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.