Ghana Pics: Part 2

By some stroke of luck (or Karma), the internet is not only free today (yes, free), it is also fairly fast. So in an effort to pay it forward, I have dedicated this post to more pics from Ghana. Enjoy!

We tried to get some Dixcove kids to pose in a canoe. I don't think everyone understood.

Each canoe is actually made the old-fashioned way: hollowing it out of one really big tree.

Voilà moi, after hiking up the top of the mountain overlooking Busua Beach (evidently the property we were on with this great view and several bungalows is own by a German man who runs the local gold mine. Danke schön.)

Ghanaian man in traditional dress walking across the beach. You definitely see more Western-style clothing here than in Burkina.

Christy in the role of monkey, when our canoe trip proved simian-less.


Relaxing on our canoe ride while our guides to all the work. Thanks William & Mary Crew Team!

After our trip up river, we learned how palm wine is made.


Christy, showing off the latest trend in footwear on the runways of Milan.

Me, standing in front of giant bamboo stalks. It was a pretty cool site to see.

Nighttime on the beach.

Karma

No, I am not talking about the Hindu cause and effect cycle in which the effects of all life's deeds actively shape the past, present, and future. Today, I am referring to one of my three satellite villages, those villages which lack a health clinic and must share the CSPS in my village. Because these other villages do not have their own health clinic, it is usually the case that they are much more motivated and interested than the village with the CSPS. Because they often receive little attention from the health clinic besides monthly vaccinations, these are great places to focus one's attention. This weekend was all about Karma.

I had mentioned to my major that I would like to do sensibilizations (health demonstrations) in my satellite villages for said reasons, so he helped plan a few activities with my nearest village, Karma. Karma is located about 3 or 4km away and is another Mooré-speaking village. I had been there a few times to help out with vaccinations and was eager to return for more activities.

This Friday, we had our own vaccination campaign in Aorema which took up most of the morning. When this wrapped up, I ate a quick lunch (lettuce, cucumber and cheese sandwiches) and then headed of to Karma with my major around midday. The destination was an alphabetization class, one of the learn-how-to-read-Mooré classes for illiterate women. When we arrived we were greeted by around thirty-five women clapping their hands and singing us a welcome song. Their appreciation was immediately palpable. The major introduced ourselves and we got to work by asking the women what they want to learn. We ended up with a list that included family planning, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and meningitis. This was going to be a long afternoon.

So we took the priority topic - family planning - and my major began talking about the different options women had for ¨spacing their pregnancies,¨ which had all the women amazed. And then he handed the floor over to me, as he took the role of translator. Using a handy picture book (called a boite à image in French) with images related to family planning, I began telling the story of ¨our family,¨ who has five children and one on the way and suffers from the constant stress, sadness, and poverty that comes with having too many kids to take care of. It was great to see the women were into the discussion. At one point I showed a picture of a woman breastfeeding her child and asked ¨What do you see in this picture?¨ One woman answered ¨A healthy mother breastfeeding her baby.¨ I said, ¨Yes, and do you think this is a form of contraception?¨ Immediately, the group began quietly discussing this among themselves. After a few minutes, the same woman responded: ¨No, it is not.¨ When I told them that they were wrong and that by continuously breastfeeding their baby, day and night, they could not get pregnant again for about six months, they were all in complete shock. The woman who had answered for the group clapped her hands together in surprise and began giggling from excitement. It was really nice to see that these women actually learned something completely new that day. We continued with the rest of the topics and several hours later, we finished, and another round of songs began, this time thanking us. I made it back home feeling really great about it all.

Saturday morning, I awoke early. We left my village at around 7am to head back to Karma. Today we had another sensibilization on a much larger scale. Our focus today was solely HIV/AIDS, and it was geared towards the entire community. We had a theater troop come in from another neighboring village, and my friend and fellow volunteer Christina from that same village also came to help out. By the time we began our presentation, after setting up all the seating and sound equipment, there were at least 150 people there. Overall, I think it went really well. I couldn't follow much from the theater group since it was all in local language but I did catch the phrase Mam data fo (¨I want you¨) during a chat between the main guy and girl and the girl refusing his advances. The people seemed to really enjoy it, and along with talks and demonstrations from my major, Christina and I, I think they definitely took a lot away from our presentation.

It was great to see so many people interested in what we were doing. You could tell that for the majority of these people, most of this information was new to them. I am excited to have another year and a half to prepare several more sensibilizations and other activities with Karma and the other villages. But after all the work this weekend, all I really want to do right now is crash. Until next time. Peace.

Snapshots from Ghana

So I don't have much news to talk about. Rains are beginning to come, which means it is slightly cooler but much more humid here. I gave my major a ware game board (a game played across Africa under various names using seeds or stones which one ¨sows¨ around the board; also known as mancala) as a gift from Ghana, but now everyone comes over to play against the whitie. Most have no clue that I played the game a lot when I was younger and can manage well on my own (¨A banga ware,¨ they say, ¨He understands ware¨). Besides that, not much else is new, so I thought I would take a moment to give you a glimpse at some of the funny (and often awkward) moments from my recent vacation from Ghana, while they are still relatively fresh in my mind. Shall we begin with the awkward:

• Christy and I were eating one day at a restaurant with margaritas on the menu and I have been that I wanted one for a long time. I also know after living in Africa, that just because it is written, doesn't make it true. I also read somewhere in my guidebook about negatives in Ghanaian English, but I didn't pay much attention. So I walked up to the waitress and the conversation went something like this: ¨Hi, can you make margaritas?¨ ¨No, we can't.¨ ¨Oh, so you don't have any?¨ ¨Yes.¨ ¨Oh . . . you do have them.¨ ¨No, we don't.¨ ¨Oh . . . OK.¨(Cut to me walking away awkwardly)
• When we were in the reserve looking for monkeys, our tour guide was quite entertaining. Every time we heard a monkey howl, we stopped but when we didn't see anything, he felt the need to point some random thing out as a sort of consolation prize for the lack of monkeys. ¨Look at this tree.¨ ¨Look, a bird.¨ ¨See here (pointing to his arm), mosquito.¨
• This same guide forced Christy and I to put on large and rather painful rubber boots which I could tell Christy wasn't too excited about. Neither was I. But half an hour into the trek we came across thousands and thousands of black ants that were crossing the path in front of us. There were so many, it looked like a stream of oil several feet wide in our way. Our guide said ¨Now we have to trot,¨ as we all ran across to the other side. Our guide then turns to us with a smile. ¨Now you should be glad you had the boots.¨
• One time in a tro-tro on the way to the beach, we met a man named Joe. Now Joe was a really nice guy who was very helpful for us. He even helped the blind man in our van when he had to go to the bathroom. The blind man is another anecdote altogether (he couldn't see to keep his arms and hands to himself and almost got to second base with Christy accidentally). Now Joe lived in Spain for five years and so he spoke Spanish. We had a small conversation in Spanish, as I tried to switch my brain from French. It was a rather basic conversation, where has asked me about my work and what not. He told me he loved Enrique Inglesias (I said I prefered Shakira) and then he said ¨Oh, Enrique is so good-looking, isn't he?¨ ¨Um . . . OK.¨ Lessen learned: don't speak Spanish in Ghanaian tro-tros.
• Now the currency of Ghana can get confusing since they recently revalued it but people still use the old way and it can be especially confusing if you are use to dealing in CFAs like us. We were in Kumasi and went to a public restroom. I waited outside and when Christy came out, the man said, ¨You owe 1,000 pesewa.¨ ¨1,000! What! I hope you like taking Obruni (whitie) money!¨ She handed him a cedi (about one dollar, or 10,000 pesewas) and was about to leave when he told her to get her change. 1,000 is actually only ten cents, not a dollar as she thought he was demanding.
• There was a bar/restaurant near our hotel on the beach that we ate at a couple times. It was a Rastafarian place with big pictures of Bob Marley and marijuana leaves painted on the walls. And I don't think it was a coincidence that the cook's name was Stone.
• On our walk to Dixcove, we passed by an old woman near the fort. She stopped us and said in broken English ¨This man, he be putting me down.¨ So I turn to the guy and say ¨Hey, that's not cool. She is a nice lady.¨ And then the old woman started cracking up and grabbed my hand yelling ¨I am a nice woman! I am a nice woman!¨ Then she asked for some money. Ha, not that nice.
• We walked to Butre three km away we had to climb up a pretty steep hill. It has just rained and so the pathway was not only steep but also muddy. By the time when we got to the top our feet, mostly Christy's, were covered in mud. We told our canoe trip tour guides about it later, to which they replied, ¨You didn't take the stairs?¨ Needless to say, we took the stairs on the way down.

Hope you enjoyed this. I had hoped to put up some more pics but the internet is running really slow today, but I will try next time.

Ghana!

After the longest bus ride of my life, I am happy to say I have returned safe and sound to Burkina after spending my first real vacation since I arrived six months ago. My friend and neighbor during training Christy, and I spent one week gallivanting across Ghana, travelling by bus and tro-tro (bush taxi) from the northern border all the way south to the gorgeous palm-lined shores of Busua Beach (which lies just west of Takoradi where the coast comes to a point).

It started last Wednesday as every good vacation should: with a 16-hour bus ride, from Ouagadougou to Kumasi, the capital of the Asante kingdom. The bus was actually the nicest I have been on in Africa with relatively comfortable seats and air conditioning, but it could not make up for stopping every twenty-minutes for police checkpoints and bathroom breaks. But we finally pulled into the Kumasi station at around 12:30am on Thursday morning. We got a cab and headed straight for the PC Suboffice which is used as a hostel for PC Ghana volunteers as well as those PCVs from neighboring countries. We crept into the house and hit the sack right away. If you did not think we were torturing ourselves at that point, we awoke the next morning only to begin part two of our trip: another 6 hours hopping from tro-tro to tro-tro, making our way to the beach. We finally arrived Thursday evening and were lucky to find very few tourists, so it was easy to snatch up a hotel room from a nice place named Dadson Lodge for 12 cedis a night (about $12, 1 cedi = $1)


The next three days we spent relaxing on the beach and exploring the surroundings. The water was beautiful and the waves were supposedly some of the best in Ghana for surfing. We thought at first we were the only whities (called obrunis, in the local language Twi) on the beach, but we eventually discovered that they were all at the other end of the beach where the nice resorts were located. It still felt like we had the whole beach to ourselves, and it was great getting to know the locals rather than other tourists. It was a pleasant change to have the mutual understanding that comes with visiting an English-speaking country. We ate at several nice restaurants and sampled the street fare as well. Staples include kenkey with shito sauce, fufu in groundnut sauce, rice, and beans, but Ghana is also known for such delights as fried chicken and fried rice, which I packed myself full of, not to mention fresh seafood like tuna and shrimp, which is hard to come by in land-locked Burkina.


We also took one day exploring the neighboring fishing village of Dixcove, which still harbors a17th-century British fort and another day trekking to Butre, a village 3km in the opposite direction, where we took a canoe trip in search of monkeys. We didn't find any monkeys, but we befriended the two river guides that accompanied us. (One said he was certified in CPR and First-Aid, in case of emergency; the other told us he was certified to "entertain people.") When we asked about palm wine, the traditional hooch of the area, they took us on a walk through the bush to meet a friend of theirs who actually makes the goods. We were able to get a look at how they make palm wine and got to sample some as well (which I actually prefer to our local Burkina brew known as dolo, or millet beer).

After the beach we headed back up by tro-tro to Kumasi, home of the Asante people, the largest market in West Africa, and a record number of bootlegged DVDs. We only stayed here for a day and a half, and it definitely wasn't enough time to get comfortable enough with the city. It is the closest thing to America that I have seen in six months, reminding me a bit of San Francisco with its steep hills (vis-a-vis Ouaga's flat terrain), and the entire vibe of the place is much more western and much more developed, which I think can actually be said for the whole country in comparison to Burkina. The market was overwhelming to say the least. Sprawled out across several city blocks, we continuously seemed to get lost in its labyrinthine passageways. It was an experience if nothing else. Coincidentally, we ran into a Swedish/French couple at the market that we meet the week before in Ouaga while applying for our Ghanaian visas. Our last day we actually left the city and went on a half-hour ride west to the small Owabi Wildlife Sanctuary where we actually did see (and hear) monkeys, as well as many species of birds and butterflies. Then we headed back to the city and got together our things to start the long journey home, which ended up taking nineteen hours (two hours of which was waiting for the border to open and then another hour and a half getting through the border). But it is nice to be home again, to familiarity, where I don't have to think in English anymore when talking to Africans (never learned how to do that) and the money makes sense to me. At least I have ten "new" movies to watch when I am back. Here are just a few pics from our vacation:

Fishing boats at Busua Beach

Me and a palm tree, the only shady place on the entire beach

We we told a local guy we found a shady spot to chill on the shore, he responded: "Oh, you mean the palm tree." Obviously, it has a reputation.

British fort built in the 1600s in the village of Dixcove

View of Dixcove from said fort

Christy and I in Butre

Learning how to make palm wine from our guides/friends (blue shirt and white shirt)

Man carrying sugarcane down the beach

Fishing canoes in various stages of production (each is carved from a single huge tree)