Easter Weekend

I hope everyone had a very nice Easter weekend. It was one of the nicer weekends I’ve had. My roommate was out of town for a church thing, so I had a room to myself for a few days, which was very relaxing. Friday and Saturday were quiet without much worth noting, except the fact that it was nice to be with friends without anything to worry about.
Sunday was such a nice morning though. A few friends and I took advantage of the empty building (everyone was either traveling or at church all day) and made a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs, pastries bought the night before, coffee, juice and milk (made from milk powder of course, which is actually quite good after being without milk for 3 months). We then boiled some eggs and spent the afternoon painting them and playing cards. One of my friends had brought a bag of jelly beans from home that she had saved until now, so we enjoyed a little sugar-fix which none of us has had since January.
Monday was also fun. (The University of Ghana does not hold lectures Good Friday or Easter Monday, so it was a very long weekend.) A few of us volunteer at an orphanage a little ways from campus called M’adamfo Paa, and we went to help with an Easter party there on Monday. We helped chop vegetables to make a giant pot of jollof rice, and as it was cooking, it began to rain so much. The rain made everything muddy and wet, but also cooled the air. After we served lunch to the 30 children, and ate some ourselves, everyone began dancing in the rain and the puddles to music blasting from a stereo in one of the buildings. It was so fun. I’m not much of a dancer, but you wouldn’t believe how these children can move. Ghanaians just grow up dancing and you can’t stop them from moving whenever there’s music on. It was so cool to be a part of the group. I definitely feel that the Ghanaians on campus are much different than Ghanaians I’ve met anywhere else. On campus, they do not talk to me and are not nearly as welcoming and friendly and warm as everywhere else. Everyone at the M’adamfo Paa was so nice and such a joy to be around… I feel alienated on campus. For anyone planning to study abroad here: don’t get discouraged if the students on campus don’t welcome you with open arms… but make sure to find something to do off campus so you can meet some really awesome people. They are out there, you just have to go find them.

I suppose I should wrap this up, but I will say that this is my last week of classes. Then we have a “revision week” and then 3 weeks for finals. That means I only have 5 weeks left. I feel like I’ve come a long way since January and I will be so happy to go home, but I will be a little sad to leave Ghana. It was sometimes rough getting to this point, but I’m so glad I came.

Photos From Kumasi

Sad news... I've been trying to upload photos from last weekend, but I haven't been able to find an internet connection that is fast enough to handle it.

So, anyone who wants to see pictures from it will have to ask once I'm home (or check Facebook because I will probably try to put most of them up there once I'm back).

So sorry!

Kumasi Weekend

The weeks are flying by now, even though the days sometimes seem to drag on…

Last weekend was one of the best I’ve had since coming here. CIEE took us on a trip to Kumasi, which is a major city in Ghana. It is the city where the king of the Asante empire lives, and the home of Adinkra and Kente cloth. Our first stop on Saturday was to an Adinkra village, where they make traditional Adinkra cloth. Adinkra symbols are traditional symbols, and they can portray historical events, human behavior and attitudes, animal behavior, and some simply signify the shapes of specific objects. There are 60-100 different symbols, which can mean anything from strength and diligence to wisdom and defiance. We were shown how they make permanent dye from only the bark of a specific tree and water.
Then we went to a Kente cloth village. Kente cloth is traditional hand-woven cloth that is quite expensive and symbolic. It is made of thin woven strips that are sewn together to make larger pieces of cloth. The patterns each symbolize something.
These villages were interesting, but quite difficult to enjoy because the sellers there were so aggressive. It made for a really stressful experience.

We stayed at the nicest hotel I’ve ever seen – The Golden Tulip. Ghana’s football (soccer) team, The Black Stars, was also staying there. That was insane.

On Sunday, we began by visiting the palace and museum of the Asante king. It was a very cool place – there were peacocks in the yard! I learned some interesting things. The matrilineal inheritance of the Asante people was finally explained to me… it had never really made sense before. (Basically, inheritance comes from the mother’s brother. So, if I was an Asante and I had children, those children would inherit from Jack. And my husband would pass his inheritance to his sister’s children, not his own. This is awesome because it gives women much more sway in the family and makes female children desirable.)
After the museum, we went to a Black Stars game! That was one of the best, most fun things I’ve done in Ghana. A match is only 90 minutes, but we got there 3 hours before its start, and the crowd was so much fun. For the entire 5 hours we were there, the people never stopped dancing and singing and cheering. It was such an amazing experience. Ghana won against Benin: 1-0. The only goal was scored in the very first minutes of the game. But the rest of it was still exciting; the crowd made it so awesome.

Well I should be going to get dinner now, so I should be wrapping this up. I will just finish by saying that I recommend going to see a football game in Africa (however make sure to choose a peaceful/safe country – the Cote d’Ivoire game was such a tragedy).


Also, photos of this trip will be forthcoming...

Beauty and the Beast (University of Ghana edition)

Plays/musicals here are usually a theatre student's final project. Each senior in the School of Performing Arts has to choose a show and put it on as their final project. So, there is at least one show every weekend, sometimes 2. I was considering being in Beauty & the Beast at the beginning, but the practices were at 6am and often twice a day and that was just too much for me. Anyway, the show was so amazing. I mean, the mics didn't usually work and the musical accompaniment (NOT an orchestra) was often too loud and there were technical things wrong like that. But the acting was good and the audience was so funny. Also the costumes were ridiculous – in a good way. There's this crazy thing here, where no one publicly shows affection, so when Belle and the beast kiss at the end after he's transformed, the audience lost their minds. Like, they were screaming and jumping out of their seats and waving their arms. And throughout the whole show, audience members were making comments to the players on stage. One guy behind me kept saying "Oh he's a romantic beast!" It was so funny. I think that if I didn't know the plot/all the words, I would have been frustrated because with the poor microphones and audience yelling and the accents, I would have missed so much. It was just so funny to see how everyone reacted to the show. The audience LOVED IT. They cheered so much at the end.

Some Thoughts Today...

There’s a practice here that I find somewhat rude and definitely uncomfortable. Sometimes, when I’m sitting in my room doing whatever, someone will knock at the door. When I answer it, in will come a complete stranger with a bag of shirts or jewelry or shoes or something like that. She will then proceed to spread out all the items in the bag around the room or on my bed and then tell me how nice it all is and how much it costs. Then when I decline, as I usually do – because I have no need for "nice earrings…from the UK!" – the woman will look offended and pack all her stuff back up and leave. But it just baffles me because 1) I did not ask you to come here and sell me anything; and 2) who goes in someone’s room and expects the inhabitants to buy from them?

No one else seems to think this is weird, and my roommate/her friends crowd around and shop from the piles on the bed. I am firmly of the culture in which I go to a store when I want something and shop without being pestered and make my decision and pay. I’m just not sure how to handle this situation without offending the woman…

Mole National Game Reserve (+ epic bus ride)

It’s been a while since my last entry, so it’s time for another…

This weekend, I and 3 friends took a crazy trip to Mole (pronounced Mol-ay) National Game Reserve with the Computer Science Department here at the University of Ghana. This was our first trip with a student-organized group, and I’ll just say that “organized” is a flexible term.

The itinerary is as follows:

Meet Thursday at 3:30pm so the bus can depart at 4:30.

Drive 12-14 hours and arrive at Mole early Friday morning.

Tour the park, see elephants, relax for a bit.

Drive back later Friday and get back to the university early Saturday.

So, this means 2 nights on an air-conditioned bus for a few hours at the park. But it was only 35 cedis for the trip and snacks and a meal.

Well, knowing that Ghanaians are typically running late anyway, we arrived at the meeting spot at 4 (instead of 3:30). THE BUS LEFT AT 8:30pm. So, we waited for over 4 hours for that bus to go. The bus was there on time, but the student “organization” had to send someone out to get food for our meal the next day, and it took so so long thanks to Accra’s notorious traffic. There were a handful of us “oburonis” who had been there since 4, and we were all very angry, especially since many of the African students didn’t show up until 6:30pm. Obviously, no one had gotten the message out to us that we were leaving significantly later than originally planned.

So, we ranted that if the food didn’t get here by 8, we were going to demand our money back. (They say the best time to see elephants and other animals is very early in the morning, and at this rate, we wouldn’t get there until at least late morning, and we were not about to take a 14 hour bus ride and then NOT see any elephants.)

The food got there at 7:55 (no lie) and we piled on the bus and pulled out shortly thereafter.

The ride was a fiasco… it was the middle of the night, and the TVs were blasting these epic Ghanaian 4-part soap opera films at top volume and students were standing in the aisles and shouting to talk to each other. It was crazy. My friends and I were so confused why all these people were not trying to get some sleep. The “bathroom stops” were generally just on the side of the road, or one memorable time at a gas station with a “female urinal.” That is not something I’d like to repeat.

The last two hours of the ride were on the bumpiest road I have ever been on in my life. Looking around, you could see everyone’s faces shaking and the windows sounded like they would break because they were shaking so much. Needless to say, there was no sleeping on that portion of the trip.

When we finally got to Mole, it was great. The food they gave us (that we waited 4 hours for) was too spicy for me, but we had brought some bread, so I was ok. We hung out for a bit, and then took a tour of the park. We saw some monkeys in a tree… but only at a distance because our group of 50 could not seem to stay quiet, so we didn’t see as many animals as I think we could have. We saw some kind of antelope and warthogs. Then, finally, we saw elephants! (The picture isn't a very good one of me... but there's an elephant!) They were behind some trees most of the time, so they weren’t right in front of us, but they were at a water hole, bathing themselves and just being elephants. It was so cool. I would love to go back there with significantly fewer people.

The ride back was better, but with a few unplanned stops. One stop at Larabanga (which was on the way), to see the “natural-built mosque.” It is said that one day, the villagers woke up and this mosque was just there. The village was like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was mostly mud huts with grass-thatch roofs. When we got out of the bus, the children swarmed the oburonis (of course) and we all went to take pictures of the mosque.

Our second stop was at Kintampo Falls. The falls were very scenic, but since Friday was Ghana’s Independence Day, it was so crowded.

Overall, it was a pretty cool trip, even though the “organization” was not exactly what I’m used to, and the bus ride was very long. If we try to make it back to Mole – there is a hippo sanctuary near there – we will be spending much more time there, so that hopefully, we have more time in Mole than on the bus.

Shai Hills Resourse Reserve

This weekend, I and 3 friends took a trip to Shai Hills Resource Reserve. I’m not entirely sure how far it is from campus, since it took us about 3 hours to get there and 1 ½ hours to get back. We received directions Saturday morning from the front desk man in our building, who basically said:

Take a trotro to Madina, then one to Dodowa, then another to Doryumu. And from there, walk to the hotel.

From campus to Madina was fine. Madina to Dodowa was fine. Then we ran into some problems… the only tro in Dodowa took us to Ashaiman, where we were directed to a tro that would take us to Doryumu.
This extra leg (from Dodowa to Ashaiman) was a long trip in the wrong direction, that we backtracked later on the way to our destination. Granted, it was somewhere around 80 cents each and an hour of our time – we hadn’t planned anything else that day – so it wasn’t really a problem.
Upon arrival, we got a double room for all 4 of us for 34.50 cedis. (The beds were put together, and we slept horizontally… does that make sense?) We spent the afternoon/evening relaxing in the air conditioning – luxury! – and were asleep by 10pm.

The next morning, we woke at 5:30am and left for the reserve once the sun had risen at 6. We had read in the guidebook that the best time to see animals was early in the morning, so we made our way down the long road to the reserve. There, we saw baboons and took a long tour that ended at a bat cave. The baboons we saw were right at the entrance. The guide said that they were almost like domesticated animals because they had gotten used to eating food from visitors. There were others in the reserve, though, that stayed far away and didn't approach us. It was very cool. I’m so glad we went because it was so nice to go somewhere without 40 other American students. It also gave us a feeling of accomplishment because we did this whole trip on our own (except for the bad directions from the guy at our front desk).