church Eddie took us to Dedei’s brother Osa’s house. His wife Sarah cooked us a delicious meal of boiled yam and plantain, rice, and vegetable stew with Octopus. I’d never had Octopus before, but it was quite good. It was reminiscent of Calamari but slightly less chewy and more meaty. We hung out for a while there with Osa and Sarah’s kids Ayelei (who we had already met because she lives with Grandma and Eddie), Ayokor, Ayikai, Tso Tso (pronounced Cho-Choh), and the neighbor boy Tete. Tete had never seen a white person before us, and was very scared at first. He quickly warmed up to us when we gave him some bites of our stew. He even started talking and pointing out the alphabet from a chart on the wall. The girls took us for a walk around their community in Tema. Tema is a little different from many other cities/towns in Ghana because it is very well organized. There are separate communities that are numbered. Dedei’s family lives in community 4. The houses are set up along a paved/cobblestoned pathway that are named with Letters and the houses are numbered. This is quite unique in Ghana, as it is easy to find someone just based on their street and number (most roads in Accra have names, but noone knows them). The community has a parking lot for everyone, as the paths between houses are not large enough to drive a car down, or to park. It’s very homey, and it certainly keeps the neighbors close!
After leaving Osa’s house we went to KK’s. We weren’t able to stay long since our program dinner had been moved to Sunday afternoon. We took some pictures with KK, her husband Robert, and their daughter Anita with Rachel and I still wearing the dresses she had sewn for us. Dedei’s family was very welcoming and made us feel at home. They all expressed their wish for us to return, and that we should count them as our family in Ghana. It is one of the motivating factors for my hope to return to Ghana in the future. I will definitely miss the country, and the little nuances, but I will more miss the family that adopted us as their own and treated us with such love and hospitality.
We also went to Dedei’s school one last time. They had been on ‘spring break’ for a couple weeks near the end of our semester so it had been a while since we’d seen them. They were all very cute, as usual. One of the other teachers came in to say goodbye to me and led the kids in a short dancing/singing performance. We led the kids in PE in the morning. They played a number of their traditional games as well as Football (soccer) and tug of war. Rachel got lots of videos that day which are really cute, so I’ll hopefully be able to share some of those with you all.
The trip home has been mostly uneventful so far. Getting out of Ghana was a little bit of an adventure. A while ago, CIEE took our passports to get an extension on our stay since when we entered the country they only gave us 60 days (even though the visa was for 5 or 6 months). When I looked at my extension it said it goes to May 7th. I asked the program directors if I would have to send my passport back since my flight doesn’t leave until the 13th. They said it was fine, and I didn’t think about it again until I got to the airport and apparently it was not ok. They guy at immigration said that because he believed me that it was due to their negligence, or something someone overlooked, he wouldn’t charge me the full fee. He did however want ‘a little something’. I told him I didn’t have any cedi’s and he said that’s fine, whatever I have. So I gave him my 7 US dollars and he sent me on my way. After making it through security and reaching the check-in point, the same guy who had printed my boarding passes was checking the size of carry-on bags. Mine didn’t quite fit into the given sized bin, so he said I would need to check it. I tried to tell him it was small enough, and I didn’t want to have to pay the extra fee for a third checked bag. He said that’s fine, he just needs a little something. Ha. So I gave him my 5 Euro’s that I had leftover from the trip through Amsterdam in January. He checked my bag and sent me on my way. The flight to Amsterdam was quick, and I got here around 5 in the morning (Amsterdam time, it felt like 3 in the morning for me). I slept on a padded bench at a closed restaurant for an hour until it hopened. Then I was kicked out and went to get some breakfast. Now I’m just stalling and looking for things to do for the next 2 hours before boarding time. I’ll be back in Boston around 3 this afternoon, and I’m getting a bit scared about the weather! When we landed here the weather was cloudy and 53ºF, 12ºC! I haven’t seen anything below 23ºC in the last 5 months, so that was a bit of a shocker getting off the plane. The airport is so air-conditioned that I’m wearing jeans and a fleece. I hope it warms up quickly this summer.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
May 4th
It’s been almost a month since I last wrote (sorry!). Things have been becoming more and more normal, so it feels less pressing that I write about my every experience. Longest ago, was our trip to East Legon (a more affluent region of Accra) where Dedei’s youngest brother Eddie lives with her mom and niece Ayelei. Eddie picked us up in his car and drove us there. We came with onions, pineapple, and various other vegetables Dedei wanted to bring her mother. We stopped at the Shoprite in the mall on our way there. Dedei had never been there and pointed out to me the celery (she had never seen it before we made her potato salad that one time). I’m just realizing I never talked about the night Rachel and I cooked ‘American food’ for Dedei and her sister Nakai. We cooked some chicken with barbeque sauce and made a potato salad from Mom/Grandma’s recipe. They thought the potato salad looked like something Ghanaians would eat for desert, but were surprised at how filling it was. One of the things people say about American food is that it is so light (for example, potatoes are much lighter than yams). Dedei had never seen celery before that day. She told me later that she took left over potato salad with fish and she preferred that to the chicken. Nakai called all their brothers and sisters and mother and was telling them how we had cooked for them and yum yum *click*. She’s very funny, clearly the youngest child.
Once we got there Eddie showed us some family pictures and we ate some biscuits and ice cream he’d picked up at Shoprite. Dedei’s mom Ayokor (her Christian name is Margaret) called to tell us not to leave, that she was rushing home from a funeral.When she arrived we cut up the pineapple and ate some pineapple with kenkey and pepper. I found out recently that they don’t say things are spicy meaning the same thing we do. Spicy to them just means that there are a lot of spices in it. If something is spicy as in hot, they say it has a lot of pepper. They use pepper to make two different kinds of stews (one is fried pepper) as well as adding however much they want to various stews. The fried pepper stew/sauce is called Shittoh, and is very spicy! It was really nice visiting with the family. Even though Margaret didn’t speak English very well, she was very friendly and welcoming calling us her grandchildren and everything. It was very much like any of our family gatherings, just sitting around hanging out. We took some family pictures and then got a cab home.
The next week was the week beginning to wrap up our classes. For Cultural Values, professor Ogundipe still wasn’t feeling well enough to come to class after her surgery, so she told us to work on our final paper. The assignment given us was to choose a West African country and do research on proverbs from that country. The paper is supposed to demonstrate cultural values as they are illustrated through proverbs. Oral tradition is so important in Africa, so proverbs weren’t too hard to find. For Africa in the International Setting, we’ve been working also on a final research paper with a topic of our choice. I had decided to do a paper discussing the unique role Reggae has played in the pan-African movement. I point out the power of Reggae to invoke political responses (especially with artists such as Peter Tosh and Bob Marley), and to spread cultural pride. I argue that the reason it has been so effective is because the method of dispersal was through the popular media, rather than through an academic vehicle.Leadership is still finishing up. We have a group paper due the day I leave discussing the validity of Machiavelli’s assertion that the ends justify the means. We have to give examples from our class case studies on leaders such as Ghandi, Kwame Nkrumah, and Lee Kwan Yew. Our professor has had a couple of local leaders come to give us lectures during the last two weeks that were really interesting. One of them was a woman who works for a department that looks into corruption allegations of various government officials. The second was a music artist that everyone but me knew; who promotes the production of Ghanaian music that doesn’t follow the Western trends. At the end of his lecture, they asked him to sing one of his most popular songs and everyone sang along and clapped and everything, which was really fun. We also had our final dance performance. It was free, but early in the afternoon and Dedei wasn’t able to make it because she was still at work. We got costumes made for us that were really nice and helped create a more African look (for those of us who are blond and blue eyed..). At one point during the dance we are supposed to go into the crowd and bring people out to dance, and my roommate Jocelyn was there so I got her to dance with me. The following day our Africa in the International Setting class told me I had Africa in my feet, and that the blond hair is just a cover up. I told her she should tell that to Dedei, who is forever telling me I was born in the wrong country.
The day after the dance performance, Rachel’s two friends that we vacationed with came to class at Ashesi. They were surprised to see that we actually had discussions in class, and were friends with some of the Ghanaian students. At the University of Legon, the lectures are so large and the lecturers usually just read from a book they say it is useless even to go to class. It definitely made me glad for choosing the Ashesi program over the Legon program. After class we went with Steph and Shannah back to Steph’shomestay in East Legon (nearer to their school). We met her mom and dad, who was a captain in the army, and so just goes by Captain. Her mom made us Redred and plantains that were delicious and then we sat for a while and talked to Captain. He is one of the more educated Ghanaians we’ve talked to, and also clearly very bright. One of his favorite topics is how Americans are forever talking about what a terrible president Bush was, but that really he was looking out for our own interests. We also talked about the various things wrong with Muammar Al-Gaddafi’s plan for the United States of Africa (the new head of the African Union). He had some good ideas about it, but also expressed that he didn’t think it was at all possible; that perhaps a more valid immediate plan would be regional unity. There are various problems with even this level of union. It is difficult to trade between West African countries, let alone travel between them. We decided that probably the first thing to do is create better roads connecting the countries. To do that, they would need top of the line construction tools, which they can only get from the Western world. This of course an issue because unless it is in the West’s interest (which of course African economic independence is not), they cannot get the tools they need. The following day, Ashley decided to take Rachel and I out to dinner as a pre-birthday gift/ night out for the girls. We went to the Golden Tulip hotel (which was shockingly Western, and expensive). I ordered a lobster bisque and a salad (yum! Veggies!). We went home and to bed early so we could wake up and go to the Volta Region with CIEE for our final group trip.
We arrived at the tourist office of Wli falls in the volta region just before lunch time. During our hike in to the falls we saw a law of school-aged children also apparently on some sort of field trip. It was interesting to notice the way they dressed, because it was clear they attended a more affluent, probably private school. They wore their hair however they wanted (usually public schools make everyone wear their hair buzzed short, girls included). They also showed an obscene amount of baggy shorts, bandanas, ‘bling’, and other Western hip-hop style. It was so excessive that it was almost funny, but also sad at how much they had been affected by Western pop and culture. The falls were beautiful. On the underside of the mountain near the falls, thousands of bats were hanging, flying, and eating. Two obruni’s from a different group went in before us and got completely surrounded, splashed, and kind of attacked by the kids in the water already. Rachel and I decided to venture in with our friend Adrian between us and the kids, as a block. A lot of times people men so much more than women, that it is a noticeable difference if you go somewhere with a guy. Adrian is an African-American as well, so that helped our cause as well. Once we got to the falls a few nice Ghanaians held our hands and showed us how to back up through the water so that we could touch the wall in the back. The water came down so hard it hurt if you got too close to the middle of the falls where most of the water was falling. After hiking out of the falls, we took a look at the tourist stands and bought some stuff because it was much cheaper than in Accra. We went to lunch, and then to Tafi-Atome monkey sanctuary.
The monkey sanctuary was really just a town. The guide told us that when the people migrated there, they believed the monkeys came with them, and that live harmoniously with them. It was then turned into a tourist economy. The guide gave us some bananas and showed us how to feed the Mona Monkeys in the sanctuary. We walked towards the woods and they began making very loud kissy-like noises to call to the monkeys. Then he held up a banana, saying that you have to hold on tight. The monkey climbed down to the end of the branch and peeled the banana in his hand and took the top half and ran off with it to eat. Some people who didn’t hold on tight enough lost the whole banana to one lucky monkey. The one who took my banana from me was quite strong and insistent. He put one of his little furry hands on mine and tried to take the whole banana, mushing some of it, but then gave up and just took the top part and went away to eat. We even saw a mama monkey with a tiny little baby clinging to her stomach as she climbed. It was very cute.
The next week Ashley and I decided to check out Makola market. It is the biggest market in Accra, and has anything you would ever wish for. It is intimidating much in the same way a mall is, but perhaps more so with all the people coming up to you and asking if you’re interested in buying their goods. The only thing that is better is that you can always bargain, and the prices are quite nice. I bought a pair of jeans for only 15 cedis, and a nice scarf for 2 cedis (which I didn’t even have to bargain for!). We’re going to go back this week to stock up on more clothing. Originally we had thought it would be silly to buy western-style clothing while in Ghana. However, if we’re going to have buy some new clothes at home anyways (since much of our clothing here has turned brown and stretched out from the dirt and hand washing), we might as well get it for half as much as we’d pay at home.
Dedei has also showed us how to make a tomato stew, and soup. It’s pretty easy, and I wrote it down so I can prepare it at home. She’s told me she will teach me to make Jolof rice as well as Palava sauce (my favorite). She’s tried to stick to teaching me to make things with ingredients that will be easy to get in the US, but Palava sauce uses Cocoyam leaves. They look very spinichy once in the stew, so I’ll have to try that. She also said I could try using cabbage. She loves when we learn how to cook from her, because she learned from her mom and we’re like the children she never had. The first girl who stayed with her from CIEE (during the fall semester) wasn’t very interested in learning to cook, so Dedei had been kind of disheartened from that experience. However, I’m very interested in learning to cook because I will miss Dedei’s cooking so much I’ll need to try to replicate it!
Last week Rachel got hit hard with Malaria. The nurse had originally told her it probably wasn’t malaria, but that she should get a test just in case. The test came out negative, and then four days later Rachel was so violently sick in the night Dedei had to take her to the hospital. The doctor there told her she had the symptoms of untreated Malaria. She spent the next four days lying in bed pretty much not moving or eating. Dedei and I took turns staying at the house, and I got a lot of reading done. Rachel did a lot of sleeping and losing weight. She’s much better now though after treatment, and is eating full meals again. Out of the 5 people on our program (1/3 of everyone!) who got Malaria, all of us had negative results on the lab test. I think either the prophylaxis we take, or the fact that we probably display symptoms earlier than most Ghanaians as a result of never having it before, are the reason for the negative tests.
This last weekend we traveled to Winneba again for the antelope hunting festival. Most of the festivities happened on Saturday, although people were partying in town all weekend. There were two teams, the red and white teams, who were trying to catch the antelope. On Saturday at 3 o’clock in the morning, everyone wakes up and treks toward the mountain. You could see all the red shirts from our hotel. They had to cross a river (that we didn’t cross) in order to find the antelope and catch it with their bare hands. Later on they sacrifice it and feast and party some more.
So I think that’s pretty much it for the last few weeks. Rachel and I have made a list of all the things we still need to buy (including thank you gifts for Dedei), and places we need to go before we leave. Only a week and a couple days left, and it is fast approaching. I’m getting a bit nervous about re-adapting to the US, because so many of the things that seemed weird and different when we got here are second-nature now. We have a re-entry orientation and farewell dinner this weekend and then my flight leaves on Wednesday. I’ll write again probably when I get home to talk about the last week and the trip home and initial feelings about being back in the US and everything.See you soon!
It’s been almost a month since I last wrote (sorry!). Things have been becoming more and more normal, so it feels less pressing that I write about my every experience. Longest ago, was our trip to East Legon (a more affluent region of Accra) where Dedei’s youngest brother Eddie lives with her mom and niece Ayelei. Eddie picked us up in his car and drove us there. We came with onions, pineapple, and various other vegetables Dedei wanted to bring her mother. We stopped at the Shoprite in the mall on our way there. Dedei had never been there and pointed out to me the celery (she had never seen it before we made her potato salad that one time). I’m just realizing I never talked about the night Rachel and I cooked ‘American food’ for Dedei and her sister Nakai. We cooked some chicken with barbeque sauce and made a potato salad from Mom/Grandma’s recipe. They thought the potato salad looked like something Ghanaians would eat for desert, but were surprised at how filling it was. One of the things people say about American food is that it is so light (for example, potatoes are much lighter than yams). Dedei had never seen celery before that day. She told me later that she took left over potato salad with fish and she preferred that to the chicken. Nakai called all their brothers and sisters and mother and was telling them how we had cooked for them and yum yum *click*. She’s very funny, clearly the youngest child.
Once we got there Eddie showed us some family pictures and we ate some biscuits and ice cream he’d picked up at Shoprite. Dedei’s mom Ayokor (her Christian name is Margaret) called to tell us not to leave, that she was rushing home from a funeral.When she arrived we cut up the pineapple and ate some pineapple with kenkey and pepper. I found out recently that they don’t say things are spicy meaning the same thing we do. Spicy to them just means that there are a lot of spices in it. If something is spicy as in hot, they say it has a lot of pepper. They use pepper to make two different kinds of stews (one is fried pepper) as well as adding however much they want to various stews. The fried pepper stew/sauce is called Shittoh, and is very spicy! It was really nice visiting with the family. Even though Margaret didn’t speak English very well, she was very friendly and welcoming calling us her grandchildren and everything. It was very much like any of our family gatherings, just sitting around hanging out. We took some family pictures and then got a cab home.
The next week was the week beginning to wrap up our classes. For Cultural Values, professor Ogundipe still wasn’t feeling well enough to come to class after her surgery, so she told us to work on our final paper. The assignment given us was to choose a West African country and do research on proverbs from that country. The paper is supposed to demonstrate cultural values as they are illustrated through proverbs. Oral tradition is so important in Africa, so proverbs weren’t too hard to find. For Africa in the International Setting, we’ve been working also on a final research paper with a topic of our choice. I had decided to do a paper discussing the unique role Reggae has played in the pan-African movement. I point out the power of Reggae to invoke political responses (especially with artists such as Peter Tosh and Bob Marley), and to spread cultural pride. I argue that the reason it has been so effective is because the method of dispersal was through the popular media, rather than through an academic vehicle.Leadership is still finishing up. We have a group paper due the day I leave discussing the validity of Machiavelli’s assertion that the ends justify the means. We have to give examples from our class case studies on leaders such as Ghandi, Kwame Nkrumah, and Lee Kwan Yew. Our professor has had a couple of local leaders come to give us lectures during the last two weeks that were really interesting. One of them was a woman who works for a department that looks into corruption allegations of various government officials. The second was a music artist that everyone but me knew; who promotes the production of Ghanaian music that doesn’t follow the Western trends. At the end of his lecture, they asked him to sing one of his most popular songs and everyone sang along and clapped and everything, which was really fun. We also had our final dance performance. It was free, but early in the afternoon and Dedei wasn’t able to make it because she was still at work. We got costumes made for us that were really nice and helped create a more African look (for those of us who are blond and blue eyed..). At one point during the dance we are supposed to go into the crowd and bring people out to dance, and my roommate Jocelyn was there so I got her to dance with me. The following day our Africa in the International Setting class told me I had Africa in my feet, and that the blond hair is just a cover up. I told her she should tell that to Dedei, who is forever telling me I was born in the wrong country.
The day after the dance performance, Rachel’s two friends that we vacationed with came to class at Ashesi. They were surprised to see that we actually had discussions in class, and were friends with some of the Ghanaian students. At the University of Legon, the lectures are so large and the lecturers usually just read from a book they say it is useless even to go to class. It definitely made me glad for choosing the Ashesi program over the Legon program. After class we went with Steph and Shannah back to Steph’shomestay in East Legon (nearer to their school). We met her mom and dad, who was a captain in the army, and so just goes by Captain. Her mom made us Redred and plantains that were delicious and then we sat for a while and talked to Captain. He is one of the more educated Ghanaians we’ve talked to, and also clearly very bright. One of his favorite topics is how Americans are forever talking about what a terrible president Bush was, but that really he was looking out for our own interests. We also talked about the various things wrong with Muammar Al-Gaddafi’s plan for the United States of Africa (the new head of the African Union). He had some good ideas about it, but also expressed that he didn’t think it was at all possible; that perhaps a more valid immediate plan would be regional unity. There are various problems with even this level of union. It is difficult to trade between West African countries, let alone travel between them. We decided that probably the first thing to do is create better roads connecting the countries. To do that, they would need top of the line construction tools, which they can only get from the Western world. This of course an issue because unless it is in the West’s interest (which of course African economic independence is not), they cannot get the tools they need. The following day, Ashley decided to take Rachel and I out to dinner as a pre-birthday gift/ night out for the girls. We went to the Golden Tulip hotel (which was shockingly Western, and expensive). I ordered a lobster bisque and a salad (yum! Veggies!). We went home and to bed early so we could wake up and go to the Volta Region with CIEE for our final group trip.
We arrived at the tourist office of Wli falls in the volta region just before lunch time. During our hike in to the falls we saw a law of school-aged children also apparently on some sort of field trip. It was interesting to notice the way they dressed, because it was clear they attended a more affluent, probably private school. They wore their hair however they wanted (usually public schools make everyone wear their hair buzzed short, girls included). They also showed an obscene amount of baggy shorts, bandanas, ‘bling’, and other Western hip-hop style. It was so excessive that it was almost funny, but also sad at how much they had been affected by Western pop and culture. The falls were beautiful. On the underside of the mountain near the falls, thousands of bats were hanging, flying, and eating. Two obruni’s from a different group went in before us and got completely surrounded, splashed, and kind of attacked by the kids in the water already. Rachel and I decided to venture in with our friend Adrian between us and the kids, as a block. A lot of times people men so much more than women, that it is a noticeable difference if you go somewhere with a guy. Adrian is an African-American as well, so that helped our cause as well. Once we got to the falls a few nice Ghanaians held our hands and showed us how to back up through the water so that we could touch the wall in the back. The water came down so hard it hurt if you got too close to the middle of the falls where most of the water was falling. After hiking out of the falls, we took a look at the tourist stands and bought some stuff because it was much cheaper than in Accra. We went to lunch, and then to Tafi-Atome monkey sanctuary.
The monkey sanctuary was really just a town. The guide told us that when the people migrated there, they believed the monkeys came with them, and that live harmoniously with them. It was then turned into a tourist economy. The guide gave us some bananas and showed us how to feed the Mona Monkeys in the sanctuary. We walked towards the woods and they began making very loud kissy-like noises to call to the monkeys. Then he held up a banana, saying that you have to hold on tight. The monkey climbed down to the end of the branch and peeled the banana in his hand and took the top half and ran off with it to eat. Some people who didn’t hold on tight enough lost the whole banana to one lucky monkey. The one who took my banana from me was quite strong and insistent. He put one of his little furry hands on mine and tried to take the whole banana, mushing some of it, but then gave up and just took the top part and went away to eat. We even saw a mama monkey with a tiny little baby clinging to her stomach as she climbed. It was very cute.
The next week Ashley and I decided to check out Makola market. It is the biggest market in Accra, and has anything you would ever wish for. It is intimidating much in the same way a mall is, but perhaps more so with all the people coming up to you and asking if you’re interested in buying their goods. The only thing that is better is that you can always bargain, and the prices are quite nice. I bought a pair of jeans for only 15 cedis, and a nice scarf for 2 cedis (which I didn’t even have to bargain for!). We’re going to go back this week to stock up on more clothing. Originally we had thought it would be silly to buy western-style clothing while in Ghana. However, if we’re going to have buy some new clothes at home anyways (since much of our clothing here has turned brown and stretched out from the dirt and hand washing), we might as well get it for half as much as we’d pay at home.
Dedei has also showed us how to make a tomato stew, and soup. It’s pretty easy, and I wrote it down so I can prepare it at home. She’s told me she will teach me to make Jolof rice as well as Palava sauce (my favorite). She’s tried to stick to teaching me to make things with ingredients that will be easy to get in the US, but Palava sauce uses Cocoyam leaves. They look very spinichy once in the stew, so I’ll have to try that. She also said I could try using cabbage. She loves when we learn how to cook from her, because she learned from her mom and we’re like the children she never had. The first girl who stayed with her from CIEE (during the fall semester) wasn’t very interested in learning to cook, so Dedei had been kind of disheartened from that experience. However, I’m very interested in learning to cook because I will miss Dedei’s cooking so much I’ll need to try to replicate it!
Last week Rachel got hit hard with Malaria. The nurse had originally told her it probably wasn’t malaria, but that she should get a test just in case. The test came out negative, and then four days later Rachel was so violently sick in the night Dedei had to take her to the hospital. The doctor there told her she had the symptoms of untreated Malaria. She spent the next four days lying in bed pretty much not moving or eating. Dedei and I took turns staying at the house, and I got a lot of reading done. Rachel did a lot of sleeping and losing weight. She’s much better now though after treatment, and is eating full meals again. Out of the 5 people on our program (1/3 of everyone!) who got Malaria, all of us had negative results on the lab test. I think either the prophylaxis we take, or the fact that we probably display symptoms earlier than most Ghanaians as a result of never having it before, are the reason for the negative tests.
This last weekend we traveled to Winneba again for the antelope hunting festival. Most of the festivities happened on Saturday, although people were partying in town all weekend. There were two teams, the red and white teams, who were trying to catch the antelope. On Saturday at 3 o’clock in the morning, everyone wakes up and treks toward the mountain. You could see all the red shirts from our hotel. They had to cross a river (that we didn’t cross) in order to find the antelope and catch it with their bare hands. Later on they sacrifice it and feast and party some more.
So I think that’s pretty much it for the last few weeks. Rachel and I have made a list of all the things we still need to buy (including thank you gifts for Dedei), and places we need to go before we leave. Only a week and a couple days left, and it is fast approaching. I’m getting a bit nervous about re-adapting to the US, because so many of the things that seemed weird and different when we got here are second-nature now. We have a re-entry orientation and farewell dinner this weekend and then my flight leaves on Wednesday. I’ll write again probably when I get home to talk about the last week and the trip home and initial feelings about being back in the US and everything.See you soon!
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