11/8 – Way Too Much to Fit in One Title

I somehow managed to “I’ll do it tomorrow” writing this blog for over a month. Oops. My only defense is a combination of continued electrical outages, internet server issues in my dorm, and the fact that by time I get back to my room every night I’m thisclose to passing out.

To do this numerically, out of the last 5 weekends, I’ve been to the Volta region at least one day for four of them (not that I’m complaining, the Volta region is awesome). I’ve been to 4 funerals. I’ve gone through 3 sets of braids. I’ve been to Kokrobitey twice. And I saw my first Sala, which is what Ghanaian Muslims call Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan.

Now, chronologically.

9/29 – Deza (Palm Festival) in Dzodze

A big group from the University of Ghana went to Dzodze, in the Volta region (pretty close to the Dagbe Center, actually) for their annual palm festival. We stayed in houses next to that of one of the music department professors. I’ve never seen so many people squished into so little floor/chair/couch space before, but it was all good. I didn’t spend that much time sleeping (or trying to) anyways. The festival itself was a bit different then I was expecting, but there were some interesting parts, and I managed to stop the Vice-president of Ghana and his entire entourage for a minute by greeting them in their language, it was pretty funny. And I didn’t really like palm wine, although I started a tradition of starting every Sunday off with a shot of apeteshie, affectionately known as apio, which is like palm liquor, and has a mystery alcohol content, although its always ridiculously high. $.10 (that’s 10 cents) worth is all you really need to get you going for most of Sunday morning.

10/7 – Party in Madina

The next weekend, I went to the 21st birthday party of the daughter of the landlord of one of my drum teachers. It was kind of cool, because the power was out in that neighborhood and so the generator-powered party was the only light or electricity around for a while. It was a great party, with a lot of really good food and an awesome DJ. I found it really interesting because it was my first real encounter with the richer side of Ghanaian society, and my first time on the “other” side of the barbed-wire capped walls that surround the mansions here. To be cliche, it drove home the extent of the differences between the haves and have-nots in Ghana. Anyways, after the party, which ended around 4am, we walked home, which wouldn’t be normally be noteworthy, but it was a full moon, the brightest one I’ve ever seen, and really clear skies, which, combined with the fact that there were no visible lights anywhere, was amazing to see. On the walk home, we thought it would be funny to stop by the house of my other drum teacher, who was fasting for Ramadan, and wake him up (he had to get up early anyways to eat before sunrise). However, we were sorely disappointed when we got there and he was already standing outside. We didn’t get the joy of waking him up, but it was still fun to see my inebriated, much larger drum teacher jump onto the back of my half-asleep, much smaller drum teacher who was just trying to brush his teeth in peace at the butt-crack of dawn. But yeah, I love the neighborhood where my drum teachers live. In addition to them, there’s a few other people I’m friends with in the performing arts department who live within a five minute walk in any direction. It’s a cute little community. I hang out there whenever I get the chance now. That weekend I also learned how to do laundry by hand. I’m a big kid now.

10/13 – Mampong Funeral, Hewale Anniversary, and Afiadenyigba Funeral

This weekend was interesting as I went to two different funerals, one Ewe and one Akan. The first, on Friday, was the funeral of a chief of the same town I went to for the funeral in September. It was raining, so not too much was going on this time, but I met a lot more people in my porter’s town. They take the open casket idea even farther here, and with many people, set them up completely as if they were alive, dressed in their finest and sitting up in a chair, and people file into and out of a room to see the body. In this case it was a chief, so they outfitted the three-months dead body in the full chief regalia. I’d never seen a dead body before, so it was quite an experience.

That evening, I went to the tenth-anniversary performance of my drum teacher’s group, Hewale Sounds, at this place called Alliance Francaise. There a lot of people I knew from around campus there, it had really good food, and the performance went really well, so it was a good night all around.

The next day I went to another funeral, this time in the Volta region. The deceased was the mother of one of the drummers in the dance department at the university. I bus from the university went, and it was really fun because for around the last hour and half of the ride there, and the entire ride back, most of the bus was singing and going nuts. When we got there, we performed a few songs, ate a crapload, and then went to the main funeral grounds where the entire village was out dancing and drumming. They had the body set out here too, but it wasn’t quite as creepy as the first one. I even danced at this funeral for a little. The little old ladies got a big kick out of it. When we were performing it was pretty funny to see people’s faces when they saw me sit down to drum.

The next day I went with some friends to Kokrobitey, a beach about 30km (not sure how many miles that is) west of Accra, and way nicer then the ones in town. It’s a big rasta hangout, and there’s a few really cheap, chill hotels within a minute of the beach. The water and beach are way cleaner then in town, and its cool to watch the fishing boats coming in and out all day. They have some damn good food there as well.

10/20 – Dagbe 3

This was our last trip the Dagbe center as a group, and it was, again, a great time. I finished learning most of the master drum part for the dance we were doing, Gahu. Saturday night, they had us perform for the village, which was fun, and after the main part where we danced, they had us play all the drum parts, and I got to play master drum, which was pretty cool. I threw in this part that I knew from listening to them play but they hadn’t taught me, and the Ghanaians flipped. Afterwards, the local kids performed for us, and they were awesome. Most of the drummers were under the age of 14 and they were all freaking amazing. Otherwise, it was basically the same as the other times. The kids were ridiculously cute, the food really good, and the whole vibe of the village chill.

10/23 – Sala

Sala is what Muslims in Ghana call Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration after the fasting month of Ramadan is finished, and apparently the biggest holiday of the Muslim year. Sunday night and Monday morning I went over to my drum teachers house and had some really awesome northern style food that his girlfriend cooked, and then Monday afternoon we went into town, near La beach, for a celebration that some of the Dagombas who live in Accra organized. It was a little smaller then I was expecting, but we all had a really good time, and they got a big kick out of me trying to do their dance. I even got my friend to lend me the big smock they traditionally wear in the North, which actually hid a lot of how much I suck at dancing, so it was cool.

10/28 – Akosombo Dam and Dodi Island

Last weekend we had our last Tufts trip. They took us to Akosombo Dam, which provides the lion’s share of power to most of the country, and then they took us on a boat trip to Dodi Island, a two hour ride on the river up from the dam, and a really nice place, but a bit of a tourist trap. The island seems to be isolated save for the boat trips that bring tourists a few times a week. Oddly enough, the boat ride reminded me a lot of the ride I took on the lake in Zurich, Switzerland. The scenery was eerily similar. Afterwards, they took us to a market that’s known for its beads, but I ended up buying way more fabric then beads. I’m getting addicted to the fabric here, and getting pretty damn good at bargaining for it.

Which brings us to this past weekend. Thursday and Friday the Performing Arts department had a wakekeeping for the former master drummer of the Dance Ensemble, Adade Ofori, which involved a lot of drumming, as usual, outside the dance hall. Saturday was the main funeral, which was smaller then I would have expected for a man as important as this guy. It’s generally believed in Ghana that if a person doesn’t receive a funeral befitting their status, the spirit will come back to haunt those who knew them, so the funerals here often resemble huge celebrations punctuated with a few sad moments. But the Dance Ensemble put in quite an effort to make sure there was proper drumming, at least, but the funeral itself was kinda small. All wasn’t lost though. In the town near where the funeral was, I found this cheese that I’ve been looking for since I went to the north but haven’t been able to find down here. It’s called wagashe (I’m making up the spelling) and my friend explained to me how it was made but I forgot. It’s from the Fulanis, a nomadic ethnic group that can be found around the northern parts of the coastal West African countries. It’s probably my new favorite food here, and now that I know what it’s called some people told me where I can find it closer to campus. Anyways, after the funeral, I went with my friends again to Kokrobitey, and stayed the night this time, which was cool. And I got madddd tan. Finally.

Whew…
So I think I’m gonna try to post once a week for the rest of the time I’m here. Let’s see how that works.

9/28 – Tamale and the second trip to the Dagbe Center

It’s been a long time, but to use the age old excuse, modified for my generation and location of course, power outages and internet servers ate my blog. I’ve been away and out of the dorm a lot in the past two weeks, and whenever I have been in the dorm the electricity has been out and/or the server in the internet cafe was down. Mepaakyew piiiii (which in this context translates to I’m very sorry, in Twi).

On that note, the power outages are becoming a lot more common, both the scheduled and unscheduled ones, and they seem to follow me even when I’m traveling. I actually don’t mind it all that much, but it’s taking time to adjust to having a flashlight become one of the items necessary for night-time trips to the bathroom. At 3 in the morning it’s really inconvenient to have to find a flashlight, toilet paper and keys in the darkness, and then have to fumble with lock before making that mad, still half-sleeping dash for the bathroom. And at my teacher’s house in Tamale, it involved fumbling with the lock on the door to my room and then with the lock on the bathroom door as well. Actually though, I’m learning to appreciate the presence of anything that resembles a toilet, regardless of its lighting situation (bonus points if it flushes). They’re irritatingly hard to find in this country.

On to more pleasant topics…
Two weekends ago we went back to the Dagbe Center in Kopeyia, Volta Region. There isn’t all that much to add this time around, we did a lot more of the same. Which is not to say I didn’t have a great time, there just isn’t much new of interest to say. I managed to avoid dancing and got to drum the whole weekend, which of course I was thrilled about. A bunch of the kids remembered my name, and the hand game I taught them. Saturday night they put on a performance which was really cool because I’ve never seen some of the pieces they performed danced in full by Ghanaians, nor had I heard them with singing in the background. A lot of people who live in the village showed up, even those who weren’t performing, and there happened to happened to be no electricity that evening so there was only a gas-lit torch for light, which created a really cool effect. We went to the beach again, which was great but left a load of sand in my braids, and I don’t think it’s coming out until the braids do.

This past weekend I finally got up to Tamale. Tamale is the capital of the Northern region, and it was quite a bus-ride to get up there. ~14 hours up, a little under 12 to get back down. But since I left on Wednesday, for a really long weekend, it was worth it. I’m definitely happy that I ended up going this weekend and not two weekends ago.

While I was in Tamale, I stayed with a drummer who comes to Tufts at the end of the spring semester every year to teach the drum class that I’ve been taking the past two years. He’s a drum chief, and the patriarch of quite an extended family. His house, or one could say compound, housed at least twenty something people of varying degrees of relationship to him. What we would call the “nuclear” family consists of four wives and their kids, and those older children who aren’t yet married. In addition to this number are a lot of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. And the family horse, Pumaya. Four days was nowhere near long enough for me to try to decipher who was who’s child, or even which younger kids were my teachers children and which were his grandchildren, because a lot of their ages overlapped. In fact, this might be the first place I’ve been to where you can’t really use age at all as a clue to familial relationships. Age is absolutely no indication of anything. Also, only a few of the kids knew English, and I don’t yet know enough Dagbani to ask questions like who is your sister or mother or something.

Another thing that complicates trying to figure out familial relationships was that in their culture, in addition to the person who supplied the biological matter for your creation, your father’s brothers, distant cousins who are your around fathers age, or someone who was one of your teachers are called your “father”. It also looked like your father’s other wives are called your mother, and basically any other kid around is called your brother or sister. As one of my friends from down here explained it, if someone is a Dagomba and a Muslim, then they’re his brother/sister. In Tamale, where Dagombas are the predominant group and where almost everyone is Muslim, that doesn’t tell you much. I’ve gotten used to asking “same mother, same father?” after every time someone uses the words brother or sister to describe someone.

Anyways, the “house” itself was pretty cool. Basically there was a main courtyard surrounded by rooms made in both a traditional and more modern style, with a main gate as the only way in. My teacher had his own room and living room, and each of the wives gets their own room where they and their children, and sometimes grandchildren, live. Two of the older sons had their own rooms as well. There’s also a seperate guest “hut,” which is where, surprise surprise, visitors stay. When I got into the room I commented, in response to the drum hanging on the wall, that only in Dagbon (the historical kingdom of the Dagombas) would a guest room come with its own drum. The house had had running water for a something like a few months, but something happened with the pipes, so they went back to using a big “well” in the middle of the courtyard for water that you’ve got to scoop out with a bucket. They also have electricity but it goes off all the time and doesn’t come back on until 6am the next morning. Bathrooms were kept under lock and key and were basically immovable portapotties made out of cement. But, there was toilet paper, which is more than I can say for most of the bathrooms in Ghana. It’s a humbling moment the first time you’re excited about the fact that there’s TP in a bathroom.

I got really lucky this trip because my first day there happened to be the third funeral of my teacher’s senior brother’s wife. Funerals here mean drumming, which of course I’m happy about. After the prayer time, most of which I spent fielding marriage proposals in broken English and unbroken Dagbani, the group moved into the next courtyard and started dancing and drumming. They way it seemed to work was that the lead drummer would go over to a someone he wanted to see dance, call them out with his drum, the dancer would pick a song, and they’d go. It was really cool, and the song that most of the dancers chose, called Nakohiwa (which is how I’ve seen it spelled, but it seems to be pronounced something mrore like Nak-wo-wa), I had just learned how to play the week before. Of course, being the only white person there, they had to make me dance. The whole crowd went nuts. Later, my teacher, who had been sitting with the chiefs in the next section over, mentioned that when they heard all the screaming they were wondering amongst themselves who could be dancing, but then they figured it was probably me.

A lot of the rest of the time I spent going around to meet various family members of people I knew before I came and some I’ve met here, and my teacher’s recently married daughter and her new husband had me over for lunch twice. After lunch, he and my friend who came up with me took me on le Tour de Tamale on the back of their mopeds. I got to see most of the city in a short time (not that it’s all that big) and some stuff that you can’t really access conveniently with a car. Mopeds can go through muddy, potholed fields, in case you were wondering. The husband, from what I gathered, works for some kind of media company, so he took me to meet a bunch of his musician friends and important people around town with whom he went to school. All in all, not a bad way to spend the afternoon.

Everyone says it, but I’d like to say my piece about how different Tamale is from almost all of the places I’ve been in southern Ghana. Things are a lot more laid back. The people are nowhere near as pushy, there’s absolutely no traffic, and the roads are in good condition and have two wide lanes, with wide “sidewalks” on the sides and in the middle of the road. I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d become to being under a constant onslaught of attention until I walked around Tamale a little. I’m not sure if it’s because English isn’t nearly as widely spoken as in the south, or it has to do with the Muslim influence, but whatever it was, it was definitely a nice respite from getting yelled at every few seconds walking down the street. Even when I greeted people on the street in Dagbani, they just answered, had a little chuckle, and we both continued on our merry ways. Only once or twice did it result in the near hysteria you get down here, even though I’d imagine white people who can speak basic Twi are a lot more common than those who can speak any Dagbani. And Tamale was a lot less dusty and a lot more green than I’d been led to expect by some people I’ve spoken to and almost all the guidebooks. It’s a great place, and I’m definitely looking forward to spending some quality time there at the end of the semester.

I’ve got more to say about Tamale, but I think I’ll save it for when I’m up there for longer and get a better gauge of things before I go running my mouth off on the internet. And I don’t think anyone wants to read more than this.

Anyways, this weekend I’ll be going to a Dzodze, a town in the Volta Region, which is actually pretty close to the Dagbe center, for their Palm Festival. A big group from the university is going, and there should be ridiculous amounts of drumming and of course, palm wine.

9/10 – CAN 2008, Kpeve Funeral, and Akwapim-Mampong Festival

So I’m really glad Tamale didn’t work out this weekend. I saw some amazing things and went to some places I might have gotten the chance to go to other times. I think it’s fair to say the overarching theme of the weekend was cultural enrichment.

Friday afternoon I went to see my drum teacher, Mutala, and his group, the Ghana Dance Ensemble, perform at the International Conference Center in Accra. When he first told me to come, I thought it was going to be a small, arty thing that they have all the time here, but no. It was “kind of a big deal.” Ghana is going to be hosting the Cup of African Nations (soccer tournament) in 2008, and this was the official launching ceremony. It was an invite only event, and the president of Ghana, along with a bunch of ministers of state, former Ghanaian football stars, and officials in the football league were there. There were a series of performances, they unveiled the logos and mascots of the tournament, and afterwards there was a big reception with free drinks.

Straight from the performance, I got into a university bus with the Dance Ensemble to go to the Volta region. The father of one of the ensemble members passed away, and the funeral was this weekend (funerals are a multi-day thing here). I have never been packed into anything as tightly as I was on that bus. One of the dancers even had to sleep sprawled out on top of a drum that was laying across the back row. When those of us in the back wanted to get out for bathroom stops, we literally had to climb in and out the window. But yeah, that’s how they roll in Ghana. It was fun.

We got to the village of Kpeve-New Town around 1am, where there was music blaring from both of the funeral houses (the village had two this weekend). We hung out at a “spot” (kind of the Ghanaian equivalent of a bar) for about an hour, and then proceeded up the side of a hill where the family lives to go start drumming. We get to this family’s yard, and incredibly, at 2am there was a whole crowd of people hanging out, eating, drinking, dancing, whatever. We set up, start drumming, and even little grandmas come out and start dancing. It was great. I’ve never seen some of the songs we were playing performed by a group of actual drummers, or danced to by people raised with them, so it was really cool to see that. We drummed until around 4am and then went back to the spot and drank and talked until sunrise. Once the sun was totally up, we walked/took a tro-tro to the next town over to sleep at the closest thing to a hotel in the area. It was a small house with a living room and a few bedrooms, and was somehow able fit about 20 something people. I actually ended up getting a bed, which was cool, but I got woken up a few times by people trying to find somewhere to sleep. Anyways, we slept for two hours, woke up, washed, ate, and went back to the village to continue the funeral.

The actual funeral ceremony began around 10am, I think, and by time they got back from the cemetery it was around 1:00pm. The funeral itself was unlike any I’ve ever seen before. For much of the time, it was definitely more light-hearted then I would ever expect a funeral to be, but there were a few times where it was as sad as any other funeral. It almost seemed as if there were orchestrated points where people who wanted to grieve could do so, and that crying or other outward signs mourning were to be, for lack of a better word, confined to these times. The proceedings basically alternated between speakers and dancing. At the end, before they carried the casket to the cemetery, there was a long bout of dancing, drumming, and singing that would look like the celebration of a happy occasion were it not for the fact that most people were wearing black and red and that there was a casket in the middle of the dance circle.

After they went to the cemetery, we went back up the family’s house to drum again for a few hours. Again, there was a lot of dancing and singing and what would appear to be merry-making if you didn’t already know it was a funeral. We ate, drank, drummed, and then left around 3pm. Even though the seat I had on the way back was better, I there was one more person fit onto the bench then there had been before, so it was a mind-bogglingly tight fit. I’m now completely proficient at boarding and getting off a bus through a window. I got back from the Volta around 7pm, and was sleeping like a baby by 8.

That alone would have been enough cultural fun for one weekend, but wait, there’s more. Going to church on Sunday seems to be a given in Ghana unless you are Muslim or follow traditional religion, and even for those who aren’t THAT religious (it seems that all Ghanaians are somewhat religious) it’s a social activity. Steven, one of my student guides, finally convinced me to go this weekend. It was interesting to say the least, and the service was nice, although a belief in Jesus Christ as the lord savior might have made it a little better for me. And they had amazing pineapple juice and chocolate muffins. Not a bad way to spend Sunday morning, but, it’s OK Mom, I don’t think I’ll be making a habit of it.

Sunday afternoon I went to the village of one of my porters because they were having one of their festivals. The village is called Akwapim-Mampong, and was about an hour-ish ride away from campus by tro-tro. The way there was quite an adventure, because even though I asked a few people AND the tro-tro mate if I could catch another tro-tro to Mampong from his route, and was told yes, more than once, and by more then a few people, I ended up having to get a taxi back to the other route to catch the right tro-tro. Grrr. It was cool though, I got there in time to see a lot of cool stuff. When I first got there, there was a huge crowd standing in a courtyard outside gathered around the chief and his court, and there was a lot of noise and commotion but I don’t really have any idea what was going on because they were yelling in Twi. Afterwards, the whole crowd moved towards this room, and the chief and his people set up again in there. On the front “stage” the chief sat with his advisors(?) in front of him, his wife (or wives, I don’t know) and the queen mother on one side, and the villagers along the other side of the room and the back. I was somehow placed in one of the chairs in the royal women section and I’m not quite sure why, but I had a great view of everything that went on, so that was cool. One by one, people got up and did what appeared to be interpretive dances in the chief’s direction and usually finished with a bow and extended hands towards the chief. This part was really cool, and the drumming was amazing. There was this little kid who didn’t look much older then 10 who was just wailing on his drum. I can’t imagine how good he’s gonna be when he’s older.

Once that was over, I went back with my porter and some of his cousins to their house/compound and hung out with his family for a little. They tested my Twi, gave me fufu (pounded cassava), and as it was a festival day, we had to have some libation as well, which involved me doing about 4 shots of gin in rapid succession. But I think fufu automatically neutralizes any alcohol that might find its way into your stomach at the same time. I’ll probably be going back to the village for the funeral of a recently deceased chief. That should be awesome.

So yeah, I definitely had an amazing weekend, and it looks like the next two will be awesome as well. I’m probably going to a drum performance on Wednesday night with some drummers that hang around the Performing Arts department, and Thursday is my first Twi test. Maybe I’ll make it off my butt and get over to the embassy this week to get my visa changed. Then Friday it’s back to the Dagbe center in the Volta region.

9/4 – Kumasi Trip

I think the best way to describe this weekend’s trip to Kumasi is ill-fated. We had quite a string of bad luck on a few fronts, but it wasn’t a total loss. I did some maddd shopping.

We left later then we originally planned so that we’d have time to cash our stipend checks (which couldn’t happen before Sep. 1st, the day we left). We hit a lot of traffic on the road, which turned what was supposed to be a 4 hour drive into one that lasted 7. When we did get there, we went to a restaurant that took around 3 hours to serve us our food, and halfway through the meal found out the the original hotel where we were supposed to stay lost our reservation (even though it had been re-confirmed two days before). That part wasn’t all bad though, because we ended up staying at a better hotel. Then, Friday night, it took us half an hour to pay for drinks at the hotel bar because they tried to pad the bill. We got them to take it off in the end, but it wasn’t easy. So, we basically spent a whole day in the car, eating at one hotel, going to another hotel, going for a ride to the National Cultural Center which usually has things going on at night but of course, didn’t that night, then going back to the hotel to eat again and sleep.

Our second day in Kumasi started out rainy. After breakfast, we went back to the National Cultural Center, and were supposed to see what I think was a museum or something but the woman with the keys didn’t get there before we had to go, and so we basically just went shopping in the rain. I got some really cool beads from this lady who them in every imaginable color.

From there we went to a section of the city known for it’s wood-carving, and walked around the market there. The workmanship on a lot of the pieces there was incredible. I ended up buying a bunch of it, and for decent prices. Originally I hadn’t even planned on getting anything here, but I somehow ended up with four pieces. And I got a sweet piece of batik cloth that’s going to make a great sweatshirt-ish type thing. Most importantly, I think I finally got the hang of bargaining this weekend.

After this, we went to a small village on the outskirts of Kumasi called Ntonso, which has an Adinkra cloth place. Adinkra symbols are an art form of the Akan people, and they use the symbols on a lot of their wares, such as cloth, etched and carved into chief’s stools, and some are even shaved into the hair of people in the chief’s court. We stuck to stamping cloth. The guy who showed us how to do it was kind of amazing to watch. His stamping was practically flawless, and he went really fast. It was cool to try, but I picked a shape that was a bit out of my league and had sloppy edges. I ended up buying this HUGE piece of royal blue cloth stamped with Adinkra symbols to use as a wall hanging. Returning to the laundry list of bad luck, one of the girls in my group had her wallet snatched while she was stamping.

Next, we went to Bonwire, the village known for its weaving of Kente cloth. Authentic Kente cloth is hand-woven on looms, and uses bold colored thread to weave geometric patterns. The shapes and arrangements all have cultural meanings. I promised myself I would only get a small sash, but there was this one piece with all my favorite colors, and of course I broke down and bought the big one. But I got the guy to throw in a cool bag, so it was OK. Bonwire might have had the most intense hawkers I think I’ve experienced since I’ve been here. They were relentless. After I turned out my pockets and bag to demonstrate that I literally had no more money to spend, they still wouldn’t leave me alone. As I was leaving, they stuffed my bag with their addresses so that I could find them when I came back.

After Bonwire, we went back to the Adinkra village, Ntonso, to see if they had caught the kid who took my friend’s wallet. Some crazy drama ensued, but more on that later. We ate dinner at some random hotel, where I had some of the most amazing pasta of my life. Yes, better than Italy.

The last day we visited Lake Bosomtwe and one of the villages on its edge, called Abono. The lake was about a half hour drive outside of Kumasi. Bosomtwe means ‘antelope spirit’, and there is a whole legend about how the lake was named, but the details presently escape me. The lake and surrounding area was really pretty, and the village we visited looked pretty chill. The fisherman there use these really weird shaped wooden contraptions as boats, which seem to work, but I don’t understand how they can float given their shape. As usual, there was a gaggle of local kids following us around. We ate lunch at this really nice hotel on the lake’s shore near the village. There were a bunch of kittens running around the patio, and I saw a dog successfully go fishing, which was pretty damn cool. We left, and, going with the bad luck theme, one of the our vans started to seriously leak oil, which had to be fixed before the 7+ hour ride home.

Whew. That’s a a lot. Sorry. Now for the analysis. My first comment is that I remember reading in one of the Ghanaian guide books that the amount of begging one encounters seems to be a function not of how poor people are in a given area, but how much that area is frequented by tourists. This trip definitely supported that notion. In many of the places we visited, which were all on the tourist track, the kids were pretty direct about asking for things. Many cut straight to the chase and came right out with “Obruni, give me money.” Not that I’m that much of a position to judge, but I’ve seen kids in other places that were noticably poorer, for instance at the Dagbe center, and even after hours of interaction, none of them asked any of us for anything, not once the entire weekend. This is the first time that I’ve had a kid come right out and say “give me something.”

Back to the kid who stole the wallet. Let me preface this by saying that theft is considered one of the worst possible crimes here. It’s a huge deal that affects not only the thief, but potentially his family, both immediate and extended, and their community. When my friend first noticed that her wallet was gone, someone mentioned that they noticed a kid looking suspicious and running off suddenly, and another local girl who was watching us said she knew him. They sent someone to go find him and get the wallet back, and told us to come back later. When we came back, they had the wallet, but it was missing more then half the money that had been in there, plus a university ID card. So the kid, who was 15, was dragged out, naked, into a huge circle of villagers, all yelling. All the villagers took turns yelling at the kid, who for a while maintained that he hadn’t seen the other money, etc. Then, when he did admit it, he led the group around to a bunch of random places saying that’s where he’d put the money but there was nothing there. I watched this from the van, so I don’t have the details, but the kid was hit, hard, across the face by a full-grown man. Hard enough to knock him to the ground. He continued to be yelled at scolded, berated, etc. for a long time, and whenever they went anywhere he was handled pretty roughly.

A lot about this situation disturbed us on a few levels, and it’s still not something that I’ve completely come to terms with. In America, a lot of what was done to this kid would probably be considered illegal, and yet here it’s sanctioned, especially by the community. Theft is a huge deal here and considered extremely shameful, to both the perpetrator and those connected to him. In Ghana, when it comes to theft, the populace seems to take the administration of punishment into their own hands. In addition to the shaming aspects, it’s considered completely normal for the thief to be beaten. According to people I’ve spoken to here, the kid is lucky that he’s so young or he would have had the crap beat out of him. One or two hits was nothing.

Something I find interesting is that not even the person who’s been wronged has a say in how the thief is treated. The community deals with them as they see fit, whether or not the person who was stolen from forgives them or wants to let it go or whatever. Even the police don’t get involved. The village we were in also took the situation very seriously because it’s the first time they’ve had a villager steal from a tourist. In addition to the cultural taboo of theft, Ghana is desperate for tourism, and so they react very badly to people doing anything that would discourage tourists from coming.

This incident definitely served as a reminder that there are a lot of differences about life here that I have yet to realize, and came at a time when I was beginning to feel really comfortable here. Coming from such an individualistic culture, it’s hard for me to completely comprehend the repercussions of this kid’s actions for his siblings, parents, cousins, and community. According to people I’ve spoken to, this could follow him for the rest of his life. When he goes to ask a girl’s parents to marry their daughter, someone will be like “just so you know, this guy stole a wallet from a tourist when he was 15,” and when the same thing happens to his siblings, people will say that they have a thief in their family. It introduces another, darker, side of the whole issue of “community” here and how this is a much more communal society then the US. Everyone’s responsible for everyone else, and that seems to apply even to reputations.

Also, it’s sad that people have to take some of the law into their own hands here because of the inefficiency of the judicial system. It’s considered completely normal here for a person who’s considered a thief to be beaten, even killed. If someone snatches a mobile phone and the person who’s stolen from turns around and yells thief, the guy could literally get beaten to death, and it wouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary or unjustified. And no questions are asked, it’s just how things work here. My roommate said that recently a 16 year old was beaten and killed for stealing, but he wasn’t even the thief, and no one got in trouble for it. That’s scary. This even applies on the university campus. If someone steals on campus and gets caught, they’ll be beaten up, ponded, which involves a very public procession through campus with the words “I’m a thief” written across the person’s front, and “I stole ___” on their back, and potentially worse.

Another explanation I’ve heard is that people will take out all the frustrations they have about being stolen from on any thief who is caught, not necessarily one who stole from them. They just want to punish a thief. Any theif will do. Also, because robbery is on the rise here, they react especially forcefully to kids who steal, because they want to literally beat the habit out of the kid before they get older.

Whatever the explanations, having seen even a mild version of how they deal with thieves here was pretty damn disturbing, and I hope I’m not near anyone who gets caught here again. It’s hard to imagine that kind of shame and ruin done to a reputation over $30, and of course it was discomfiting to see a teenager hit, at what appeared to be full-force, by a very strong grown man. It’s also hard to imagine, coming from a society where people sue over some of the most trivial and idiotic things, that someone can hit another person, someone else’s child or someone else at all, and have it considered acceptable and/or normal. But many of the people here have lived under military regimes, and so hitting someone who’s committed such an offense as stealing must not seem so bad. It’s just hard to wrap my mind around coming from where I do.

Back to more mundane topics…

I had to go into town to get a new water-boiling jug (kettle?) for my friend because I broke hers, and I had to walk directly through the busiest market in town to get to the store. I thought that Ghanaians just went nuts when I used one of their languages when it was saying something they wanted to hear, like one of the greetings or “what’s your name, my name is X.” I literally had to spend every piece of currency I had on the kettle, and so when I was walking towards where my friend lives to borrow 50 cents to get home, I said to the people who were trying to sell me stuff, in Twi, “Please/sorry (it’s the same word here), I have no money.” Even though I was saying I’m not buying anything from you, they all still went nuts and loved it. At one point I had at least half a city block of people yelling “hey” and laughing because I said “I don’t have money.” It was pretty cool.

I was planning on going to Tamale, a city in the north, this weekend, but even though I went to the bus station two days in advance, the tickets sold out, so that didn’t work. And my friend who was going to go with me found out he was scheduled for some immigration test earlier then he’d originally thought, so he couldn’t have gone either way. I’m gonna try again in two weekends, which actually works out better, because I just found out about some stuff that will be going on around here, and because in two weeks it will be the start of Ramadan, which will be cool to see.

Friday night one of my drum teachers is performing in town, so I’m going to go see that, and then afterwards, the father of one of the guys in his performance group recently passed away, so they’re going to the Volta region for the funeral, and I got invited, so that should be awesome.  Funerals here are huge celebrations, and there’s going to be a lot of drumming.  One of the porters in my dorm also says his village is having a festival on Sunday, so hopefully I’ll be able to go to that too.  Actually, I’m kinda glad Tamale didn’t work out this weekend, I would have missed a lot of cool shit down here.

8/30 – Already?

As of this past Sunday, I’ve been in Ghana for one month. Wow. I feel like I should say something profound but nothing’s coming to me at the moment. However, it is kind of amazing to think I’ve already spent a month living in Africa. What’s weird is that after two weeks, I felt like I’d been here a month, and now, after a month, it feels like it’s been two weeks since I watched Jesse get yelled at by a crazy Slavic lady on the Customs line, met Mr. Bamfu and his three Joes, and got my very first marriage proposal from Kofi the baggage handler, all before leaving Kotoka Airport. Crazy. And I have yet to enter the second, I-hate-everything-about-this-country stage of culture shock. According to the chart, I’m still in stage one, the honeymoon phase. Nice.

Sunday was also exciting because my roommate finally moved in. Yayyy. Her name is Alithea, she’s from about an hour outside of Accra, she’s Ga, and she’s really cool. And she came with a really good boombox. Even better. It’s definitely a relief to finally know who’s gonna be on the other side of my room for the next few months, and to know that I like her.

My class schedule is slowly starting to take shape, and I’ve had most of the classes I think I’ll be taking at least once now. A few departments are still figuring stuff out, but it looks like I’ll have Wednesdays and Fridays free, with the lion’s share of my classes on Monday. And for about a month I’ll have one somewhat flexible class on Thursdays and no class until 12 on Mondays, which will make traveling a lot easier. Now I just have to get my visas worked out. It looks like I won’t be going to the Linguistics course because it conflicts with some drumming stuff I’d like to do, so le grand course list is as follows: Intro to Oceanography, Intro to Coastal Geomorphology, Rationalism, Traditional Ghanaian Social Institutions, Twi, and Dagbani, and some drumming classes.

What have I been doing the last few days since my last post, you ask? I went to visit Fuseini and Rafik in CMB a few times, and got to watch a “football” game between Ghana and South Africa in a room full of crazy Ghanaian guys yelling at the top of their lungs in languages I don’t understand. I had a few uncomfortably close calls with errant arms, but I escaped unscathed. Good times. And I got finally got my drum!! It’s huge, completely bad-ass, and everybody who sees it is like, “damn.” Even the guy who’s going to be giving me lessons in Legon was like, I wish I had a drum like this. I had a big crowd around me when I was taking it out of its bag, which was kinda fun, but it also meant that the first time that I played one of these drums since May had to be in front of 15+ oldish Dagomba men who know what this stuff is actually supposed to sound like. I think I did alright though, and either way they got a kick out of the siliminga (Dagbani for obruni) girl playing one of their drums.

For the Yids in the audience, I had a really weird experience on my to and after my first philosophy class. I was walking to class, wearing my IDF t-shirt, when a sociology grad student asked me if he could interview me for a paper he’s writing. After he was done, completely out of nowhere, he goes “I totally support Israel,” and proceeds to go on and on about how anti-semitism makes no sense and that Israel has a right to exist, etc. I really don’t recall ever hearing anything like that out of non-Jew. Then, 20 minutes later, some people who are in my philosophy class and I are standing outside the room waiting for the professor (who never ended up showing) when another Ghanaian walks up to me and asks, in an astonished voice, “are you JEWISH?” So I’m like, “ummm…yeah.” To this, he yells “OH MY GOD! I LOVE YOUR PEOPLE!” like he’s been waiting to meet a Jew his whole life, and then, starts to ramble about how amazing Jews are and how when he graduates he wants to join the Israeli army, and do I think they’ll let him join, and how does he sign up, and blahblah. This guy is completely serious, not a trace of irony or sarcasm in his voice at all. 19 years of being Jewish and I’ve never had anybody say anything even close to what these guys were saying. It was pretty cool and a little bit weird that these incidences were back to back, but I’m sure the shirt had something to do with it.

Otherwise, things seem to be settling in here. I have classes, a roommate, most of the student body has moved back in, and I’m starting to feel really comfortable in and with Ghana in general. This weekend we’ll be going to Kumasi, which is the second largest city in the country and the capital of the Ashanti region, and pretty damn cool from what I’ve been hearing. So next week I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say, and there will most likely be a major picture upload. Until then….

8/23 – Dagbe, Classes, and the Bean Breakfast from Hell

I’ve been slacking the last couple of days, so this is a long one.

Went to the Dagbe Cultural Center this past weekend, and it was awesome. Dagbe is in a fishing village called Kopeyia, a couple minute drive from the coast near the Togo border. They teach Ewe drumming and dancing, basket-weaving, kente weaving, and batik and tie-dying. And we got to go swimming at the beach. The center itself is a really chill place, the staff are great, the cook is incredible, and the local kids are adorable. The guy who runs it, Emmanuel, is hysterical and has one of the best laughs I’ve ever heard. It comes out of nowhere and is over just as quickly. The Tufts program takes us there three times but I’m definitely gonna go some more on my own.

The whole center is basically two separate buildings with circular, thatch covered patio in between them. One building houses the bedrooms, dining room, and kitchen, and the other has a stage, changing rooms, and the kente looms (kente cloth is the fabric in the picture at the very top of this page). Dancing and drumming happens in the patio. Most of this trip was dancing, with breaks for drumming, weaving, and dying, but next time he said we can do more drumming. Anybody who knows me knows dancing is up there with vinegar and mustard on my shit-list, but it actually wasn’t all that bad. It was a crazy workout (I haven’t been able to walk the last couple of days), and in a way it was cool to be able to do the dancing that goes with the drumming I’ve been learning for two years. But I’m looking forward to learning some more drumming next time.

The kids who live around the center are cute as hell. During our break after lunch the first day, I sat down with a circle of them, ranging from around 2 or 3 up to 13, with one 18 year old who stopped by later, who were playing chinese jacks (the ones with all the little rings) with rocks. They went crazy when they realized I knew it, and because I could catch more at a time since I have bigger hands. It amazed me how willing they were to share, as well. Where most American kids in a group this size, and with kids this age, would have been fighting over who’s turn it was and whatever, these kids were all sharing and taking turns like I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and they kept handing me the pile after around 2 of their turns. I was amazed. It’s cliche to say, but these kids have next to nothing of their own, and yet when I, a complete stranger who can’t speak a word of their language other than thank-you, sat down with them they were throwing the only toys they had, a pile of rocks, into my hands. I’ve really never seen anything like that before. And, unlike some of the urban kids, they never once asked for anything, other then for me to take pictures of them so they could see it on the screen. They’re really comfortable around strangers, but that might just be because they’re used to foreigners visiting the center. Either way, the youngest ones (under 4) were all making themselves comfortable in my lap within 5 minutes. There was also something really cute about 12 or so kiddy voices saying Elana, or attempting to, over and over for a few minutes straight, like its the funniest word they’ve ever heard.

They also pick things up really quickly. Drum and dance class is called into session there by the drummers, who just start to drum as they show up. When they start drumming, everyone knows to come back, including the kids, who are allowed to watch as long as they don’t get in the way. While they teach us to dance, the kids, including some who look barely old enough to be walking, start dancing in their own circles off to the side, and start and stop whenever the drums do. I’m killing the word cute today, but ya, it’s so cute. And they’re good. Some also seem to learn how to drum before they can walk, and I think they pick a lot of it up just by watching. When I was playing with the group of kids my first day, I tried to teach them my favorite hand game from the good ole’ days of camp bus rides (Slide, for those to whom that means anything), but since I had no way to explain it other then using gestures, only two of the older ones picked it up. The next evening, I went out to the dancing patio after dinner and they were all sitting there waiting to show me that they knew the game. There were even a bunch of kids who hadn’t been there the first time I tried to teach them. When I walked out they started playing and then ran over to take turns playing it with me. I’m gonna be back there in a few years, see a few kids playing it outside, and be like, yeah, I taught them that. It’s gonna be great.

Next topic: Classes

Classes officially started Monday, but the word “officially” doesn’t really carry seem to carry too much weight in this here parts. Out of 3 scheduled classes so far, I’ve only actually had one. Not that I’m really complaining, as long as they get started eventually. I love the system here, most classes are at most a 2 hour meeting once a week. What I don’t love is that I still have a bunch of classes I can’t even register for until next week because the departments need to get their shit together. Not that I really mind, more nap/exploration time for me, but it’s a little frustrating to have been here for almost a month and still not know what my schedule is going to be like for the next few months. Of the multitude of classes I’m technically registered for, I’m sure I’ll be taking Introductory Oceanography, Introductory Coastal Geomorphology, Rationalism (philosophy) and Traditional Ghanaian Social Institutions (sociology), and Twi. I’ll also probably be sitting in on Pidgin and Creole Languages (linguistics) but I need to check that out with the prof. In addition to those classes, I still need to register for all my drumming stuff, Dagbani, and possibly Ewe, which are both other Ghanaian languages. But that won’t happen until next week. Traditional Ghanaian Social Institutions is the only class I’ve actually had already, and I really liked it, which is good. The professor is straight out of the 70s, with bell-bottom pants, man-heels, a flamboyant shirt, and a mini ‘fro. Even the lecture hall feels like the 70s. But he’s engaging, knows his stuff, and the subject matter is really interesting, and from what I hear it’s an easy final exam, which is the only thing that goes into your grade here, so yeah, this one’s a keeper.

Moving on… I had a bit of malaria scare yesterday. I was completely out of it, and can’t recall having felt this sick in at least a few years. Fever, achy all over, nauseous, dizzy, the whole shabang. After a few hours, I thought to myself, way to go dumbass, you couldn’t last a month without getting malaria, but sometime around last night I started feeling better, and felt almost normal today. They still took me to get a blood test, but they didn’t see anything, and if it was malaria I would have had a higher fever and it wouldn’t have broken in a few hours. I trace it back to two bad judgement calls I made on Monday, but who knows. Monday morning I took my malaria pill on an empty stomach, which you’re not supposed to do, because I had forgotten to take it Sunday night and just wanted to take it ASAP. Around 45 minutes later, when my stomach was already hurting a little, I had a bowl of beans for breakfast at this place near the dorm where the kids who go to the university lower schools eat. Beans at any time of the day are asking for trouble, and I don’t really know what I was thinking eating them for breakfast with nothing in my stomach other than my weekly dose of mefloquine. And I ate from their bowls, which you’re not really supposed to do. My stomach was a bit off the rest of the day, but not anything more than mild discomfort. Tuesday was a whole different ball-game though. Oh well. I learned my lesson, and learned it early, so at least that’s out of the way. And at least it wasn’t malaria. Yet. I’m still scared to eat anything but fruit and plain crackers for the next few days, but I’m sure I’ll eventually cave at a whiff of some good jollof rice (my favorite local dish).

OK, that’s all. As if any of you lasted this long.

8/17 – Registration, Art Gallery, and Aburi

Unless there’s something wrong that I don’t know about, which is entirely possible, I’m basically done with class registration. For now. Until I have to deal with figuring out which of the 10 or so courses I signed up for I’m actually going to take. Hopefully, when the timetables that were supposed to be up this week actually do come out, scheduling conflicts will do a lot of the decision making for me. Fridays are off limit by default. If I’m lucky, registration will be the most stressful event I have to deal with while I’m here. Particularly fun was a man at the Faculty of Science who refused to give me the form needed to register for science courses. It took two grad students arguing with him in Twi for me to get the stupid piece of paper (which I really could have just xeroxed from someone else if he hadn’t given it to me). I have a lot more respect for my parents’ generation now. The fact that any of you stayed in college through eight semesters of paper-based registration is incredible.

Still no roommate, but I do know that she’s friends with the roommate of another one of the Tufts students, who happens to live next door. The hostel is slowly filling up with people from other study abroad programs and African countries, and the campus is definitely looking more alive. Nothing about the registration process here is computerized, so all the residence halls on campus have lines of students waiting to register with the university and with their residence halls snaking through their courtyards and out the doors.

Moving outside the university…
Tuesday afternoon they took us to an art gallery in Teshie-Nungua, another neighborhood of Accra. There was some nice stuff there, and I’ll probably go back before we leave to buy stuff. I just got a kente-cloth bookmark this time around. Across from the art gallery was a place that sold custom made coffins. It’s a growing trend in Ghana, and possibly all of West Africa but I’m not sure, to be buried in a coffin that represents either the deceased’s favorite hobby or occupation. So a fisherman might be buried in a giant crab coffin, or a shoemaker in…you guessed it. Kind of morbid, but at the same time they seem to have a much different, and arguably, healthier view of death here then we do in Western culture. The spirit world and ancestors play a prominent role in everyday life, and ancestors are genuinely believed to have a direct influence on happenings in this world. Death certainly seems less threatening and final when you look at it that way. Either way, the personalized coffin thing is gaining popularity and its not uncommon here to see these, or the workshops where they’re produced, around.

Later on Tuesday, Vincent, one of the Ghanaian grad students who spent last year at Tufts as part of the exchange program took me and some of the other girls on our program out. We went to La beach, which has amazing sand and will be a nice respite from the heat once it actually gets here. There are rasta-hosted parties most nights there as well. After we went to this outdoor bar called Dreamers Joint, which is in East Legon, close to campus, and had really good, but insanely spicy food. It was definitely worth the ten or so minutes of suffering for food to have that kind of flavor. And for around 50 cents. Today was our third, and finally successful, attempt at a trip to the Aburi Botanical Gardens. There was less flower and more tree then I expected, but it was very cool nonetheless. A bunch of the lawn was covered with mimosa, which closes up when you touch it, and there were a lot of ants, some of them biting. One took a good couple of flicks to get off the sole of my foot. There was also a huge tree there which was really a parasite that had grown around and eventually choked another tree, and now stands in the other tree’s place. There are “holes” in its trunk where the branches of the tree it killed used to be. Its big enough for 4-5 people to climb in at once, and the inside is hollow all the way to the top, which was awesome. Also, the man who conducted our tour was a chief. He didn’t tell us flat out, but rather described how the enstoolment* process works, and then passed pictures out of the various stages of the process. He happened to be the one in the pictures.

*In Ghana, rather than having thrones or crowns as the sign of royalty, they use skins and stools. In the South, the chiefs sit on royal stools, and in the North chiefs sit on piles of animal skins. So a chief is enstooled or enskinned, rather than enthroned or crowned. Chieftancy is an important institution in Ghana, and almost all Ghanaians, even those who no longer live in their ancestral villages, are under and expected to demonstrate their allegiance to a chief. Class dismissed.

Anyways, we leave for the first of our three trips this semester to the Dagbe Center, which means I’ll finally get to do some drumming. And the center’s near a beach. Nice. Till next week…

8/13 – Cape Coast Trip

Just got back from our trip to the Cape Coast, a stretch of coastline a couple of hours west of Accra. It was definitely nice to see ocean and beach again. They took us to Kakum Natural Park, Cape Coast Castle, Elmina Castle, the beach, and Takoradi, a market and shipping town even farther west then Cape Coast. We stayed at a place called the Hans Cottage Botel. No, I don’t know what a ‘botel’ is. But it was nice enough, had hot water, and the restaurant and a sitting area were over this manmade moat that had cool birds and crocodiles. And they had the fastest internet I’ve been on since I got here. I finally got to upload some pictures.

Kakum Natural Park is where they have the canopy walk, a network of bridges and platforms built in the trees of the rainforest. The bridges weren’t exactly rickety, and they never really felt like they were going to snap or fall off or something, but every step you took shifted the bridge in some direction and you felt like you were gonna fall. It was kind of cool, actually. On the last bridge, some of the people in my group thought it would be fun to see who could get across the fastest. I got it on (crappy) video and dubbed it the Canopy Cup.

The big part of the Cape Coast trip is visiting Cape Coast and Elmina castles. Present day Ghana encompasses what used to be the Gold Coast colony, and so there are quite a few old forts and buildings dotting the coastline that were used as administrative buildings by the Europeans when they were in power. The two castles we went to still have their slave dungeons intact, which the tours take you through. It was really eerie to stand in the doors of no return. There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t already been said or been said better, but even standing in rooms that still haven’t lost the stench of death or layers of human detritus, it’s almost impossible to fathom that kind of brutality happening to that many people for so long. Tens of millions of people exported over hundreds of years. Sickening. I can’t imagine what walking around the castles must be like for African-Americans who come here searching for their roots.

Aside from the castles, I got to hang out at the beach a little, which was actually a tease because there were some great waves and I didn’t have any swim stuff with me. From what I’ve seen and been told by Africans themselves, they don’t like to swim, which is a shame because there were some gorgeous sets going to waste.We also got to go to Takoradi market, which was another tease because although it has the reputation of being the largest market in West Africa, we went on a Sunday, which meant that 80% of the shops were closed. Even so, it was huge. Between the market and the ride home, I ended up with more fruit than I could ever eat before it goes bad, and got it all for insanely cheap prices. A bag of oranges for C2000, about 20 cents, 5 pineapples for C10000, about a dollar, and some avocados from my program director who bought more than she wanted because you couldn’t buy in less then sets of 5. The two Ghanaian men in the front of the car actually succumbed to the begging worse than either of us did, and the back of the car was loaded with fruit. It’s going to suck going back to the States and having to eat the sad excuses for fruit we have.The fruit here has way more flavor.

Anyways… Tomorrow, in theory, begins class registration. Let’s see how that goes.

8/10 – Twi Class, CMB, and the Central District

We had our first Twi class this morning, and the professor is really cool. He’s pretty famous here, and almost everyone I’ve mentioned him to talks about how he speaks beautiful Twi, even those for whom it’s not a first language. It’ll be great to learn it from him. He’s known for translating New York Times editorials into Twi on Ghanaian radio, and ends quite a high percentage of sentences with “Hallelujah, praise the Lord,” usually praising how much easier his language is to learn then English. Which is an entirely valid point. Learning the mechanics of another language puts into perspective just how retarded English is. I feel for anyone who has to learn it as a second or third language.

After Twi, I finally got to go into the city by myself. It was glorious. I went in to meet my drum teacher’s nephew, Fuseini, and son, Rafik. Fuseini moved to Accra a few years ago and Rafik drives a (huge) truck between Tamale and Accra every few weeks to deliver and receive market goods.

Sooo…tro-tros. Tro-tros, I believe, are unique to West Africa, if not Ghana alone, and form a chaotic but oddly functional transportation system. And they’re ridiculously cheap. Tro-tros are modified vans that fit a lot more people in them then they appear to be able to from the outside. Each one has a mate, who yells the tro-tros ultimate destination out the window, opens the door for people getting on and off, and collects the money. There are places where they seem to congregate, but from what I saw you can get on and off almost anywhere you want. Anyways, I took a tro-tro into the city, which wa exciting as it was my first time on them by myself. I planned on getting a taxi from the circle I’d gone to the rest of the way, but apparently the taxis wouldn’t go to the street I wanted because it’s one-way and annoying to get to from where we were, so I had to find another tro-tro that went in the right general direction and walk, then have Fuseini meet me where I was going. Afterwards I found out that he was a far walk from there, and that I could have taken a cab to somewhere else closer, and if I’d really wanted to make things simple for myself, could have a taken a different tro-tro originally and gone straight to where I needed to go. Oh well. Next time.

While I was waiting for Fuseini to meet me, I met four Ghanaian girls on a lunch-break who were all obsessed with America, and kept talking about how it was their favorite country even though they’d never been. They got a kick out my attempts the speak Twi. Once Fuseini showed up we walked towards where he lives, which is in a market near CMB, whatever that stands for. The women on the street by his market also went nuts when I answered them in Twi. All I said was “how are you” and the whole corner started yelling. It was awesome.

Fuseini and Rafik are Dagombas, an ethnic group that comes from Northern Ghana, and it seems that many of the people in the market where they live/work are Dagomba as well, which meant that I had to learn a whole new set of greetings. But the people there reacted just as well to my attempts at their language, this time Dagbani, and it was a lot of fun to get cheers every five seconds for saying ‘good evening.’ I also was named something by this group of Dagomba guys but I have no idea what it was or what it means. I have a feeling I don’t really want to know.

After watching Westlife (yes, the British boy-band) sing-along DVDs at Fuseini’s for a while, which are apparently big here, even among 20-something year old guys, Rafik went to work on his truck and I walked with Fuseini around the Central District of Accra, Okaishie Market, and Rawlings Square. There were women walking around there with boxes stacked 5 high on their head. Big boxes. It was amazing. After that they came back to campus for dinner. I got to ride shot-gun in the tro-tro on the way back, and the driving seems even crazier from there. Ghanaian driving….

8/6 – Cruisin’ Accra

Let’s see how short I can keep this one.
We got off campus again today! They took us on a driving tour of Accra proper, which we haven’t gotten to see yet. The city, like this country in general, is a lesson in contrasts. Old/new, traditional/modern, rich/poor, its got ‘em all. There are surprisingly affluent neighborhoods alongside slums, with not too much to represent any middle ground. Seeing a lot of the traditional clothing being worn in the center was really striking as well. It was one thing to see so much of it in the more rural areas we drove through yesterday, where you expect there to be less of a modern influence, but it’s something else to see the full outfits being worn on city streets alongside office buildings, paved sidewalk, and parked cars. Definitely challenges the National Geographic image of Africa.

As for pictures I got some more shots of the religious names and quotes that seem to be everywhere here. This time I got ones mostly on taxis, since we were driving around. I got a few shots of signs and storefronts, but driving by them at 30mph didn’t make it easy.

So I’ve gotten the day names down. The Akan, the predominant ethnic group in Ghana, give names based on the day of the week you’re born, in addition to your given name from your parents. Here, not knowing the day of the week you were born is like not knowing your own birthday in the States. There are male and female versions for each day. I was born on Thursday, which means my Akan name is ‘Ya’. For some reason, the names for Thursday are really short. For instance, from Sunday to Saturday, the guys’ names are Kwesi, Kojo, Kobena, Kweku, Yow, Kofi, and Kwame. Where does the Yow (the male ‘Ya’) come from? But yeah, Kwame and Kofi seem to be heard and used more often, which makes sense because Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of Ghana) is a national hero and Kofi Annan is currently head of the UN.

Anyways, back to the lecture thing tomorrow, but Wednesday is the last official day of orientation, and then we go to Cape Coast this weekend, so that should be cool.

8/5 – Koforidua

Twi lesson of the day: “m’kochye-nana”. verb. Literally means greet/salute the chief. Polite euphemism for going to the bathroom

PSA: I got my cell phone!! The # is (if you’re calling from the US)
011- 233 – 24 – 660 – 9700
From in Ghana:
024 – 660 – 9700
It’s free incoming for me, so go crazy, but I’m not sure about the calling card rates to Ghana. And I’m 4 hours ahead of NYC time (5 hours after October 29th). Adjust accordingly based on your location.

Getting on with it, this morning is the first sun I’m seeing since I landed here a week ago. Exciting. But I think the rain’s supposed to come back sometime soon. Apparently, this rain is really out of the ordinary for this time of year. I should be whining about the heat now. Global warming?

We met our Twi professor-to-be, Dr. Kofi Agyekum, who is a well known radio personality around here and a really cool guy, so that should be fun. Lectures have continued to be good, although I finally got caught sleeping in one. The room we have them in was designed to put people to sleep, or so I’m convinced. No matter how great the lecturers are and how interested I am in the topic, after around 10 minutes I can’t keep my eyes open. For one of the lectures, I was at the directly opposite the head of the table (and the lecturer), and after a valiant struggle on my part, it seems I fell asleep, head flopped back and mouth open, no less. At some point in her talk (about keeping healthy here) she reached the issue of sleep, telling us to make sure we got enough, and said something along the lines of “like your colleague over there.” I’m told everyone stared at me for a few seconds, expecting me to wake up when I heard that, but I was really out. Someone had to wake me up, and everyone had a hearty laugh at my expense. Some things stay the same in every country.

Friday night we finally got to eat somewhere other then the University Guest Center. They took us to a restaurant in East Legon (close to campus) called Chez Afrique. It was really good food, better live music, and a nice change of pace from eating on campus at the same place for all three meals a day. It would have been even better if my stomach hadn’t started hurting that afternoon. Two days later it’s still hurting, but getting better. I’m thinking of it as a nature-induced diet.

Yesterday (Saturday) we finally busted out of this joint, hitting up the town of Koforidua, capital of the eastern region, AKA Kof-town. They took us to two really nice waterfalls, Boti Falls and Akaa Falls. The ride was way longer then I was expecting, upwards of two hours each way, which again was made worse by my bad stomach, but there was a lot to see out the window so it was cool. We passed quite a few funerals and even some weddings, so a lot of locals were out in their finest, and it was a market day in one of the towns. It was amazing to see that many bright colors in one place. A riot of color, shall we say? Anyways, after the falls, we went to order our lunch, went to market while it was being cooked, and then went back to the hotel to eat.

Once again, I was reminded how much I suck at bargaining, but I still got about 10 feet in seed beads and around 20 recycled glass beads of various sizes and colors for C20,000, around $2. And a cool keychain for C15,000, which was way too much but the guy was really nice, and something about haggling over 50 cents just feels wrong. Other than that, the market was really fun, I got to practice my Twi greeting at almost every stall I passed, and all the ladies were genuinely amused at our attempts to carry on a basic conversation in their language. At one of the stalls I had a 10 year old girl translating for me, and apparently I got named something by her mother and aunt but couldn’t get her to tell me what it was. She just giggled whenever I asked her to explain what my name meant and nodded ‘no’. Most of the kids got really excited when we waved at them, but when my friend waved at this really young one who had run up to us, he ran back to his mom bawling. I know just how he feels. When I see how light my skin’s getting I want to cry too.

So, some observations about Ghana:

1) they take their religions very seriously here.
Many of the stores you’ll pass here are named something religious. For example, a hair salon named “True Light in Jesus Hair Salon.” I saw a lot that were funnier than that, but none come to mind as I write this at 9am.

2) Getting into any moving vehicle here is an adventure.
Reckless doesn’t begin to describe the way people drive in this country. Traffic lights are few and far between, and it doesn’t look like they’re really observed either way. Also, the number of lanes on a given road and their respective directions are at the discretion of each driver and up for interpretation at any time. If your lane isn’t moving, just create another one. Anywhere. The (negligible) space between the other two oncoming lanes, for instance. Successfully merging into traffic or crossing a road could really just be called a failed suicide attempt. Another thing that’s scary is that there are drainage ditches along the sides of most of the roads here, and along both sides of every road on the university campus. These are generally at least a foot wide (but more is common) and at least 2.5 feet deep. However, ignoring precise measurements, the space is ample enough to fit, say….an entire car or van tire. Combined with how close drivers cut things here, sitting in a window seat in a moving vehicle is definitely an adrenaline rush.

3) Credit goes to Faith for this one: Things that would take 5 minutes in the States take 3 hours here, and things that would take 3 hours in the States take 5 minutes here.
Case in point: The clutch of the van I was in broke just as we got on our way back to Legon, and we had to stop at a place to get it fixed. So we pull into a mechanic’s lot, or something, which is really just a space of red dirt moguls and shack made out of wooden posts and corrugated metal roof. We pile out of the car, with the (male) driver’s Celine Dion tape still blaring, and within two songs we have a new clutch. Which leads me to…

4) They’ve got an interesting taste in music here.

On our ride to Koforidua, we listened to a mix of local music and rap from the US, in between the two falls we listened to a classic Michael Jackson tape, which the other van stole for the ride back, and on the way back to Legon we listened to the Celine Dion – Greatest Hits tape about 3 times, and then switched to rap and R&B from the US. It takes a real man to admit he listens Celine Dion. And likes it.

8/2 – Madina Market

So we finally (I say that like I’ve been trapped here for two months) got to leave the campus and see some of the surrounding area, which was cool since by time we left the airport it was dark and we couldn’t see much on the ride over. The weather took a turn for the worse and it basically rained straight through from around 3am Wedsnesday morning (when it woke me up) till of this writing, Thursday morning. No end in sight. The frogs had taken a break the last few nights but the rain is apparently what sets them off. Great. The rain also made us push off a trip to Aburi, which is an area north of the university that has some really nice botanical gardens and stuff. We’ll probably be going next week.

The lectures have been pretty good so far, more useful then I thought they would be, and I might actually take one of the speakers’ courses if fits into my schedule. We also had a “panel” on residential life on campus from our trio of student guides, Albert, Steven, and Gertrude (all of whom are featured in today’s pics. The University of Ghana (UG from now on) operates on the British tutorial system, and so their dorms play a pretty prominent role in student life. The dorms here, called halls (there are 6), organize Hall Weeks, which seem range from what one would call ‘normal’ entertainment on any college campus to one’s that culminate in the ‘enstoolment’ of, in one Hall’s case a ‘Chief Farmer’, and in the other a ‘Chief Vandal.’ They’re kind of the equivalent of Homecoming Kings, but taken to a whole new level and then Africanized.

‘Chief Vandal’ is a title held by a student (whose identity is usually kept secret to all those but his inner circle) that is resident of Commonwealth Hall, the notoriously rowdy all-male dorm at the top of the Legon hill. Him and his henchmen seem to command quite a lot of respect on campus, and among a crapload of other privileges, he has the authority to order people ‘ponded.’ Public humiliation is about as bad a punishment as someone can get here, and ponding involves a very public procession down the hill from Commonwealth Hall to whichever watering hole the Chief Vandal orders on campus. The most serious of offenders get sent to the pond in front of Balme Library, the campus library and the biggest one in West Africa. They’re then dumped, in their boxers, into the lily-pad filled, nasty-ass water while being laughed and pointed at by as much of the campus as can fit on the pavilion to watch. Even better, they’re forced to sign their consent to the whole procedure. I can’t wait to see one.

We also got to go to Madina market, not quite the biggest one around but a worthy introduction to markets here nonetheless. Basically anything you could imagine (and some stuff you probably can’t) was either on sale or piled high on the head of a passing teenage girl. The women here really do carry EVERYTHING on their heads. I’ve seen platters that have to be at least 3 feet wide piled at least 2 feet high with oranges and bananas. My friend saw a girl carrying an entire sewing machine. It’s pretty freakin’ crazy. I needed to get a pillow, which was my first (and failed) bargaining experience, but on my second try I was able to talk a lady down C500 (about a nickel) on a yard and a half of fabric, and I’ve only been getting better since. And I got called ‘obruni’ for the first time, which was exciting, but will probably get annoying as time goes on. Not yet though. Obruni is Twi (the local language mainly spoken here) for white person or foreigner. A girl that must have been around 12 yelled “hello obruni byebye” as if it was one word when I walked by. After that I got followed by a bunch of kids who’s “hi obruni how are you” I actually answered. Best of all, before we got back into our vans, a 2 year old in a diaper did the WWF “suck it” sign at my friend while yelling “Obruniobruniobruniobruni.” That just might have been the highlight of my day. That or being told by the former chief of security of the university that girls should try to have a guy with them when they’re walking so that if something happens he can “use his macho.” Priceless.

7/31 – Akwaaba

Holy crap, I’m in Ghana!! It was one bitch of a ride, even with a really short layover in Amsterdam, and I couldn’t really sleep for any of it. The plane from JFK to Amsterdam was pretty nasty and run down, but weirdly enough the plane from Amsterdam to Accra was hands down the nicest one that I’ve ever been on. My friend and I were sitting next to this really nice Ghanaian lady who moved to Oklahoma but goes back to visit for a month every summer.

The adventure really began with Jesse, a guy on the trip with me. Jesse spent the summer traveling around Vietnam with his brother, and even managed to get into a moped accident when he was sideswiped by a passing nutcase and fell over, dumping him and the Danish girl on the back of his bike onto the side of a remote dirt road. He spent 4 days in a Vietnamese hospital, and then went to stay with family in Germany and friends in Switzerland. After a blissful few weeks traipsing around the EU, he was informed by Tufts Programs Abroad that for some reason he would not be able to meet the group in Amsterdam from Europe, but would have to fly BACK to the US to fly BACK to Europe. So a few days before we’re supposed to leave, Jesse IMs me looking for a place to stay in NY. Despite the fact that he’d just flown around the world, I think he might have been most culture-shocked by Jewtopia, USA. That or my mother.

Getting back to Ghana, the warnings I got about marriage proposals weren’t a joke. I got two before I even left the airport. One of them might have been half-joking, but Kofi made sure that I knew he was from a good family who could provide me with “nice, quality gold jewelry,” and given that he was 30 was the perfect age for me. He almost had me when he said that he worked for a fancy catering company (which completely explains what he was doing standing in uniform at baggage claim) and would bring free food to my dorm, but I decided to keep my options open.

Aside from my suitors (who weren’t mean, just persistent), everyone here has been almost scarily nice. Ghanaians seem to be intensely proud of their country and personally want to make sure you feel welcome and are enjoying yourself, but it’s going to take a while to get used to being the center of attention all the time.

Another thing that will taking getting used to are the assortment of farm animals that inhabit the campus. So far I’ve seen horses tied up in the field outside my dorm (supposedly to discourage local people from using university property as farmland), goats and sheep NOT tied up on my way to the internet cafe and all over the place, quite a few dogs and not so many cats. By far the most entertaining thing I’ve seen was one of the horses who had chewed through his rope and escaped. He was trotting down the road in front of five vans, weaving so that only one of them was able to get by, followed 30 seconds later by a man on foot chasing him down. This is gonna to be an interesting semester.

Other than that (brief) excitement, we haven’t done much since we got here besides sleep, eat really good food, unpack, and get driven around in vans by Mr. Bamfu (our “Director of Transport”) and his drivers, all of whom are named Joseph. For you Jumbos reading, it’s just like taking the Joey. Today they took us on a tour of the whole campus and it’s huge, but really pretty, and there’s a shuttle bus that stops in front of our dorm and around major points on campus so it shouldn’t be too bad. But I’m gonna try to walk. Really.

The dorm is cool, and the rooms are way better than I thought they’d be. I’ve even got carpet. The Tufts people are almost all on the ground floor. Our rooms have decks and the front doors open out onto a courtyard. There’s an internet cafe in the dorm too, but it doesn’t open until classes start, which isn’t for another few weeks. That’s also when our roommates move in. A short walk from the dorm is a little supermarket that has a lot of things you wouldn’t expect to see in Africa like Heinz Ketchup (in the same bottle as they use in America), actual cans of Diet Coke (not Coke Light like they have in Europe that tastes funny), Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and lots of other “American” foods, and they’re a lot cheaper here. A huge bottle of water costs somewhere in the range of 50 cents. They’ve also got this really good drink called Vita Fruta Juice that’s basically the pineapple juice left on the plate when you cut one up, poured into a bottle. Pulp and all.

The dorm showers seem to have a range of only freezing to cold as far as temperature goes, which I’m sure I’ll be thankful for when it warms up here but presently hate. Right now the weather is almost perfect, basically Hawaii temperatures with a little more rain, but in the next month or two the rain will stop and temperatures will go up to somewhere around 100. Yay.

Tomorrow starts our actual orientation, with “Ghana 101” lectures to punctuate our schedule of sleeping, getting driven in vans to eat really good food, and then getting driven back to the dorm to nap. We might actually be leaving the campus tomorrow too. Oh boy.

More pictures and rambling in a few days.